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

by Susan Lindauer

  Copyright © 2010 Susan Lindauer

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1453642757

  ISBN-13: 9781453642757

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62345-888-1

  Any views, commentary or opinions expressed

  in this book, or description of events

  are those of the author.

  They do not necessarily represent the views, opinions or commentary

  at Create Space, its parent company or affiliates,

  or any of its employees

  CONTENTS

  Deepest Thanks

  Prologue by Brian Shaughnessy, attorney U.S. vs. Lindauer

  1 The War on Truth

  2 Advance Warnings About 9/11

  3 Peace Asset

  4 A Secret Day in the Life of an Asset

  5 Iraq’s Peace Overtures to Europe and the United States

  6 9/11: A Pattern of Command Negligence with Michael Collins

  7 September 11, 2001

  8 Iraq’s Cooperation with 9/11 Investigation

  9 Iraq’s Contribution to 9/11 Investigation Part 2

  10 Blessed Are the Peacemakers

  Part 2: When Truth Becomes Treason

  11 The Old Potomac Two Step

  12 The Battle For Peace

  13 The Last Days

  14 Good Night, Saigon…

  15 Warning. This Message Contains Democracy

  16 The Crying Game

  17 The Patriot Act

  18 The Case of the Missing Trial

  19 Secret Debriefings and the “New Psychiatry”

  (A Little Intelligence War)

  20 Incompetent to Stand Trial

  21 The Bright Secret

  22 Carswell Prison

  23 If at First You Don’t Succeed, Shoot the Hostage

  24 Corruption at Carswell

  25 Prison Diary

  26 The Friendly Skies of “Con Air”

  27 Extreme Prejudice

  28 Metropolitan Correctional Center

  29 The Last Man

  30 Illegitimus Non Carborundem Est

  31 American Cassandra

  32 Vindication

  33 “Off with Her Head,” the Red Queen Said

  34 Dialogue! Dialogue! And Democracy!

  Affidavit of Parke Godfrey

  Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer

  Appendix

  End Notes

  DEEPEST THANKS

  My life has been blessed by a number of individuals who profoundly impacted the course of my direction and adventures. For every burden I have faced, there has been a partner in fortune to master the challenge.

  All my thanks go to my beloved friend and companion, JB Fields, for his courage to fight unbeatable forces. To activist Janet Phelan, blog journalist extraordinaire Michael Collins, and all time best radio host Michael Herzog, for championing my story and defending Constitutional liberties for all Americans. You are truly awake and vigilant.

  To my heroic Uncle Ted Lindauer, for fighting bare knuckled to win my release from Carswell. To Brian Shaughnessy and Tom Mattingly, for recognizing the strengths of my legal defense and carrying my dirtied banner when others dismissed my claims. To Parke Godfrey and Kelly O’Meara, for daring to speak Inconvenient Truths. To the women of M-1 at Carswell—Nancy Zaia, Sharon, Jessica, Renee, Toie and Karen—for reminding me always of the power of transcendence. To Sarah Yamasaki for singing on the rooftop of M.C.C. as if all of our lives depended on your songs—which they did.

  Above all, I send my greatest love to Paul Hoven and Dr. Richard Fuisz, whose exuberance and vision launched me on the greatest quest of discovery to create my own life. Whatever happened afterwards, these men encouraged my passion and endurance for almost a decade, challenging me to stand strong for my values and face what I must.

  To you most of all, for sharing my greatest adventures, Carpe diem!

  FORWARD

  My law firm defended Ms. Susan Lindauer against federal charges of acting as an unregistered Iraqi Agent in conspiracy with the Iraqi Intelligence Service. I assure you that Ms. Lindauer’s story is shocking, but true. It’s an important story of this new political age, post-9/11.

