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

by Susan Lindauer

  As for post traumatic stress, psychiatry might have clarified the impact of chronic fatigue on my life after 9/11, and how exhaustion delayed my understanding of the nuances of White House policy on Iraq. On the other hand, it might not have mattered. After 9/11, Republicans obfuscated their intentions on Iraq. They had a secret agenda that they chose not to share with anyone—certainly not a Peace Asset opposed to sanctions and War engaged in bi-weekly dialogue with diplomats from the Iraqi Embassy.

  Psychiatry could contribute no real understanding of that dynamic— except to explain that I was too exhausted to figure it out for myself, without somebody telling me directly. And nobody did.

  Once I met Dr. Drob for our first meeting on January 18, I saw that he could offer no insight to my stress after 9/11.

  I’m convinced Dr. Drob recognized it, too, which explains why the evaluation was so perfunctory. After the Rorschach ink blot test, he left my attorney’s office straight away, and I headed home to Maryland— a huge waste of driving time.

  Psychiatry appeared to be dead on arrival.

  Then, on February 10, 2005, the Justice Department hosted that “secret attorney debriefing,” as evidenced by the non-disclosure agreement.367

  Low and behold, psychiatry hurled its ugly weight onto my case.

  Three weeks later, on February 28, 2005, Dr. Drob issued an extraordinary report, declaring me “incompetent to stand trial.”368

  Welcome to the New Psychiatry!

  A declaration of insanity would have required evidence to substantiate the “diagnosis,” and there was none. But incompetence?

  Dr. Drob offered the most sparse and perverse logic to justify his findings:369

  “Ms. Lindauer insists that she does not want to proceed with an insanity defense, and insists that her lawyer follow up leads and witnesses that will demonstrate (1) that she did not receive the alleged moneys, (2) that she was an extremely important intelligence asset working for the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] and CIA. It is Ms. Lindauer’s insistence upon her relationship to CIA handler, Dr. Fuisz that is apparently frustrating counsel’s efforts to provide her with a viable defense.”

  “It is not simply Ms. Lindauer’s refusal to go along with counsel’s suggestion of pursuing a psychological defense in this case that renders her incompetent.”

  “It is rather Ms. Lindauer’s insistence that counsel pursue witnesses and leads that may make her, by reason of mental illness, incapable of effectively cooperating with counsel in her own defense, and which is apparently actually impeding counsel in preparing a viable defense.”370

  That was Drob’s “medical diagnosis:” My desire to authenticate the facts of my life through highly credible, independent sources and alibi evidence qualified as a “major psychological impairment” that rendered me “unfit to stand trial.”

  Put another way, my desire to prove my innocence qualified as a mental defect.

  Now I would say that’s crazy.

  It’s also bloody well unconstitutional. You can’t deny somebody a trial on the grounds that she has asked for a trial. That’s legally absurd.

  Yet that’s how psychiatry attacked me.

  Months later, when I finally received a copy of Drob’s report, I was struck by the undertones of sexism, ignoring the history of women’s contributions to intelligence work, dating back to World War II. The idea of a woman engaging in anti-terrorism was apparently beyond Drob’s “reality consensus.” So he cited his psychiatry credentials as proof that it’s impossible for a woman to perform this work— A ludicrous supposition.

  Otherwise, Drob offered no explanation for the disparity with Dr. Taddesseh’s observations that I suffered “no symptoms of mental defect” in the previous twelve months.

  Drob had copies of those monthly reports. He ignored all of it.

  A year later Judge Mukasey would call a special court meeting, demanding an explanation for that discrepancy.371 Unhappily, by then, our “learned professor” from Fielding Graduate University had done his worst damage. And it would be savage.

  No, “Dr.” Drob’s degree in psychiatry was supposed to suffice for Judge Mukasey to accept his opinion as “scientific fact.” And so, in contradiction to multiple witness statements, a mediocre Rorschach ink blot test, and a short conversation that manifested no emotional upset of any kind, Drob concluded that I was “unable to assist in my Defense.”

