Where was the Senate Intelligence Committee when an Asset needed them? Or the House Judiciary Committee, for that matter? What about my old boss, Senator Ron Wyden? Or Maryland’s Senator Barbara Mikulski— Both serve on the Intelligence Committee.
Why didn’t any of those powerful Senators take action to protect a woman Asset who came under attack for claiming to be a woman Asset? As if it was laughable that women could do such work. All of Congress bragged about its “outstanding leadership support” for the anti-terrorism work that I devoted 9 years of my life to performing. This was the time to prove it.
So why did nobody help me?
Infamously, one morning I challenged one of the psychiatrists that Carswell should expect a hard hitting Congressional investigation of the abuse I suffered in their prison.
The man laughed in my face: “They don’t care what happens to you. Nobody’s going to help you. They’re quite pleased with the way we’ve handled this.”
If so, it was a terrible judgment call. My imprisonment set a dangerous precedent in the intelligence community. It borrowed the old Soviet game plan from the Cold War, punishing Assets for knowing “inconvenient truths,” and viciously trying to “correct” my thinking, in order to cover up their own political mistakes.
The question was, how low would Republicans sink?
The answer was, as low as possible. They would inflict as much damage as they could get away with.
Everything depended on Judge Mukasey. Ted Lindauer swore that Judge Mukasey was nobody’s fool. He wanted a vehicle to end the case, Ted speculated. But he’d see what they were up to. This incompetence strategy was what Talkin handed him. That’s what the Court had to work with.
Really though, I had no idea what to think.
According to federal law, the maximum detention for a competence evaluation is 120 days—and no longer.479 After 120 days, if a person shows no signs of violence towards himself, others or property, he or she must be released back to the community. That’s plenty of time, by the way. Most psych studies can be completed within 60 days, unless it involves a drug detox.
That should have put me outside the prison gates on February 3, 2006—and not one day later, according to federal law.
Grimly, I waited.
As my big day got closer, other women inmates began to notice that basic steps for my release were not taken. There started to be whispers on M-1 that something wasn’t right. That kind of prison gossip travels fast.
And so the day of my release approached.
February 3rd started like any other day. There were no goodbyes the night before, a prison ritual with prayers and hugs for those left behind. No staff woke me before dawn to usher me quietly out of the prison before other inmates woke to see me go.
With quiet stealth, the Bureau of Prisons website reported that my release had been postponed “indefinitely.”480
Back home in Maryland, friends and family finally panicked. They could not believe what had just happened.
Locked inside prison on a Texas military base— an accused “Iraqi Agent—” I was terrified.
CHAPTER 25:
PRISON DIARY
Courage is resistance to fear, and the mastery of fear—
Not the absence of fear.
–Mark Twain
“What are you saying? They lied? What do you mean? They fucking lied?”
“They can’t lie to a federal judge! That’s perjury! That’s a federal crime. They know it’s a crime. Half the prisoners here got arrested for making false statements to the FBI. The other half got sentenced for obstruction of justice. They know they can’t do that.”
“That’s right,” Ted Lindauer told me. “People lie in court all the time.”
“Yeah, criminals lie. Not staff for the Bureau of Prisons! They’re supposed to be the ones telling the truth.”
It was February 3rd. My 120 days were up. I was supposed to board an airplane in Dallas to fly home to Maryland. I was practically hysterical as Uncle Ted gave me the low down on my release, which Carswell had delayed “indefinitely.”481
That wasn’t the agreement. Granted, they cut the deal without my knowledge or consent. However, it looked pretty good that morning. In exchange for overlooking the violation of my right to a hearing before detention, and my cooperation for the sake of “national security” the Prosecutor was supposed to drop the charges and send me home— not detain me “indefinitely!” That was the end game they sold to Judge Mukasey.
Worst yet, Carswell was arguing that I should be strapped to a gurney, and forcibly drugged with needle injections of Haldol,482 until I stopped claiming that I worked as a “U.S. Intelligence Asset in anti-terrorism for Nine Years,”483 and that I warned about a major terrorist attack involving airplane hijackings and a strike on the World Trade Center throughout the spring and summer of 2001.
