Confidence Game
by P.J. Tigue

During the 2000 elections, George Bush made it clear that he wasn't really a hands-on kinda guy. Like any good CEO (which, by the way, he never was), he planned on delegating responsibility to a group of talented, qualified people. Whatever your feelings about Bush himself, you can't deny that his team is comprised of motivated, intelligent people who have succeeded in the political and private realms. In short, to have confidence in his appointments was to have confidence in him, our newly minted MBA president.

The only problem is that government isn't a corporation, and while you may be able to turn a loss into a gain on a quarterly earnings report, you can't turn tax cuts into consumer confidence or a series of mind-numbingly bad ideas into weapons to fight terrorism.

To wit: In a stunning display of institutional blindness worthy of Dr. Strangelove, in February 2002 Bush named retired Admiral John Poindexter, who was convicted in 1988 for defrauding the U.S. government and obstructing justice as part of the Iran-Contra scandal, to run an information-gathering agency called the Information Awareness Office (IAO), a part of the Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (Although Poindexter's convictions were overturned in 1990 when Congress granted him immunity in exchange for his testimony, the fun wasn't over — the testimony he gave them turned out to be false, anyway.)

After his conviction was overturned, Poindexter has been busy as vice president of Syntek Technologies, a major government technology contractor. Syntek, with Poindexter at its helm, has been working closely with DARPA for years to develop a system called Genoa, a cross between a super-Google search engine, an information-harvesting program and a "peer-to-peer" file-sharing system, in other words a near-prototype of software used by the IAO.

Indeed, just a few months ago, the IAO's "Total Information Awareness" program, with Poindexter newly at the helm, became public knowledge. The TIA program aimed to develop software to conduct broad sweeps of commercial data, called "data mining," with targets including credit card records, Internet logs, medical data, merchant purchases and travel records. The goal was to "mine" this data, complied from ordinary citizens, in search of suspicious patterns that may indicate possible terrorist movement.

After some bad press, Congress, led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), moved to shut the program down. It was quickly renamed the "Terrorist Information Awareness" program to throw all those unpatriotic busybodies in Congress off the trail, and went back to work; fortunately, just this month, the Senate agreed to block all spending on the program (although the House has yet to do the same).

But Poindexter had already moved onto other things. This week, the IAO tried to launch what might be, pound for pound, the dumbest idea any American administration has ever floated: the Policy Analysis Market program. The idea was as absurd as it was simple: beginning on Friday, traders (the OIA hoped to sign up 1,000 by Friday) could wager on the probability of terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups, presumably making a buck off correct, or lucky, picks. The web site, before the plug was pulled Tuesday afternoon, was classic, and should give conspiracy nuts fodder for years. Complete with a black back screen, a weird prism effect with the color spectrum and a flashy font straight out of computer class circa 1988, it had all the bells and whistles of a religious cult with less-than-stellar web-design skills.

In a best-case scenario, Poindexter and Co. figured, seasoned investors with knowledge of the Middle East and other hot spots would be enticed by the prospect of making money into using their expertise to buy and sell futures contracts on world events. In other words, thanks to the market-driven wisdom of our MBA administration, a group of seemingly mature and serious-minded adults actually thought it was a good idea to mine the collective wisdom of the free market on such questions as the impact of U.S. involvement in Iraq and the stability of the monarchy in Jordan — and possibly make foreign policy decisions based on the market value of certain scenarios.

Examples of potential events on the Web site included the overthrow of the king of Jordan, a missile strike by North Korea or the assassination of Yasir Arafat. So if your money were on a biological weapon attack against Israel sometime in the next 12 months and you were proven right, pack your bags for Vegas! If you think the Iranian mullahs are ripe for a revolution and you hit the mark, time to trade up to that Hummer!

If we're lucky, this debacle will signal the end of the sordid, corrupt and disgraceful career of John Poindexter. And blame should be placed on the man who appointed him — the president. After all, Poindexter isn't the only embarassing Bush hire: He has a national security advisor who can't be bothered to read memos about the veracity of Iraq's supposed attempt to buy uranium from Niger; speechwriters and assistants who can't seem to recall who told them what, and when, about Iraq's chemical weapons program (or lack thereof); and two, possibly going on three, different administrators of post-war Iraq in three months. To have confidence in the president, we first need to trust his appointments. Too bad that this is one confidence game we'll all lose.