  Strikingly, I was not allowed to know that Dr. Drob’s evaluation was finished, or what it contained. I was not allowed to review it, or provide corrections and clarifications. For months and months I had no idea that Drob had already told the Court I was “unfit for Trial.” Talkin continued to promise we would go to Trial, as I urgently demanded.

  Truly I believe that “secret attorney debriefing” at the Justice Department marked the turning point.

  Interestingly enough, Drob’s “diagnosis” of incompetence matched up precisely to complaints by Senator McCain, Republican leaders (and a lot of Democrats) on Capitol Hill at that very moment. Congress was hard at work on CNN and Fox News, bashing Assets for failing to build options to War, or correct faulty assumptions in war planning— all the things I was indicted for doing. According to Congress, Assets provided wrongful assessments throughout the intelligence process. The “incompetence of Assets” had thrust our nation into the abyss.

  Dr. Drob’s evaluation lined up perfectly with that Republican message, though surely my actions rebutted their complaints.

  All of my bona fides, my hard-won achievements, got cast aside in preference for Dr. Drob’s fanciful inventions about my personality and private life— which were suspiciously non-specific—and unsupported by real life events.

  Dr. Drob constructed a whole new reality, contradicting all facts.

  And it happened within three weeks of that “classified debriefing” at the Justice Department.

  “It was a game play straight out of the Cold War, a strategy that paralleled the psychiatric abuse of writers and intellectuals in the old Soviet Union,” said Brian Shaughnessy, my brilliant Washington attorney who replaced Talkin after Carswell. “That’s what struck me the first time I heard Susan’s story. And that’s why I took her case. Her story reminded me of the “Gulag Archipelago” [by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn] and “Darkness at Noon” [by Arthur Koestler].

  Indeed, the similarities to Soviet psychiatry are frightening Westerners are prone to forget that right up to the fall of Communism in 1988, one-third of all Soviet dissidents and intellectuals arrested for “anti- government activities,” got locked up in mental institutions. Soviet psychiatry took up the government’s cause, declaring that opposition to Soviet policy indicated serious mental disease. “Correction” required electro- shock and heavy dosages of psycho-tropic drugs, forcibly administered as treatment for what Moscow hailed as “sluggish schizophrenia.”

  Soviet psychiatrists admitted that most intellectuals and dissidents showed no outward symptoms of “mental disease” or behavioral defects.

  The Director of the Moscow School of Psychiatry, Professor Andrei Snezhnevsky, who invented the diagnosis for “sluggish schizophrenia,” agreed that most “patients” functioned normally in a social sense. Their “symptoms” typically resembled a “mild neurosis.” The tell- tale indicators were “paranoia and grandiosity.” For example, individuals with paranoid symptoms overvalued the importance of their contributions to society, and believed the Soviet government was persecuting them. They exhibited grandiose ideas for reforming society, including “reform delusions,” the “struggle for the truth,” and “the idolization of perseverance.”

  Though these political dissidents functioned normal in every way, Dr. Snezhnevsky insisted that he and his Soviet colleagues were justified in forcibly treating them to stop the progression of their “mental illness,” which would be observable later on, if left untreated.

  And so these brave men and women, who embraced freedom from Soviet oppression, were no longer regarded as “activi
sts” or “dissidents.” They were degraded as “patients.”

  After several years locked up on a psych ward, tyrannized by political conformity and lobotomized by psychotropic drugs and electro-shock not surprisingly, many Soviet intellectuals could be persuaded by doctors and frightened family members to reconsider their “anti- social” criticism of government policy. Once Soviet dissidents learned to agree with the government, they would be judged “mentally healthy” again.

  Of course, a psychiatric record diminishing their credibility would now exist. If that person ever “relapsed” into anti-social behavior criticizing the government, he would be picked up by “concerned” authorities once more.

  That’s what the Justice Department planned for me.

