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

Page 53

by Susan Lindauer


  Right there, Goldstein exposed his own “grandiosity” by trying to invent a reality to support the diagnosis he wanted to make.

  Had I experienced paranoia at all in my life? I confess that I’ve been known to joke with friends that we have our own satellite tracking devices, so the feds can watch over us. That doesn’t mean we believe it, however.(Or that we’re wrong!)

  I would call paranoia an occupational hazard. For almost a decade, I was part of a community that relies on surveillance for its livelihood.

  Intelligence. Surveillance. I think I see a connection.

  So was I paranoid? Probably.

  Was that irrational paranoia? Was that surveillance false?

  Not on your life. Surveillance would be de rigueur for any Asset engaged in frequent contact with diplomats from Libya and Iraq, Yemen, Syria/Hezbollah, Egypt and Malaysia. In the context of my work, it was quite ordinary.

  Once when I protested some particularly heavy surveillance during the Lockerbie negotiations, my handlers laughed derisively. Paul Hoven scolded me, saying the Feds wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they didn’t track me. If you’re dealing with Libya and Iraq, you’d be foolish not to expect it. It would be pitiably naïve.

  Incidentally, FBI wiretaps captured 28,000 phone calls, 8,000 emails and hundreds of faxes in a two year period before my arrest.

  There was surveillance video of me walking my dachshunds in my neighborhood.534

  I’d been subject to two “warrantless searches” on the Patriot Act. And I was subsequently indicted as an “Iraqi Agent.”

  Maybe I thought I was under surveillance, because I was under surveillance!

  Admittedly, my beliefs about surveillance might seem irrational to outsiders or colleagues who had no idea that I functioned as an Asset in frequent contact with diplomats all over the Middle East. However I would never discuss surveillance with friends or family not connected to my Intelligence projects. Except in the most extreme circumstances, they would rarely know what was happening.

  Was I frightened about this surveillance? Did I “spend lots of time trying to protect myself from imaginary enemies,” as Goldstein implied?

  Notoriously not. My brilliant attorney after Carswell, Brian Shaughnessy, used to chuckle that a woman dealing with Iraq and Libya is probably not afraid of anything.

  The psychiatry crowd failed to grasp that if surveillance truly frightened me, I would have cut off my dealings with the CIA, and stopped meeting diplomats entirely. I would have become a librarian. I was so “not paranoid” that the Justice Department accused me of meeting with an undercover FBI Agent and “conspiring with Iraqi Intelligence—” which has to require some fairly bold actions.

  Most of my close friends would say I wasn’t paranoid enough.

  Dr. Goldstein’s second “diagnosis” that I suffered delusions of “grandiosity” struck me as equally ludicrous and uninformed.

  “Grandiose delusions,” according to Goldstein, “involve situations where individuals believe they have special talents or outstanding abilities, relationships with successful or prominent people, or that they have special gifts—being clairvoyant or other special gifts.”535

  That could describe half the populations of Washington, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. The civic leaders of small town America. And practically all of the guests on CNN, the Fox News Channel and Real Time With Bill Maher.

  The better half, I would add.

  Here psychiatry exposed its true nature, as a defender of Mediocrity and Conventionalism. My experience proves that psychiatry makes a study of gradations of the Ordinary. It’s greatest purpose is to keep Americans in a box, ineffectual and always seeking approval, rather than acting decisively to create their own life.

  If Goldstein had spoken with me—instead of making up stories—he’d recognize that I’m a fairly down to earth woman. I perform like a work-horse, not a show horse. I’m not a celebrity seeker. I’m an activist motivated by love for my causes, not a desire for publicity.

  I understand how difficult it is to create change. I find it amazingly hard. And also worthwhile. I have made the commitment and sacrifices. I have learned to appreciate the smaller moments when a project advances slowly. I have learned not to feel daunted by what’s left to be done. I give thanks for my small role.