  As her attorney, I maintained very high legal standards for validating Ms. Lindauer’s claims that she worked as a U.S. Intelligence Asset, supervised by members of the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency. Before agreeing to represent her, I took steps to corroborate her story through independent sources that I considered to be extremely high caliber. Those included former Congressional staff, international journalists, and several U.S. and Scottish attorneys involved with the Lockerbie Trial at Camp Zeist. I know some of these people socially and professionally. Ms. Lindauer’s story checked out. She has an extraordinary personal history, and I believe it’s true.

  Vetting her story was much simplified by the extensive records available in her legal discovery. Those included original documents and transcripts from FBI wire taps of 28,000 phone calls; 8,000 emails; and hundreds of captured faxes that are date and time stamped to prove transmission. When, for example, Ms. Lindauer claims that her CIA handler, Dr. Richard Fuisz, paid her $2,500 in October, 2001 for her work on the 9/11 investigation, she’s got the personal check to prove it. When Ms. Lindauer claims to have delivered papers on Iraq’s probable lack of illegal weapons to the home of Secretary of State Colin Powell, who lived next door to Dr. Fuisz, she’s got the FBI photo copy of the manila envelope to vouch that she did it. She’s also got copies of the original papers with handwritten notes delivered to Secretary Powell the week before his speech at the United Nations, provided by the FBI for her prosecution.

  Her portfolio smartly repudiates claims that Intelligence Assets made no attempt to correct faulty intelligence on Capitol Hill before the War. Indeed, FBI records show that she worked night and day around the clock to do just that. When Republican leaders decided to invent a new story about the 9/11 warnings, Pre-War Intelligence and Iraq’s contribution to the 9/11 investigation, Ms. Lindauer’s activism and her reputation for truth-telling, vis a vis Lockerbie, got in their way. For the deception to succeed, they had to take her down.

  In my opinion as her attorney, Ms. Lindauer was always competent to stand trial, only the Justice Department wanted to avoid embarrassing revelations from her case.

  Brian Shaughnessy July 1, 2010

  CHAPTER ONE:

  THE WAR ON TRUTH

  He who tells history must tell it for all, not only for himself.

  –Arab saying

  “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought

  to the bidding of the leaders.

  That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and

  denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

  It works the same in any country.”

  –Herman Goering. The Nuremberg Trials 1946

  “Hey kid, remember— When they come to kill you, scream your head off.”

  It was an eerie premonition, those last words by my intelligence handler, Paul Hoven, in the doorway of his apartment. Or perhaps it was a matter of fate, predestined and unalterable. Had we all seen the eventuality of this day and laughed our way to the other side of its meaning? Like an outlaw from the old West who understands that eventually he’s got to hang for robbing those trains. Or a spy who knows his life has memorialized too many inconvenient truths.

  Yet when the day arrived, it caught me fully off guard. I heard the hea
vy pounding on my door early that morning. I wrapped myself in a bathrobe and hurried to the window. A crowd of men in flak jackets had gathered on my front porch. I could see more federal agents in the yard.

  “Susan Lindauer— FBI. Open the door. We have a warrant for your arrest.”

  For a few crucial moments, I was too stunned to act.

  “Open this door immediately. This is the FBI.”

  Actually I couldn’t. Quite mysteriously the door jamb had broken about three weeks earlier. The door swung on the air, so that I had no choice but to barricade it shut with plywood and nails.1 Among friends I speculated that federal agents cracked the door frame during one of those warrantless searches on the Patriot Act that Congress was so jazzed about.

  Suddenly my paranoia did not appear so irrational after all. I pointed to the other side of my house, and started to back out of my living room. I needed to get dressed.

  That made them very, very angry.

  “WE ARE THE FBI. OPEN THIS DOOR OR WE WILL BREAK IT DOWN.”

  “What? You already broke it. You’re going to break it again?” I shook my head at the FBI agents staring back through my window. “No! You have to come to the side door.”

  I turned on my heels and fled. A stampede of agents raced to the door off my bedroom, as I cautiously pulled it open. A whole team of feds forced their way inside. Now I started shaking.