  It’s shocking for the novice who expects psychiatry to employ some rational methodology and integrity. However, according to the constructs of psychiatry as defined by Dr. Drob and others like him, reality does not depend on external factors and measures. It depends on the interpretation of a psychiatrist.

  Factual evidence does not have to be considered at all.

  But that would not end the debate. Unhappily for Dr. Drob’s brand of psychiatry, factual evidence and witness testimonials would surface non-stop to repudiate his outrageous allegations.

  The horrors of my case would demonstrate beyond any doubt that psychiatry is neither medical, nor scientific. It cannot survive the most basic scrutiny or “reality testing.” On the contrary, it requires the suspension of reality in order to gain credence. It is wide open for corruption.

  Once reality comes into play, psychiatry falls apart.

  So it happened to Dr. Drob.

  My Achilles Heel

  Imagine the absurdity of my situation.

  A year after my indictment, I was gunning for trial, totally ignorant of my attorney’s collusion with the Justice Department. I was fully innocent of the various methods of corrupting a psychiatric evaluation, or that the easiest way to manipulate the Court, apparently, involves declaring a defendant “unfit to stand trial.”

  That could mean anything.

  Most ironically of all, since I had no idea what my attorney was up to, I proceeded full steam to help prepare my defense. I was too poor to hire a paralegal. So I rolled up my sleeves, and applied my best efforts where I could. Mostly I wrote background papers on witnesses. I also culled computer records to establish alibis for dates that I was not in New York eating cheese burgers with Iraqi diplomat, Salih Mahmoud. I persevered in ignorance, while Talkin promised that he was still preparing for trial.

  And I found the alibis!

  I gained such expertise as a paralegal, in fact, that later on, I helped my second attorney, Brian Shaughnessy submit a legal brief to the United States Supreme Court for another client. If my skills are good enough for the filing protocols of the Supreme Court, I’d say they’re good enough for the Southern District of New York any day.

  Alas, according to psychiatry, the very fact that I pushed Talkin to “interview witnesses and follow leads” confirmed the diagnosis of my “mental defect,” which rendered me “incompetent to stand trial.”

  The only way they could advance this crazy scheme was to keep me ignorant of their actions—which they did for several more months.

  I trudged on in the dark. Yet something didn’t feel right. Friends started asking questions about my rights to a speedy trial.

  And I began to worry that not a single one of my key witnesses had been interviewed. That gnawed at my gut. You see, I had just one Achilles heel, but I recognized it was a critical flaw in my defense. I had a public attorney. Talkin was over-worked and underpaid for such a complex case. Most worrisome, he lacked any basic understanding of how the intelligence community operates, and showed no inclination to learn.

  Aggravating his ignorance, Talkin had bad instincts. Briefly, Talkin hired a criminal investigator in New York who traveled to Washington exactly once— on the night of the 2004 election.372 A lot of my witnesses are tied to national politics, and probably stayed up late into the night watching election results. Most took the next day off. Talkin’s investigator got frustrated, and left town that afternoon. Then he refused to drive back to Washington. Talkin shrugged it off. That hurt us.

  Other simple things got messed up. The wrong phone company got subpoenaed for calling records.373 Restaurant receipts in New York were date and time stamped. If phone records could prove I was at home in Maryland —not eating cheeseburgers in New York— we could argue for dismissal of the minor charges.

  Makes sense, right?

  Through my own efforts, I’d struck out four days already. We had five more to go. Then I would be home free! Phone records were logical and simple.

  In Talkin’s mind, it didn’t matter which phone company got the subpoena, because they would all possess the same records for all customers in the Washington Metro area. Nine months passed, while he haggled with the wrong phone company,374 ignoring my urgent pleas to go back to Judge Mukasey for the correct subpoena. Unhappily, by the time Talkin acknowledged his mistake, Starpower had merged with a new phone company, and older calling records got erased. It was a great loss for my defense.

  Some of the mistakes were more outrageous.

  Talkin subpoenaed the Defense Intelligence Agency for all records in my file. Yet he made no challenge when the agency limited its search to “unclassified” documents” in “a two hour search window.”375 (See Appendix.)

