EXTREME PREJUDICE: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq

by Susan Lindauer

  Since I was handcuffed, when I had to go to the bathroom, a U.S. Marshal would have to pull down my pants, and raise ‘em up again when I was finished.

  Oh yeah, it would be a helluva flight.

  And for what? I stood accused of engaging in anti-terrorism that politicians on Capitol Hill declared their highest priority for national security. Now those same leaders wanted to exaggerate their success to voters in Oklahoma City and New York.

  Is that ironic enough for you?

  I choked on the outrage of it.

  Shamefully, I suffered ridicule in court proceedings505, 506 for declaring my faith that New Yorkers would appreciate what I had done on behalf of their city.

  They say New York has a cold, cold heart. Maybe they would care in Oklahoma City, where a nursery school filled with toddlers and infants got destroyed in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building.507 Do you think those 19 babies died quickly crushed under all that concrete? Did they scream for their mommies as they suffocated with broken bones?

  Do you care?

  Well I care. If those parents told me to stop, I would consent out of respect for their grief. But I would be damned to hell before I ever stop hunting men who kill anybody’s children— and certainly not because some creepy politician in Washington winks that it’s okay.

  It’s not okay. But hey, that’s just me.

  And now I was on my way to argue before Judge Michael B. Mukasey why I should not get forcibly drugged for 10 years in prison— without a trial— for contributing to the 9/11 investigation, and warning Colin Powell and my own cousin, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, about the catastrophe of invading Iraq.

  Or was that 25 years in prison?

  That’s just too much irony for me.

  It was a miserable flight.

  Yeah, you bet it was. Some things really are unforgivable in a democracy.

  CHAPTER 27:

  EXTREME PREJUDICE

  “Everyone strives to reach the Law,” says the man. “So how does it happen that

  for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?”

  The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end,

  and, to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear:

  “No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you.

  I am now going to shut it.”

  –The Trial by Franz Kafka

  Forcible drugging with Haldol— The harshest anti-psychotic available, which blocks bodily functioning and imitates the stone-like effects of Parkinson’s Disease.

  This was the stuff of nightmares. And the worst was coming fast.

  If O’Callaghan won this fight, my capability to think and function would be utterly wrecked. I would be so doped up that I wouldn’t be capable of exchanging ideas through conversation or the written word pretty much ever again.

  That was the whole idea.

  I would be chemically lobotomized like those other broken women on the notorious M-1 of Carswell. Women who couldn’t hold a fork to eat, or raise a cup to drink without spilling on themselves. Women who couldn’t shower or dress themselves. Women who slept 15 to 18 hours every day, and often wet their beds at night.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, because I was pre-trial, Carswell wanted to lock me up “indefinitely,” which could imply the maximum 10 year sentence. Carswell was testing the waters to see if the Patriot Act could be categorized with violent crimes, which typically hold “incompetent” inmates for the maximum possible detention. If the Court accepted “indefinite detention,” it would be up to Carswell to recommend when to free me, at whatever time the Justice Department decided my Intelligence background no longer threatened Washington’s elite.

  Hell would freeze before I got out—and my life would become a living torture until that end.

  This was “extreme prejudice,” alright. The goal was much worse than discrediting my reputation as an Asset. They sought to destroy me as a human being— body, mind and soul.

  Only “extreme prejudice” could destroy all evidence of Washington’s Crimes Against the American People— and protect Republican leaders, who had staked their reputations on a totally false and revisionist myth about their performance on national security.

  In truth, Republicans had blundered badly. They had to go nuclear on me to shield themselves.

  And now we had gathered in New York for a hearing to debate this God awful proposal.

  They had not counted on one problem, however. Just because somebody wants to kill you doesn’t mean that you have to surrender without a fight.

  In which case the FBI should have listened to Paul Hoven more carefully. He used to chuckle, “Susan, if I was taking gun fire in a back alley at midnight, I would want you by my side. Because you would fight to the death.”

  Psychiatry had nothing to do with reality in my case. This attack was strictly politically motivated. Having studied the competency law at Carswell’s prison library, however, I understood exactly how to tackle it and defeat it. The competency law itself gave me all the opportunity I needed to bring clarity to the situation. Satisfying the Court was simply a matter of presenting a couple of participatory witnesses, who could assure Judge Mukasey of the authentic details of my life. I was also entitled to supply evidence to prove my functionality. Any hearing would do, so long as I could exercise my right to challenge the questions raised in these absurd psych evaluations.

  Once reality came into play, this bogus psychiatry would get thrown out the window. Oh yes, give me due process, and this phony psych debate would be smashed.

  At my first face meeting with Talkin at M.C.C, I made perfectly clear that’s the strategy I wanted to pursue. I was furious that I was suffering because he had misread my case so badly. Talkin had gambled with my freedom and lost. Since O’Callaghan was reneging on his promise to drop the charges, I wanted to take a sledge hammer to these ridiculous psych evaluations, and go back to my original defense.

  Talkin wasted no time disabusing my expectations.

  Only the psychiatrists who’d invented this nonsense story would be allowed to testify. Indeed, the Defense intended to call just one witness, somebody named Dr. Robert L. Goldstein, a psychiatrist on the faculty of Columbia University.

