Bush Political Prisoner Gets Her Day in Court – Susan Lindauer Collins/Scoop

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http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0806/S00141.htm

Bush Political Prisoner Gets Her Day in Court

Wednesday, 11 June 2008, 10:36 am
Column: Michael Collins

Susan Lindauer, accused “unregistered” agent and the judge
who rescued her from forced psychiatric medication, now
U.S. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey.

American Cassandra: Susan Lindauer’s Story

Michael Collins
“Scoop” Independent News
Washington, D.C.

Susan Lindauer has a scheduled hearing at the federal district court in Manhattan on June 17, 2008. Just a year after the Iraq invasion, April 2004, Lindauer was charged with serving as an “unregistered agent” for that nation’s government prior to the U.S. invasion. Lindauer countered that she’d worked as an asset for U.S. intelligence and had simply done her job by predicting the risks and negative outcomes of the planned invasion.

She later came to the conclusion that her indictment was a harsh example for any intelligence operatives or figures thinking about taking on the Bush administration in
public - stay silent or you’ll experience the same fate.

"Above all, you must realize that if you go ahead with this invasion, Osama bin Laden will triumph, rising from his grave of seclusion. His network will be swollen with fresh recruits and other charismatic individuals will seek to build on his model multiplying those networks. And the United States will have delivered the death blow to itself." Susan Lindauer’s last letter to Andrew Card, Jan. 6, 2003

The passage above is from the last of ten letters Lindauer sent to her second cousin, Andrew Card, then White House Chief of Staff, from 2001 through 2003. She also delivered the last letter to then Secretary of State Collin Powell (who lived next door to her CIA handler).



A year after her last letter to Card, Lindauer contacted staff for Senator John McCain and Senator Trent Lott offering to testify before the committees investigating intelligence activities prior to the Iraq invasion. At that point, the government turned her file over to a grand jury. Lindauer notes, "They failed to tell the grand jury that I’d been working for them for nine years."

More: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0806/S00141.htm

[Sanity Claws]

1. OMG

Why is this printed in a New Zealand paper and not a US paper?

[Rageneau]

5. Because New Zealand is a free country and the U.S. is not.

America is no longer the land of the free, nor the home of the brave.

And it is in money and power and weaponry, not God, that we trust.

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7. We've got room to grow.

There's an international rating on freedom of the press, political freedom, etc.

NZ is always near the top. That's one area where we should be tied for #1, you're right.

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6. "Scoop" runs an active section for U.S. "free thinkers" and dissent

I wrote this here, sent it there, and now it's back. Amazing!

Here's the Scoop Independent News "Comment" home page http://www.scoop.co.nz/sections/comment.html

Lots of good stuff there. They publish a variety of views. But since 2004, they've been a lifeboat
for people writingon election and other forms of government fraud.

[ihavenobias]

2. K & R

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10. THNX!!!

What a deal! You get indicted and nearly four years later, despite all your efforts,

you have not even had a pre trial hearing.

The governments continued efforts to suppress any evidence hearings represents a strong
proof of Lindauer's claims before there's even an argument.

What's to hide if they have a case?

What's to lose if they don't?

[truedelphi]

3. Not to diminish Susan Lindauer's tale, but if every professional

Diplomat, soldier, naval expert, Pentagon bureucrat, etc who was at odds with the Bush Administration over Iraq was to step forward, we would see a huge number of public servants (5,000?? 25,000?.) Between 2003 and now, as each and every one of these people raised a fuss, they found themselves betrayed by the callous and criminal individuals now entrenched inside the Bush regime.

As a consequence to their speaking out, they were "resigned," early retired, started living in the basement of whatevr agency where they used to occupy the top floors.

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8. Speak out, feel the lash

That's what it comes to. Her quotation in the article is so accurate and its so early - 2 months
before the attack. She was trying to go to the very top due to her connections and presumed
rationality. Others, a few, made these comments. They were off the shows and out of the papers.

But Lindauer was a special target due to her background, more of which will be discussed in future
articles on this. It was, I believe, part a combined attack and immunization program for the
Republicans on Iraq in the 2004 election. It didn't work but they continued to persecute Lindauer.

4 YEARS AND THIS IS THE PRELIMINARY HEARING. "swift and speedy trial" - "due process"

Time for truth.

[truedelphi]

11. Time for truth.

Sometime in spring of 2004, I had an appt with an insurance agent.

I arrived at his office a few minutes early. He was sitting in his inner office, I could see him through the glass that surrounded that office. He gave me the sign of fingers to lips - I realized he was on an important business call. He needed me to be quiet, I assumed, so he could concentrate.

Within thirty seconds he was shouting into the phone at the top of his lungs.


"Those asinine Goddamn Morons!" "No, don't back down. You have every right to let them know what you know." More name calling.

Then - "Why aren't they listening to you - you are the one with experience in this!"

It went on for another five minutes. He was pacing around his office, screaming at the top of his lungs.

Finally he ended the call -- and quite red-faced from the exertion of screaming for ten minutes, he entered the waiting room. "I hope you aren't a George Bush supporter," he said mildly.

"No, far from it."