  “What exactly are you doing here? May I see some identification?”

  “Susan Lindauer, I am Special Agent Chmiel. You are under arrest on the Patriot Act. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say, can and will be used against you in a federal court of law—”2

  The FBI’s presence in my bedroom hit me like a dirty punch in the gut. At the mention of the Patriot Act, however, I knew this was serious trouble, and it could be scary trouble. Still, I had no idea that my arrest was connected to Iraq or my Pre-War Intelligence activities. I had no inkling what illegal actions the government had clocked against me. I was waking up to make coffee. I was not a bank robber, a drug dealer, or a murderer. I had a couple of minor speeding violations. That’s it.

  My arrest would prove distinctive in two critical ways.

  First, I was one of only three U.S. Assets covering the Iraqi Embassy at the United Nations before the War, granting me vast primary knowledge of Pre-War Intelligence as a direct participant in some of the events. I would soon discover that all three of us got arrested as “Iraqi agents” when Congress and the White House decided to cook the intelligence books.

  More notoriously, after Jose Padilla, I was now distinguished as the second non-Arab Americans to discover the slippery and treacherous legal terrain of the Patriot Act. By invoking the Patriot Act against me, the Justice Department used the same tools to smash political dissension against Republican war policy that Congress enacted to break terrorists. The message was simple. Oppose the Grand Old Party and you become an “Enemy of the State.”

  It was especially ironic because my line of specialty— for almost a decade— was anti-terrorism.

  The FBI hustled me to a sedan in handcuffs, and we drove off towards Baltimore, gambling it would be out of range of the Washington media. I kept it light, joking about the fingerprint machine that scanned thumb prints straight onto a computer screen. Pretty cool technology, I guffawed. I was waiting for the punch line, confident that somebody extremely high up would quickly receive an angry phone call, telling the FBI they’d made a hugely embarrassing mistake. Obviously they didn’t know who I was. I tried to keep the mood friendly, no hard feelings when they got the order to release me. I was sure the situation would change momentarily. I could be magnanimous for an hour or so.

  Keep dreamin’ baby.

  My expectations changed radically and abruptly when Special Agent Chmiel sat me down with a copy of my full indictment.3 His finger shook slightly as he pointed to the bottom line: 25 years in prison under Federal Sentencing Guidelines. (Mandatory sentencing got set aside and reduced to “recommendations” by the U.S. Supreme Court4 in December, 2004, nine months after my arrest). A powerful surge of horror exploded in my heart. I stared numb and disbelieving at the rundown of the charges, trying to determine who the hell had ordered my arrest. I felt a jolt like a heart attack when I realized that everybody I ever trusted had betrayed me on a massive scale.

  Stunned, I demanded to know what exactly I had done wrong? The FBI Agent replied glibly that my attorney would explain my criminal actions later. Need I say, that was hardly satisfactory after suggesting I might spend 25 years in federal prison for violating the Patriot Act—a 7,000 page document that I happened to know nobody on Capitol Hill actually read before voting to approve.

  Almost immediately my arrest began to expose the dilemma for defendants on the Patriot Act. If you rob a bank, or smuggle drugs into the U.S., or commit a violent robbery, then the accused person can recognize what actions constitute that particular crime. When a person gets indicted on the Patriot Act, what does that actually mean? What triggers the criminal action which the Patriot Act seeks to punish? I had no idea. The FBI Agent could not explain it either. That struck me as grossly unfair. I mean, if you’re going to spend 25 years in prison, you have a reasonable right to know why.

  The government’s position was not strengthened by the disingenuous nature of the few specific actions detailed by the Justice Department. For example, I was formally accused of “Organizing Resistance to the United States”5 in Iraq. My mind flashed back to the previous summer, and my brief encounter with an under-cover FBI agent, presented as a “Libyan Agent” in the indictment, a false flag to inflame the media. Quite the contrary, I recognized he was some form of American Intelligence—and teasingly, I called him out the way that spooks do. We have our ways of letting each other know that we know, even if someone’s on cover.