  I had never spoken with this man, or laid eyes on him until he showed up in Court to disparage my reputation. Yet Dr. Goldstein was ready to assure Judge Mukasey that he had greater insight to my character, personality and life’s work than anyone outside of psychiatry who’d known me 15 years or longer.

  It was a flagrant violation of my rights under the competence law. I knew that, because I had read the law, and I understood what it meant. Yet here again I confronted psychiatry’s unscrupulous finagling of court procedure.

  Now I was truly terrified.

  Prison guards woke me before dawn on the morning of May 4 for the first of two hearing dates. I showered and ate a small breakfast before getting hustled through the ancient concrete tombs of M.C.C. to the federal courthouse next door.

  There I was strip searched, garbed in a special prison uniform for court, and dumped in a holding cage. I waited for hours, it seemed, before I got called to Court.

  There I stood —the woman who tried to stop the 9/11 attack— just 1000 yards from the rubble of “ground zero,” where the World Trade Center once graced the New York skyline. The whole thing struck me as preposterous and grotesque.

  I was frantic to speak to my Judge. I had prepared a brief written statement so I could stay on point, though my emotions burgeoned on hysteria.

  To my dismay, Judge Mukasey refused to allow me to address the court.508

  JUDGE MUKASEY: “No. She’s got a lawyer. Anything that she has to tell me, she should tell you. You can tell me or not, depending on whether you think it’s in her legal interest to do it.”

  TALKIN: “Ms. Lindauer… wishes the Court to know that she is competent to stand trial, and wishes to stand tri
al, and she denies all of the reports. It’s her position that all of the reports are false and inaccurate.”

  JUDGE MUKASEY: “I understand that, and there’s now a record that that’s her position. I think there was a record of it before, and so any effect that might have on subsequent proceedings, the legitimacy or lack of it, in any subsequent proceedings is now clear.”

  If that sounds harsh, it was. In fairness, Judge Mukasey was stuck between a rock and a hard place, confronting two wretched options. It must have infuriated him. He could accept an incompetence defense for a faithful U.S. Asset who successfully engaged with pariah Arab nations like Libya and Iraq for almost a decade. He had to know that was legally absurd. Or he could reject the incompetence strategy, and force the Defense to go to trial. In that case, he would be forced to implement the Patriot Act in his courtroom, a law crammed with every imaginable weapon for assaulting the Constitutional rights of due process for all defendants in the U.S. Courts across the country.

  My case created a lot of bad law. A great Judge like Mukasey thinks about that.

  A sophisticated attorney, like Brian Shaughnessy after Carswell, had a shot at striking down key planks of the Patriot Act. Shaughnessy had the legal knowledge and confidence to attack its constitutionality. Alas, he was not leading my defense at this point of time. My public attorney, Sam Talkin was over his head.

  The result could have been catastrophic for everybody else.

  “Warrantless searches” on the Patriot Act posed the least of my worries, though they excited the most public outcry, and I endured at least two!

  By far the scariest part of the law pertained to “secret evidence.”

  “Secret evidence” worked against a defendant in two critical ways, I was finding out.509 Under the Patriot Act, the Justice Department could deny access to any evidence of its choosing. Neither the defendant, the Judge or the Jury would be allowed to see it. As a token gesture, some classified evidence could be revealed to tease the attorney—depending on his level of security clearance.510 Even so, whatever limited access the attorney enjoyed, he would have no authorization to discuss with the defendant, or other attorneys associated with the Case. That carried enormous consequences American could never imagine— like the “secret attorney debriefing” on February 10,511 which preceded Dr. Drob’s declaration of my incompetence on February 28.512

  The Patriot Act made that possible.

  “Secret evidence” laid the ground for two “secret charges” in the indictment.513 If I had a possible explanation, it would be meaningless to share with my attorney. In all likelihood, he would not know the nature of those “secret charges” either.

  That creates unexpected logistical difficulties at Trial. Any alibi would be purely speculative. We’d be shooting in the dark. Indeed, it’s questionable whether the Judge would allow a Defense to argue hypothetical alibis in front of a jury. But what else could you do? Judge Mukasey would have been forced to decide.

  For all that, it was dawning on me that “secret evidence” on the Patriot Act carried an even more frightening and onerous burden that I had not previously understood.

  “Secret evidence” that established my innocence and might save me from years in prison, called “exculpatory knowledge,” got withheld from the Court, too, including all important confirmations of my work as a U.S. Asset in anti-terrorism for nine years, supervised by U.S. Intelligence! That meant everything. And the Justice Department greedily withheld validation of that truth. They simply declared it “classified evidence,” and refused to acknowledge it.514

  That’s how we ended up in Court on a fine day in May, fighting over whether I should be forcibly drugged with Haldol, Ativan and Prozac to “cure” me of believing what the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Attorneys Office and the Justice Department all knew to be fully truthful. Ted Lindauer and later Brian Shaughnessy would know it, too—But when confronted, the Feds refused to admit it.

  Though I was frightened and confused that day, I’m now convinced that Judge Mukasey could see the horror of it, too.