  And since when has ambition, hard work, self motivation and pride for one’s achievement become a personal liability? Is that not the refuge of mediocrity to scorn personal striving for excellence?

  Grandiose, huh? You don’t like motivation and achievement?

  Fine. If I’m grandiose, do you think I care what you say? Just spell my name right. Because I did this work— or I wouldn’t have been under surveillance for 10 years!

  To his credit, Judge Mukasey posed an incisive question that swooped right over the heads of these lunatic psychiatrists.

  He asked Dr. Goldstein, “What is your understanding of the charges against Ms. Lindauer? Do you understand that she has been accused by the Justice Department of engaging in these activities?”

  Right there Judge Mukasey pointed to a serious flaw in the logic of psychiatry. The indictment itself depended on my relationships with Iraqi diplomats at the United Nations. The rationale for prosecution hinged on these activities.

  Now these crazy psychiatrists paraded into court, arguing that these events never occurred.

  But if the actions did not transpire, how could the US Attorneys Office justify the indictment? (Obviously, they couldn’t!)

  My wonderful Judge, brilliant and canny, had found his way out of our box. (I just didn’t know it yet.) People, I love Judge Mukasey. Thank God for his legal savvy!

  The question from the Court’s outlook was whether my activities rose to the level of a crime. Was I an Iraqi Agent? Or was I acting under the legitimate assumption that I was performing as an Asset, under the long-time supervision of U.S. Intelligence?

  The Justice Department was not conceding that my actions never took place. Nor did I deny participating in them.

  Only the crazy psychiatrists got twisted in their thinking, and wanted to cure me of believing those events occurred—which was fairly bizarre, given the backdrop for our Court drama.

  That implication flew right over their heads.

  Instead Dr. Vas and Dr. Stuart Kleinman swore to Judge Mukasey that with enough Haldol, and enough prison time, I could be cured of believing that those events took place—actions stipulated in the indictment itself.

  And how long would this “cure” take?

  Psychiatrists frowned. That was a harder question.

  How many years of Haldol, Ativan and Prozac would be required to eradicate an individual’s sense of identity and life’s purpose?

  How much drugs would it take to destroy my belief that two men named Paul Hoven and Dr. Richard Fuisz had been guiding forces in my life for almost a decade?

  Would five years be enough?

  How long would it take to destroy my recollections of the terrorism investigations and policy that our team contributed to?

  Or to destroy my memories of diplomats at the United Nations? Ambassadors that I’d known socially? To forget conversations from our back channel dialogue?

  How much Haldol would it take to destroy my natural sense of privilege and joy that I felt participating in this work?

  Would this cure require the maximum sentence?

  Could they destroy my dignity any faster than that?

  They could certainly try.

  For that matter, how much drugs would it take to stop me from claiming I warned about the 9/11 attack? Or insisting that one faction of the Intelligence Community urged Attorney General John Ashcroft’s private staff to coordinate an intra-agency response and pre-empt the 9/11 attack?

  What would it take to stop me from knowing the truth about Pre-War Intelligence and the comprehensive peace framework negotiated with Iraqi diplomats that would have solved America’s conflict without War?

 
How much time? How much drugs?

  Psychiatrists told Judge Mukasey that they could not know the answers to those questions. It might be accomplished in several years. Or it might require the maximum 10 year sentence to make sure that I was really and truly “cured.”

  Carswell would be sure to let the Court know when I was ready for release.

  One point they agreed on. With enough Haldol— eventually— my brain would be so fried that I would forget the whole thing.

  My life could be “corrected.”

  Erased.

  Terminated. With Extreme Prejudice.

  CHAPTER 28:

  METROPOLITAN

  CORRECTIONAL CENTER

  “Former CIA Asset and political prisoner,

  Susan Lindauer joins us today for a KBOO Radio Special,

  How to Succeed in Terror Without Really Trying.

  Lindauer not only looked out over the Abyss—

  She went camping there.”

  – Chris Andreae for Air Cascadia.