  And what plot did we hatch that posed such grave threat to the Occupation? Why, we discussed the critical importance of promoting free elections and free political parties in Iraq, and how Iraqi detainees should not suffer torture or sexual abuse, and should have access to attorneys to protest their detentions by American soldiers.6 Here the Republican leadership was bragging about the U.S. liberation of Baghdad, while I faced years in prison for supporting genuine democratic reforms and human rights inside the “New Iraq.” It screamed hypocrisy.

  Another federal agent interrupted the conversation. They were ready to take me to Court. He warned that a small group of journalists waited outside the building for my perp walk. I would be photographed in handcuffs on my way to Court.

  I saw Paul Hoven’s face framed tight in his doorway that last time we said goodbye— forever, though I didn’t know it yet. The smiles and warmth had gone. I saw him deadly serious now. And I heard him again:

  Scream your head off, Susan!

  Federal agents shoved open the door of the FBI Baltimore office. A huddle of local journalists with a couple of TV cameras rushed into position:

  Scream!

  I took a deep breath, holding it until I got directly in front of them. Then I shouted:

  “I am an Anti-War Activist and I am innocent!” I yelled. “I have done more against terrorism than anybody. Everything I have done was always good for the security of the United States and good for security in the Middle East.”7

  The FBI Agents grabbed me from behind, and shoved me faster towards a black sedan. They thrust me in the backseat and slammed the door. I gazed out the window into the horrified eyes of a camera man, who followed us when I cried out.

  For one moment, one photo-journalist recognized that something terribly wrong was happening in America. He got a glimpse of the truth, but it was enough. Television footage of my arrest beamed around the world. I know from friends in Canada, France and Taiwan who saw it. He took my story to the White House door, summoning the Washington and international press corps en masse. For one moment, a single camera man showed the White House the force that journalistic freedom can unleash as a check on t
yranny.

  For one moment, we almost won.

  Much later media pundits would decry the administration’s policy of crushing dissent in the intelligence community, attacking the patriotism of individuals who opposed the Republican War policy in Iraq. Unhappily, those pundits saw nothing awkward or contradictory about Capitol Hill’s practice of systematically tearing down the CIA to take the blame for “faulty” pre- war intelligence. The Intelligence Community would be demoralized for years afterwards. The GOP would leave it gutted in ashes.

  On the morning of my arrest, I saw with total clarity that I was the first casualty of the Republican War on Truth. I recognized that my indictment was a political smoke-screen to shut me up, because I possessed first-hand knowledge of events that Republican leaders desperately wanted to hide from the American public. Even so, I had no idea how far afield of our Constitution they would go to protect their grip on power.

  What those TV cameras captured in their sound-bite was the head-on collision of my double life as a clandestine, back-channel Asset in counter-terrorism for the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency—and my public life as an Anti-War activist-as seen by friends, neighbors and family. In truth, I was both women. On that fateful morning, I had no idea that construct of duality in my life would prove more difficult for the Court to understand than the prospect of my innocence. Explaining that duality would become my hardest battle. On the morning of my arrest, I had no idea how difficult or frightening that fight would become.

  My FBI Agents sped off to the Federal Courthouse in Baltimore. Shaken by my outburst, they hardly spoke on the drive. I was dumped unceremoniously in the custody of court bailiffs to wait for a court-appointed attorney to fight for my bail. Meanwhile, the Feds skulked off to devise a new strategy for containing the GOP’s “Susan Lindauer problem,” which was already backfiring on the White House and Capitol Hill.

  In a tiny holding cage, I examined the federal indictment more closely, while I waited for the extradition hearing that would transfer my case to Chief Justice Michael B. Mukasey in the Southern District of New York in Manhattan.