Carswell decreed it a “psychotic disorder, not otherwise specified.”
This attack came out of nowhere.
Or did it come straight from Republican headquarters?
At that point, I had not seen Carswell’s report prepared by Dr. James Shadduck, but Ted had. Apparently, it carefully overlooked the unhappy truth that my story checked out in total. The report faithfully omitted critical acknowledgements that Shadduck himself had spoken with two witnesses, and fully authenticated the key structure of my history.484 Documents in Maryland proved my CIA handler’s expertise on Iraq, including his Congressional testimony on Iraq’s SCUD Mobile Missile Launchers in the first Gulf War.485, 486, 487
I checked out alright. Not a problem.
Dr. Shadduck had also spoken with Parke Godfrey, who provided critical corroboration of my 9/11 warnings.488
Godfrey had promised to make sure Carswell understood he was repeating what he’d already told the FBI in Toronto in September, 2004. So the FBI and my prosecutor, Edward O’Callaghan, already knew it, too—a year before I got sent to Carswell Prison.
My insistence on pre-trial validation had strategically removed “plausible deniability,” whereby one party shields another from responsibility for their actions by withholding vital information. They couldn’t hide behind the pretence of ignorance—a favorite Washington trick.
I had blocked “deniability” from every angle.
Everybody understood I was telling the truth. The FBI. The U.S. Attorneys Office in New York. Uncle Ted. The hack psychiatrists at Carswell. They’d all verified it.
Distinctly, the only individual who had not verified my authenticity was Judge Mukasey. And he was forced to rely on the integrity of the Justice Department, which has a sworn obligation not to lie about such things to the Court.
Dr. Shadduck was on the inside of the cover up. He could see that Ferguson and Godfrey were eager to bring clarity to the legal confusion. At trial, there would be more high-powered witnesses, who would expose more truth. In this pre-trial phase, however, Dr. Shadduck had more than sufficient validation for his purposes.
Knowing all of that, Shadduck deliberately structured his psych evaluation to suggest that no independent corroboration existed. In so doing, Carswell effectively falsified its psychiatric report to Judge Mukasey—who was also hearing the financial lawsuit by World Trade Center owner, Larry Silverstein.489 And Carswell psychiatrists sought to forcibly drug a known Asset to stop me from saying that I was an Asset who warned about 9/11.490
With a high enough dosage of psychotropic Haldol, Carswell argued I could be made to forget the details of my activities at the Iraqi Embassy, which contradicted the fanciful “truths” invented by Republican leaders, including my own dear cousin, Andy Card, Chief of Staff to President Bush.
As for “indefinite detention,” Carswell argued that I should be locked in prison until whatever time psychiatrists could guarantee the “cure” had been effective.491 Psych evaluations speculated this “cure” would require many years of detention, because my beliefs in my Asset work are so deeply engrained in my psyche. (It ain’t easy to eradic
ate reality, even for psychiatry!)
If that’s not Soviet style revisionism, I don’t know what is. It’s something Stalin would have done in the Cold War to crush opponents and enforce political conformity. For sure, when O’Callaghan and Shadduck falsified that psych evaluation, they committed gross professional misconduct.
Vital exculpatory knowledge was withheld from the Court, which Judge Mukasey urgently “needed to know—”
For those outside the intelligence community, “need to know” status gets conferred when any individual, federal judge or not, risks making a decision that would damage the functioning of intelligence operations, or otherwise cause negative blowback on the Intelligence Community. The person “needs to know” to guide their actions, so they don’t do something incredibly stupid or dangerous.
Threatening to forcibly drug an Asset to “cure” her of knowing real intelligence would certainly qualify as a most obscene sort of mistake.
It rendered psychiatry an instrument of State Fascism.
And it put Judge Mukasey in the position of judicially endorsing a cover up of my team’s 9/11 warning and Iraqi Pre-War Intelligence—something he would never have done of his own volition.