  KBOO Public Radio, Portland, Oregon 9/14/2011

  There’s a great Robert Redford movie that hits a nerve for me —“Three Days of the Condor.” In it, an intelligence operative stumbles on a “black operation” at the height of the Cold War. His entire team gets snuffed while he’s at lunch, all of his associates terminated “extreme prejudice” style. He goes on the run, hunted by an assassin, while he tries to figure out what the hell he’s uncovered that’s got everybody so afraid.

  The movie ends with Robert Redford standing proudly in front of the New York Times.

  His intelligence chief from CIA warns him to go to ground. “Otherwise someday a car will pull up on the side of the road, and the door will open. They might send a friend.”

  Oh no, Robert Redford assures his Langley boss. “Look where we’re standing—” under the sign of the New York Times. If the spooks harass him, the New York Times will publish everything. The CIA’s black operations will be exposed. The murder of his associates will be in the open.

  “You don’t know that,” the Intelligence Director shakes his head. “You can’t be sure.”

  “I can be sure. They’ll do it,” Redford retorts, with confident naivety. “They’ll publish it.”536

  My nightmare paralleled “Three Days of the Condor” in so many ways—right down to the fact that the New York Times Magazine had the dirt to blow the whole thing wide open. One of the Magazine’s writers told me that Richard Fuisz and Paul Hoven vouched for everything weeks after my arrest —my 9/11 warning, my role in the Lockerbie negotiations, and how our relationship started after I warned about the first World Trade Center attack. In 1993.

  If Dr. Fuisz and Hoven volunteered my bona fides to the New York Times, it’s a good bet they told the FBI. Don’t you think?

  As a former journalist myself, I recognized what a huge story the Times was sitting on. It would rock Washington. Not only that, most of my anti-terrorism work involved New York City, the paper’s home town.

  Human decency—and journalistic integrity—demanded coverage.

  And so I waited, hopeful and desperate, after the May hearings on forcible drugging.

  Except Robert Redford was wrong. The loud silence of the corporate media answered my prayers.

  If your life depended on the New York Times, you’d be in a helluva lot of trouble.

  Now I was frightened out of my wits. Scared like a scalded cat, as the saying goes. My hair turned from dirty blonde to white in a couple of short months, after Carswell refused to release me. I had so much white in my hair that the prison hair salon refused to dye it for me. Prison rules prohibit changing an inmate’s appearance.

  I existed in a state of constant anxiety over this horrific chain of events that got worse with every throw.

  The Metropolitan Correctional Center is maximum security detention for pre-trial inmates. It houses every sort of crime—from murder, bank robbery and securities fraud, to drug trafficking and terrorism. Yet I would come to dread leaving it.

  Ms. Eldridge ran the women’s floor of the prison like a sergeant matron of a military boot camp. She could hunt out contraband nail polish like a bloodhound. She kept discipline tight among the 100 women inmates crammed into 10 by 12 foot cells, often sleeping four to a room on double bunks, with an open toilet in the corner.

  My heightened state of fear might have added to my vulnerability, except that Ms. Eldridge refused to tolerate inmates harassing one another. Discipline was for our own protection, and the guards kept a close watch over me. Other inmates might not have understood my status as a political prisoner, but the guards recognized something was up. One guard would call out “Peace!” whenever I walked by. Another guard sang to me once, when she saw me weeping. They made a special effort to keep me safe in my obvious state of fright, while I waited for the Court through that sweltering hot summer.

  I will always be grateful for that.

  At M.C.C. my sleep was black, and my waking hours stormed with suppressed anxiety. In prison, all of your emotions have to be swallowed down, or blocked out. There’s no privacy for grieving. Everything’s exposed. My status in the law was so degraded by this point that I had to fight doubly hard to overcome my despair. I lived in sheer terror for the day the Judge would issue his ruling. I had no idea if I would win. Carswell definitely expected me to lose.

  The consequences of the Judge’s decision could be monstrous. I would not only lose my freedom, but the best parts of my life— my creativity and my intellect.