"Well that was my uncle on the phone, who has served in the Navy for thirty five years. Yesterday one of his senior officers, someone who has served in that capacity for about two minutes, showed my uncle his new office, in the basement of the Pentagon. All my uncle has to agree to do to avoid being demoted there is to contradict all the recommendations he has offered his seniors over the last few weeks. But he can't agree with Stupitidity - and I 'm not going to encourage him to!"

[mod mom]

19. I never understood why knowing what fighting the Afghan rebels did to the Russians

why the neocons would want to get involved in Iraq. Was it hubris? -they thought they could both easily prevail and milk the American Taxpayer through war profiteering. Or was it stupidity? Or was it something more malevolent? (Resource depletion and wanting to be in power when the shit hit the fan)?

[truedelphi]

21. It is so awful to know that when you think of the Presidency for the past eight years

Your only choices are:
1) incompetence
2) corruption beyond the pale
or
3) a sinister mixture of both 1 and 2

[truedelphi]

4. K & R for Lindauer n/t

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9. I see your Kick

:kick:

And isn't Dennins Kucinich the best person in the entire world this week, the very best.

Someone said, how awful Bush must be when it takes five hours to read the crimes against him.

Pretty damn awful.

[Me.]

12. MeThinks

As you know, things go in cycles, one day up, two days later down, especially if there is karma involved. I believe we are just entering the 'chickens coming home to roost' cycle. Watch McSame over the next month, he won't be able to put together a full sentence without a gaffe. KKK's dream of continuing GOP rule is dying a painful death and as I have predicted on another thread...come Nov. 5th all GOPers will be bald. They will all have torn their hair out.

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17. This one is an angry hen, with a cause

There are some folks you don't provoke wrongly. Susan Lindauer is one of them.

She indicates that she will pursue this until she gets justice. I believe her.
That's good for us but not do good for those who locked her up for 11 months.

[truedelphi]

13. The cost of accuracy and good judgment to the logically minded Patriot

Quoting from the Scoop article: "Accuracy and good judgment have their price with the Bush administration. In the case of Susan Lindauer the price was months of confinement and years of court ordered counseling and supervision, all because she was judged delusional for maintaining her innocence."

[bleever]

14. Even more incredible than the Plame story is some ways.

Lindauer was convinced that the charges would be resolved in her favor through the legal process. Instead, she was forced to undergo a psychological evaluation despite her strong objections. She was never tried. Court appointed psychiatrists told her that claims of innocence constituted a delusion. She offered these mental health professionals contacts and other evidence to prove her claim that she worked for the U.S. government. No one got back to her.

After a period of freedom under court supervision, Judge Michael V. Mukasey (the future U.S. Attorney General), ordered Lindauer to spend no more than four months in the federal prison facility at Carswell Air Force Base, Ft. Worth, Texas.

During her time at Carswell, the staff psychiatrist repeatedly suggested to her that she take powerful psychiatric medication to cure what were called �delusions,� her claims that she�d worked as a U.S. asset and was innocent of all charges. She refused, all the while maintaining her innocence.

The U.S. Attorney�s office, Southern District, Manhattan, then moved for the forced administration of unspecified psychiatric medication to allow for a �fair trial.� The prosecutor argued that a fair trial was not possible without this medical intervention directed at her �delusions� of innocence..

Judge Mukasey presided over the hearing. After evaluating the evidence, he refused to order the forced administration of medication. He ordered that Lindauer be set free. The case was continued.

Thank you for keeping this visible, auto!

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15. Can you believe this nonsense.

It just won't stop!

[crickets]

16. K&R

[seemslikeadream]

18. the United States will have delivered the death blow to itself

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20. Quite a line isn't it...

That's why she's been called "American Cassandra"

Watch for the interview tomorrow. A "candid and frank" discussion of her situation over the
last four years, as a survivor of the injustices availed to specially selected citizens.

[H2O Man]

22. "The Society of Captives"

In 1958, social scietist Gresham M. Sykes of Princeton University authored a study of Trenton State Prison, titled "The Society of Captives." He noted that "Centers of opposition in the inmate population -- in the form of men recognized as leaders by fellow inmates -- can be neutralized through the use of solitary confinement or exile to other state institutions. Just as the Deep Soth served as a dumping-ground for particularly troublesome slaves before the Civil War, so too can the ... mental hospital serve as a dumping-ground for the maximum security prison."

I've wrote before about how, when my friend Rubin Carter was organizing the inmates in a positive way in the 1970s, he was deemed "criminally insane" by the state of New Jersey, and placed in the TSP's Vroom Building, for the mentally ill. He had been elected as the president of the Prisoner's Council, and had convinced inmates to voluntarily turn in weapons. He also was coordinating efforts to increase safety with the prison guards' union, and had regional sociologists coming in to assist in making the prison a safer, more progressive place. For that, the prison administration deemed him a threat, and put him in a tiny dark cell in total isolation for 91 days, before a federal court ruled the prison was wrong. (Another federal court awarded Carter damages for this, amounting to $30 a day for those 91 days in isolation.)

What happens to the least in society eventually happens to others. Susan Lindauer was found guilty of "thought crimes," as surely as the Hurricane was.

[puebloknot]

23. KICK!!! Good that you're advocating for her. Scary as all hell. nt