  Like that would do any good!

  We know this, because the Defense Intelligence Agency was required to outline the scope of its research in answering the subpoena. So we have hard documentation of their actions. According to their communications with Talkin, all “Top Secret,” “Secret” and “Confidential” documents got excluded from the search.

  A “two hour search” of “unclassified documents”—only— was deemed sufficient to pull out all relevant information pertaining to my contributions to anti-terrorism from 1993 until 2003, covering Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria/Hezbollah, Yemen and Malaysia.

  That two hour window covered my warning about the 1993 World Trade Center attack; the Lockerbie negotiations with Libya ; the Lockerbie Trial; the bombing of the USS Cole; the Oklahoma City Bombing; my team’s early investigation of Osama bin Laden, right through our team’s 9/11 warnings, and efforts to secure Iraq’s cooperation after 9/11.

  I’m not the slightest bit surprised that “unclassified” records turned up nothing from Defense Intelligence. All of my work would have been “Secret” or above. “Unclassified” was probably the only category that would be worthless. It would yield nothing.

  And what about this two hour search? Did Defense Intelligence seriously expect to perform a thorough review of all those terrorism cases in a single afternoon?

  That was a joke. Realistically, it should have taken a whole legal team a couple of weeks to pull everything for our subpoena.

  Yet Talkin registered no protest when Defense Intelligence demurred from a more thorough inspection of its files—or that the subpoena instructions stipulated “verification is unnecessary.”

  There was another ugly twist. The Defense Intelligence search was conducted on February 4, 2005—one week prior to the classified debriefing on February 10. That’s the “secret meeting” at the Justice Department that culminated in the “secret agreement” to deny me a trial.

  Drob’s declaration of my “incompetence” was filed February 28.

  And the dagger drops.

  A Few Good Men

  Ah, but you see, there’s one critical factor in any Intelligence War: My enemies had power over their actions. They had no power over mine.

  I would not play their game. I would run their blockade. That’s what any good Asset does.

  Right at that moment, Providence smiled with a true gift for my case. My own extraordinary and beloved uncle, Ted Lindauer.

  Ted has a deep care for family. He’s got four children of his own, and six step-childre
n. And he would go through any sort of hell to protect all of them. Actually, they’re upstanding and educated professionals. I got into more trouble than all of them combined. Yet Ted made a special effort to protect me, too.

  Blessedly, Thayer “Ted” Lindauer has also practiced commercial and civil law for 40 years. As a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School years ago, he’s got the legal savvy and brilliance in the law to work his way through any crisis situation, which mine was quickly becoming.

  I relied on Ted’s tenacity and dedication many times before this nightmare ended. At critical moments, he would appear and take action that would save me. He would go to a great deal of trouble on my behalf, when Talkin could think of nothing to help me.

  It’s almost eerie how Ted Lindauer arrived on the scene exactly as my court-appointed attorney cut a deal with the Justice Department. My prosecutor, Edward O’Callaghan, had just demanded that I meet his psychiatrist, Dr. Stuart Kleinman. And I was pushing Talkin to get on the ball interviewing my witnesses— which had not occurred a year after my arrest.

  Regarding psychiatry, Ted told me not to worry. No matter what psychiatry hoped to accomplish, I had the right to a hearing. I had the right to call rebuttal witnesses, and submit evidence of my own to the court. That year’s worth of session notes from Dr. Taddesseh in Maryland started to look awfully appealing.

  More worrisome, several witnesses voiced alarm that Talkin had snubbed efforts to set up phone interviews.376 More than once Talkin looked me straight in the eye, and swore that my star witnesses from the Lockerbie Trial never responded to our outreach. Unhappily for him, MacKechnie had copied me on every email.377 So the bald faced lie got smashed at once. Nevertheless, Talkin insulted a top international criminal attorney willing to travel at his own expense to New York for my trial, possibly waiting several days to testify on my behalf. It was an act of extraordinary generosity, and Sam Talkin threw it back at him.