John Poindexter

From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.

John Marlan Poindexter (born August 12, 1936) was an Admiral in the United States Navy and the National Security Advisor from 1985 until 1986, during the Ronald Reagan presidency. Oliver North worked closely with him as an aide, and Poindexter is regarded as the chief architect of the Iran-Contra Affair.

Poindexter was convicted on multiple felony counts on April 7, 1990 for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and the alteration and destruction of evidence pertaining to the Iran-Contra Affair. The convictions were reversed in 1991 on the grounds that the prosecution's evidence may have been tainted by exposure to Poindexter's testimony before the joint House-Senate committee investigating the matter, which testimony was compelled by a grant of "use immunity". The prosecution was not able to re-try the case.

On February 13, 2002, the media learned that Poindexter had become the Director of The Pentagon's Information Awareness Office, a secretive intelligence bureau whose mission is to gather and centralize as much information as possible about everyone, intending to unify all private databases about U.S. citizens into one central database run by the government (including information about travel, credit card purchases, medical history, etc.). Controversy over Poindexter's integrity followed his appointment to the position due to his role in the Iran-Contra scandal.

In protest against what he feels is Poindexter's plan to effect the systematic destruction of Americans' civil liberties and privacy rights, San Francisco Weekly columnist Matt Smith published John Poindexter's home address and phone number on November 27, 2002, along with the names and addresses of his next door neighbors. The meme quickly propagated through the Internet, and Poindexter's phone number was disconnected shortly thereafter.

Background:

• B.S., Engineering, U.S. Naval Academy, 1958
• M.S., Physics, California Institute of Technology, 1961
• Ph.D., Nuclear Physics, California Institute of Technology, 1964

From 1958 to 1987 Poindexter served the U.S. Navy in various positions. As Deputy Commander of Naval Education and Training Command, amongst his duties of commanding the U.S. Navy's extensive education and training programs, he initiated a project to develop a distributed database management system for more efficient management of the training pipelines. When Commander of a destroyer squadron, he was Surface Warfare and ASW Commander of battle groups in the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean and developed new tactics and battle management procedures under the Composite Warfare Commander concept. As Commanding Officer of a cruiser he pioneered the shipboard use of computers to manage the ship's force portion of yard overhauls. He has been an Executive Officer and a Chief Engineer of destroyers. Significant staff assignments included: Executive Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, Administrative Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy and Special Assistant for Systems Analysis to the Secretary of Defense.

From 1961 - 1964 Poindexter was a laboratory assistant at the California Institute of Technology, where he conducted laboratory research to further develop a model for understanding the Mossbauer effect with Nobel Laureate Rudolph Mossbauer.

Poindexter has served the White House as Military Assistant from 1981 - 1983, as Deputy National Security Advisor from 1983 - 1985, and as National Security Advisor from 1985 - 1986. Joining President Reagan's White House staff in 1981, from 1983 to 1985 Poindexter was responsible for leading and managing the National Security Council Staff and was Chairman of the Crisis Pre-planning Group. As National Security Advisor, Vice Admiral Poindexter was responsible for providing recommendations to The President on national security, foreign policy and defense policy. Major events in which he played a significant role included: Strategic Defense Initiative, Operation Urgent Fury, Achille Lauro incident, Operation El Dorado Canyon to respond to Libyan terrorist attacks, the Reykjavik Summit with Soviets, peaceful transition of government in the Philippines, and the Iran-Contra Affair.

From 1988 to 1989 Poindexter was senior scientist at Presearch, Inc. Presearch had primarily been involved with defense studies and analysis. Faced with anticipated defense budget reductions, Poindexter joined the firm to develop new commercial enterprises. He designed and developed hardware and software for the prototype of a digital real-time, imaging system to be used for physical security of high value facilities. It was used to obtain a contract for a nuclear power plant security system.

From 1990 to 1996, Poindexter served as co-founder of TP Systems, Inc. TP Systems was a software development firm specializing in commercial software for the IBM PCs and compatibles; Poindexter was the chief designer and programmer. Development included a symbolic debugger for multi-tasking environments, a BBS communications program, and numerous utility programs.

From 1993 to 1996, Poindexter served as a consultant to Elkins Group. Elkins was a business alliance with Electronic Data Systems (EDS), which has developed the Elkins Interactive Training Network (EITN), a satellite based training delivery system. Poindexter was the Chairman of the Maritime Advisory Committee and a member of the Board of Directors. He also provided advice on strategic planning.

From 1996 to 2002 Poindexter served as Senior Vice President for SYNTEK Technologiex. SYNTEK is a small high technology firm with contracts in domestic and international defense and commercial business. Poindexter was responsible for high-level advice on management and direction of information systems projects (for example Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's Project Genoa).

From December 2002 to August 2003, Poindexter served as the Director of DARPA Information Awareness Office (IAO). The mission of the IAO was to imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components, and prototype closed-loop information systems that will counter asymmetric threats (most notably, terrorist threats) by achieving total information awareness: enabling preemption; national security warning; and, national security decision making. Poindexter faced immense criticism from the media and politicians about the Policy Analysis Market project, a futures market that would have allowed trading in, and profiting from, such events as the assassination of heads of state and acts of terrorism. The controversy over the futures market led to a Congressional audit of the IAO, which revealed a fundamental lack of privacy protection for American citizens. Funding for the IAO was subsequently cut and with his already tattered credibility permanently damaged Poindexter resigned from DARPA on August 12, 2003.

External links

• Who is John Poindexter? - A Detailed Biography
• John Poindexter's Resume
• Meet Big Brother
• Report of the Independent Counsel (Lawrence Walsh)
• The Guardian: No more Mr Scrupulous Guy
• Matt Smith's November 27th San Francisco Weekly column, where Poindexter's address and phone number were first published.
• Washington Post: Poindexter to Leave Pentagon Research Job
• Poindexter's resignation letter
• Results of Congressional audit into the Terrorism Information Awareness Program