  And so I have tremendous sympathy— and respect— for Judge Mukasey, because I believe he perceived that bigger picture of casualties for the U.S. Court system.

  If he could not kill my case, Judge Mukasey might be compelled to instruct a jury that the use of “secret evidence” to substantiate “secret charges” could not be devalued in deciding whether to convict me.515 He might be required to instruct the jury that the Justice Department considered the “secret evidence” sufficient to prove some unidentified act of wrongdoing occurred on some non-specific day, violating some non-specific law. And that’s all the Jury needed to know.516

  I could get five years in prison, without knowing why.

  A straight arrow Judge and preeminent legal scholar like Mukasey doesn’t like that. He would enforce it, because that’s the law of the land. But a great Judge thinks about the consequence of his decisions for due process and civil liberties. At the highest level of Chief Justice, he considers the precedents throughout the Court system.

  From the first days of my indictment, I could see that Judge Mukasey regarded “secret evidence” with strong distaste. He didn’t like what it meant, or where it led, creating bad legal precedents in the Courts that he loves.

  There was one more problem facing both of us that morning. Judge Mukasey could only work from whatever defense strategy my attorney gave him. Judge Mukasey could not craft that strategy himself, or apply his greater skill to improve upon it.

  This incompetence defense was the only option Talkin presented the Court. Talkin made no effort to strike even the most innocuous charges, that I ate cheeseburgers on days I was not in New York, or that I supported free elections in Iraq.

  This was all Mukasey had to work with.

  On the face of it, incompetence was grossly insulting. However under the original agreement, I would have served the most minimal prison sentence possible under federal law, just four months. It would have killed the case without a trial, sidestepping the Patriot Act with its treacherous legal precedents for the whole U.S Court system. And I would have walked away with no conviction on my record. A Judge might consider this a very reasonable solution. Most inmates would agree.

  Forcible drugging was a different beast,. It made a great big mess out of our legal solution. Face it, I’d been a damn good sport about going to Carswell, and this was a blatant double cross. The mere suggestion of Haldol terrified me no end.

  I tell you without shame, I almost broke down and wept, shackled in that courtroom.

  Judge Mukasey could see that. He was fiercely attentive to my courtroom demeanor that morning, fully alert, while I sat quaking in obvious fear.

  But his choice—and mine—was whether to throw out the whole incompetence finding, and go back to square one. Or go forward into this storm.

  For myself, there was no question. I abhor drugs. There’s no way I would consent to ruin my thinking and my consciousness with mind-altering psychotropic drugs.

  I would fight forcible drugging all the way to the Supreme Court. I considered it medically unethical and politically motivated. And I would not submit for any reason.

  Honestly, I’ve dealt with terrorists who didn’t frighten me as much as these crazy fools who call themselves “psychiatrists.”

  That was the backdrop when Judge Mukasey struck his gavel to call the Court to order, as sunshine burst through the tall windows of his chamber.

  The first witness that May afternoon was Dr. Collin Vas, throwing down the gauntlet on behalf of Carswell.517

  Introducing himself, Dr. Vas testified that he’d worked as a staff psychiatrist at Carswell for a year. He attended medical school in Banglo, India. He earned a postgraduate diploma in psychiatry at the Christian Medical College in Vellore, India, and finished his psychiatric residency at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.518

  On behalf of Carswell, Dr. Vas requested the Court’s permission to forcibly strap me
to a gurney and inject me with Haldol,519 until I could be “cured” of claiming that I worked as an Asset on 9/11 and Iraq.520 According to Dr. Vas, my “cure” required the harshest drugs available to the prisons, a drug known to imitate Parkinson’s Disease, causing heavy loss of motor functioning, especially at the high dosages prescribed by Carswell staff.

  And why exactly? What disturbing symptoms of “mental illness” had I exhibited?

  By this time, Carswell had scrutinized me for seven (7 1/2) months, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Surely there must have been some serious behavior problems to justify forcibly drugging an inmate with the harshest drugs available to prison staff.

  Medical ethics would surely demand that symptoms of a “disease” show itself before recommending treatment to a willing participant— Let alone forcing it upon an unwilling prisoner.

  You can judge for yourself whether Carswell met that medical criteria:

  That afternoon, the Court cut to the chase.

  Had I been observed to suffer hallucinations?521

  O’CALLAGHAN: “If you could turn to page nine, please. Do you see that?”

  VAS: “Yes.”

  [The Prosecutor was referencing an observation report from Carswell.]

  O’CALLAGHAN: “Do you see the cross-outs in that area?”

  VAS: “Yes. That’s all my handwriting.”

  [On October 3, 2005, the day of my prison surrender, psych staff cited a goal of “decreasing the intensity and frequency of auditory and visual hallucinations in 120 days.”

  On October 26, 2005—three weeks after my arrival at Carswell—that objective was struck from the observation report by Dr. Vas himself.

  Scrawled across the page was the wording: “Not Applicable.”]

  VAS: “The reason why it was crossed out is that during the time that Ms. Lindauer was present at FMC Carswell, she denied ever experiencing hallucinations, and we did not see any external evidence of that.”