O’Callaghan and Carswell didn’t stop to consider the consequences for Judge Mukasey’s integrity. They only imagined that if they could forcibly administer enough psychotropic drugs, we could all lie about 9/11 and Iraq together!
They wanted to chemically lobotomize me. And they sought to compromise a senior federal Judge to do it.
Drugging was a political weapon, alright. And my prosecutor, O’Callaghan was nothing if not a political animal. He left the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York to become a top adviser to John McCain and Sarah Palin’s Presidential Campaign in 2008.492 I could never forget— or forgive— that I got arrested 30 days after contacting McCain’s Senate office in Washington, asking to testify before the Presidential Commission on Pre-War Intelligence.
The next thing I know, I’m under arrest. What a coincidence that my Prosecutor worked for McCain at election time.
O’Callaghan now works at the Law Firm of Peabody Nixon, the haunts of former President Richard Nixon.
You can only imagine the horror that I experienced receiving this news. I was terrified beyond words. Ordinarily, “indefinite detention” implies the maximum prison sentence, 10 years in my case. Typically that’s how the Courts handle violent offenders who get declared incompetent. They get hit with the full sentence. It appeared the Bureau of Prisons wanted to test whether the Patriot Act could be categorized with other major crimes, pushing me into a permanent legal abyss.
On February 3rd, in a moment of blinding panic, I wasn’t sure what part of my situation was the worst— Getting stuck in prison indefinitely, without due process, because of a bogus psychiatric evaluation. Or getting threatened with forcible injections of Haldol throughout my incarceration.
I would have to say drugs tipped the balance.
Haldol was a rhinoceros tranquilizer. It’s a zombie drug that imitates the stone-like effects of Parkinson’s Disease. It kills all daily functioning. And they wanted to shoot me up like some street junkie.
Honestly, I would rather get water-boarded.
There was never any question of compromising on drugs, in exchange for freedom. I would stay in prison as long as it took, but I would never put drugs in my body. Not to save some hack politician in Washington. Not in this lifetime. This would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary. Ted Lindauer and I were confident there’d been enough irregularities that we could overturn forcible drugging in the 2nd Circuit Appellate Court, if Judge Mukasey ruled against me.
“Indefinite detention” could still be in force in that equation. We did not know. Honestly though, for the next months, I was more terrified wondering whether the Court would allow us to “stay” a decision on forcible drugging— to stop Carswell from strapping me to a gurney, while the Court appeals raged on. That frightened me more than anything else.
Uncle Ted demanded that I must not panic. He promised to visit me in Texas, so that we could work out a counter strategy together.493 Obviously, my attorney, Sam Talkin was out of his depth, and unable to cope with this shocking twist in events. He took no action to fight for my release. He appeared to be stumped as how to proceed.
My beloved Uncle Ted swore that I was not alone. Ted has such a forceful presence as an attorney that he’s practically in the cell with you, talking side by side, hammering out strategies. Ted promised to exert his best energies to broker a solution with the Judge that would get me out of the “hoosiegow,” as he called it.
Ted kept my courage strong in moments of absolute terror and despair. I could never have survived—and won—without him.
But inside those prison walls after February 3, 2006, a surreal drama began to play out. Reality was thrown out the window. Staff aggressively declared that my Asset work in Pre-War Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism from 1993 to 2003 was manifestly delusional, and must be corrected. They began to impose their own psychosis on me, brutally reinventing the truth of my life. All external factors stopped mattering, by order of prison psychiatry. A life-time’s work against war and violence, the support of senior. Congressional staffers, journalists, attorneys from the Lockerbie case. U.N. diplomats who watched my work for years—None of that external reality mattered any more. .
They had tried to force me to recant voluntarily. And they had failed. Now they proposed physically crippling me, so that I would be too destroyed to speak. Or think.
On several occasions, I protested to Dr. Vas that Dr. Shadduck had spoken to witnesses who verified my story.