  By my way of thinking, forcible drugging qualified as a threat of torture. It would mutilate the most precious memories of my life and my happiness for those memories. I happen to enjoy the human condition, with its joys and pain and small kindnesses.

  I was proud to go to prison for opposing the violence and suffering of the Iraq War. I considered my actions deeply righteous on behalf of the anti-war movement. If I had to pay for that, then I had no regrets or remorse, whatsoever. These are my life-long values, which I cherish with all my heart. I would make any sacrifice for them, because I believe they are important values. And I’m willing to defend them.

  Only drugging was abhorrent to me. Prison life could be harsh. It’s terribly unpleasant. But you can survive it. This threat of forcible drugging, however, terrorized me, because it aimed to destroy the best parts of what I am. I regarded it as manifestly evil.

  I could not believe that strangers would dare to deny my life’s work as an Asset, and somehow they should have more rights to speak in a court of law than “participatory witnesses”— friends and colleagues who engaged in these activities with me, during the period of the indictment.

  If the Court had questions, it struck me that finding answers should be a simple matter of firing off a couple of subpoenas, and calling those participatory witnesses to testify. Judge Mukasey could confront them with questions, in open Court, in full view of the Community. And they would reply with insight from firsthand contact to the events. Primary sources are always superior and more trustworthy. Who else could possess such insight?

  By now, I was desperate to provide that comfort to the Court.

  My attorney commanded that I should not write my Judge—and I never did until Carswell refused to release me.

  Now I appealed to the Court in long, desperate letters, begging for a proper hearing. I regretted that I had not spoken up sooner.

  On four occasions, I filed witness lists with phone numbers, addresses and email contacts, urging Judge Mukasey to hear those primary sources before deciding the petition to forcibly drug me.537 I pleaded to give priority to witnesses connected to the events above those looney tunes with psychiatry degrees parading before his Court. My arguments for the natural priority of participatory witnesses over “speculative psychiatry,” as I called it, would have formed the basis of any appeals to the higher courts, if Judge Mukasey ruled against me.

  Indeed, my case provides damnable evidence of how untrustworthy psychiatry is.
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  The problem, as I understood it, was that Judge Mukasey could not overrule my attorney’s legal strategy. Even if a Judge saw that changes would benefit me, or that my attorney’s performance was sub-par, he could not impose a correction.

  Along those lines, if a Defendant requests a hearing over the attorney’s objections, the Judge can not supersede the decision to forego it. That’s how they got me.

  It was a legal spy thriller worthy of John Grisham or Robert Ludlum. Talkin, meanwhile, did not want witnesses revealing how easily my story could be verified, or how my Uncle Ted had felt compelled to interview them on my behalf.

  Hence, my attorney’s nickname, “No Talkin.’” He was protecting himself from questions of his own incompetence.

  That didn’t stop me from writing tearful, frightened letters to Judge Mukasey at 2 a.m in the dark of my cell, listening to Anna Nalick’s beautiful song, “Breathe” on the hand radios we carried with ear plugs. Her lyrics captured all of my agony that summer. When I finished my letters, I would play Free Cell solitaire on my top bunk early into the morning. I hardly slept at all.

  I got so desperate that I proposed my old intelligence handler, Paul Hoven, should testify in closed court.538 I suggested he could provide more forthcoming answers without fear of media exposure. By this stage, nothing else mattered.

  I promised that Hoven could vouch for:

  1. My warning to the Tunisian Embassy two days before the first attack on the World Trade Center in February, 1993, and how that act triggered our relationship.

  2. How Hoven introduced me to Dr. Fuisz in September, 1994 for the purpose of starting talks with Libya’s diplomats for the Lockerbie Trial.

  It was Hoven who recruited me. There’s no blame in that. These were all extraordinary events in my life, and I’m deeply proud of our work together. But I was very young when I met Paul Hoven. Approaching the Libya House at the United Nations would never have occurred to me, if Paul had not coached me.

 

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