Was Admiral Poindexter a terrorist?

Who's in charge of your prediction market?

In yesterday’s post I wrote about convicted terrorist John Poindexter, who had been briefly involved in U.S. government plans to create a terrorism prediction market. That story from a couple decades ago came up recently in the context of a recent post by my economics colleague Rajiv Sethi on betting markets on political and military events.

Anyway, after my post appeared someone sent me an email questioning my labeling of the retired admiral as a “convicted terrorist”:

That is clever but seems also not true?

From Wikipedia:

“Poindexter was convicted on April 7, 1990, of five counts of lying to Congress and obstructing the Congressional committees investigating the Iran–Contra affair, which were investigating the Reagan Administration's covert arms sales to Iran and the diversion of proceeds to insurgents fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The convictions were reversed in 1991 on appeal on the grounds that several witnesses against him had been influenced by his testimony before Congress, even though Congress had given him immunity for that testimony.^”

That hardly sounds like “convicted of terrorism.”

I replied: I think that what they were doing in Nicaragua was terrorism. If you want to be precise, you could say that Poindexter was convicting of aiding and abetting terrorism, or something like that—he wasn't personally mining the harbors or whatever. But I would consider someone who carries out a policy of terrorism and who is involved in illegally concealing terrorism, to be himself a terrorist, in the same way as I'd consider Osama Bin Laden's press agent or whoever to be a terrorist and in the same way that I'd consider someone to be a bank robber even if all he did was drive the getaway car or fake the papers on the gun license.

My correspondent responded:

Fair enough. But perhaps then it would be more precise to say “guilty of terrorism” which implies a moral judgement? To say convicted of X usually denotes that a court found someone to have committed the specific legal charge of X.

Also, once his convictions were reversed it would seem to me that it would no longer be correct to describe him as convicted, although in some grammatical sense it might be true that he was at some time so convicted.

I guess the exact label doesn’t really matter. “Convicted terrorist” still sounds about right to me, but “person who carried out terrorism” would work too.

Also, whether Poindexter’s Iran-Contra operation was actually “terrorism” . . . that’s a judgment call. You could say it was just an act of war. Or you could say it’s justified policy, whatever. But then you could say that about just about anything called “terrorism,” including the World Trade Center attacks, the exploding pagers in Lebanon, etc etc etc. In the context of that proposed “online futures trading market… in which anonymous speculators would bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups,” I think the secret Contra actions fit right into that category.