To which he replied: “That doesn’t matter. I’m going to tell the Judge you made it up. Who do you think they’re going to believe? You or me?”
“I am a doctor.”
In one terrifying episode, a psychiatrist declared, “Don’t worry. I’m going to give you so many drugs, you won’t be troubled by those memories any longer.”
Who cared about reality at Carswell? Who cared about the law? Who cared about ethical behavior and truthful testimony?
Nobody that I could see.
One of the psychology staff said to me: “Reality is whatever I say it is.”
I remember that I looked him hard in the face. I wanted to stare him straight in the eyes, inmate to prison officer, when I shook my head and replied: “You Are Wrong.”
For these reasons, I am firmly convinced that Carswell should be closed to all psychiatric evaluations immediately. Some women prisoners should be entitled to new evaluations, and a reconsideration of their sentencing and any court-ordered drugging. This corruption of psychiatry did not start with my case. And it did not end with my case either. It’s endemic to Carswell’s approach to psychiatry and the Courts. A lot of other women inmates have suffered from it, and a lot of other Judges have been fooled by it. Those sentences should be reconsidered at once.
As for me, my nightmare of “extreme prejudice” was beginning in earnest.
It comes down to the old cliché that courage is not the absence of fear, but fighting through fear. Thinking back on it, I was terrified beyond words— and the odds of my victory were stunningly low, at least in the first round, without an appeal to the higher court. Prison staff on that Texas military base had no doubts they would prevail against me. They did not expect me to win.
I began to have a recurring nightmare.
In my dream, I was living in a room filled with water up to the ceiling. I could only breathe through a small air tube that snaked up to a vent above me.
In my dream, the tube was thin, and breathing was difficult. I had so little oxygen.
I was chained to the floor. Looking up through the water, I could see the vent. But I could not see behind it to know if my oxygen would be cut off by some unseen hand. In my dream, I feared that hand intensely.
I remember distinctly knowing that I must stay focused, and concentrate on b
reathing. If I panicked, I would lose what small source of oxygen I had, and the effect would be catastrophic.
I could not lose control. Yet I had no control. You see?
Imagine a place where prisoners can be physically tortured, crippled and maimed without any rights to stop the abuse. That abuse continues month after month, year after year, until inmates are utterly destroyed beyond the possibility of healing.
Now you’ve got an inkling of what I’m talking about.
My daily life was controlled by an extraordinary confluence of fairly decent prison guards— and a group of sadistic psychology staff. Unhappily, the psych staff appeared to relish their power to inflict tremendous suffering on inmates through crippling dosages of drugs. The women on M-1 had no legal right whatsoever to protect ourselves from their abuse— which had no correlation to prisoner behavior or real life personality traits.
Forcible drugging was about power.
The experience haunts me to this day.
Prisoner Abuse_
Lots of bad things happened at Carswell. But nobody suffered like the women inmates on M-1. Black, white, Hispanic, everybody got hurt. But black women especially got victimized by the All Caucasian psychology staff— and not only those who are poor, less educated and less familiar with their legal rights.
Middle class black women got attacked savagely, too. Apparently it wasn’t “normal” to live outside the ghetto. Think Jennifer Hudson”s role in “Sex and the City.” That’s exactly the sort of black woman targeted on M-1. No joke. The torture of those women would astonish and devastate most Americans. It would break your heart if you saw them. They had no legal counsel that cared for them.
The outcome was hideous. During my 7 month detention at Carswell, I saw these women at the time of their arrival at the prison. Mostly they were in good health, confident and friendly, not violent, not threatening. Just nice people. That was the most striking thing about their behavior. They smiled. They joked with other inmates. They were the girls next door who’d got into trouble, without criminal intent. Mostly their boyfriends or husbands engaged in some criminal act, and they got picked up together. A large number of these women wouldn’t talk to the FBI— called “obstruction of justice—” or else they got hit with making “false statements” to protect their men. (Ladies, that’s a bad idea!) Loyalty to their men caught them several years in prison.
EXTREME PREJUDICE: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq Page 47