Susan Lindauer was arrested on March 11, 2004 by five FBI agents for conspiracy, acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government and taking money from a government that supports terrorism (Iraq.) Susan was arrested with two co-conspirators, Raed Rolan Al-Anbuke and his brother Wisam Al-Anbuke. http://www.usdoj.gov/...
Almost five years later Susan Lindauer has been declared incompetent to stand trial and her case has been dropped. This after prosecutorial attempts to have psychotrophic drugs administered to her by government physicians for diagnoses made by court ordered evaluations that Lindauer's attorney refused. http://www.dailykos.com/...
By the way, the two men indicted along with Susan Lindauer are the sons of Iraq's former liason with U.N. weapon's inspectors. For a person ruled delusional by court psychologists, Susan Lindauer has some pretty real co-conspirators.
Lindauer was arrested about a year after dropping this letter: http://www.cicentre.com/... off to her cousin, Andy Card. In the letter Susan implores her cousin to intervene on behalf of the Iraqi government in order to avert war and says:
I have worked so hard to secure cooperation with the weapon's inspections so that a confrontation could be avoided.
It was one of ten that she had sent to her cousin and in it she also indicates that the Iraqi government is ready to make concessions on weapons inspections.
Lindauer was held in a federal mental facility in Texas for several years where this was the impression a friend had of her mental state:
Friends say her mental state seems to have worsened during incarceration since October. "It's not clear when she's getting out now," says J.B. Fields, a federal employee with a low-level security clearance who rents a basement apartment from Lindauer at her Takoma Park, Md., home, and who talks with her regularly. "She has her good days and her bad days," he says, based on conversation when Lindauer calls from Texas. "On days when she gets emotional or scared, everybody's evil, you
know."
http://www.seattleweekly.com/...
So who is Susan Lindauer? There are a lot of different opinions out there, and while I read several accounts of her madness, there are a number of things that bother me about these. For example, if she were mad, why did Card report her and how did she end up being arrested for acting as an unregistered agent of Iraq? Wouldn't it have been simpler to tell your boss (Dubya) that your cousin was batshit nuts and maybe get your family in on an intervention? Instead there was a major FBI investigation. A reporter that did a piece for the NY times kind of sums up where I am right about now in my opinion of Ms. Lindauer:
It is possible that Lindauer's account is delusional. It is also possible that Lindauer's account is accurate. Iraq certainly tried to use other back channels to try to reach U.S. officials, including a Lebanese-American businessman, Imad Hage, who conveyed messages to Richard Perle in the run-up to the war. For her part, Lindauer says that she was unaware that her activities required her to register as a lobbyist -- a formality that, to her mind, seemed quite absurd. ''Everything that I did that was quote 'lobbying,''' she said, ''I was giving to the chief of staff of the White House.''
http://query.nytimes.com/...
Lindauer's life up until the arrest certainly doesn't give the impression of a person operating in psychoses. She is the daughter of John Lindauer, a former Republican candidate for governor of Alaska. She majored in economics in college and worked for the United States Congress as well as several media outlets as follows
11 March to 14 May 2002: press secretary for Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.)
- Executive producer for political affairs at Channel 28 in Washington, DC
- press secretary for former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun (D-Ill.), who recently ran as a 2004 Democratic Presidential candidate
- press secretary for former Rep. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), before he became a senator
- press secretary for Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.)
Sept 1990-August 1991: Part-time, temporary reporter associate at U.S. News & World Report
3 August 1987-25 July 1989: Editorial writer for Everett Herald newspaper
27 April-17 July 1987: temporary, full-time reporter on the metro desk of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper
- Fortune magazine
http://www.cicentre.com/...
A long time back dKos diarist DHinMI diaried about the case here: http://www.dailykos.com/...
and emptywheel blogged it a few days ago commenting:
Just five days before the end of his term, Bush's DOJ has dropped all charges against Andy Card's cousin--Susan Lindauer--whom they had accused of being an unregistered agent for Saddam Hussein's Iraq. By dropping the charges at this time, the Administration:
Prevents Lindauer from proving at a trial that she was an intelligence asset working on behalf of the United States (though she says she'll sue for damages)
Declines to try to prove that she was working on behalf of Saddam--and not the US--when she warned against invading Iraq
Succeeds in preventing embarrassing information (both because of the link to Card, and because it included solid warnings against Iraq) from coming out while Bush was still in office
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/...
I learned about the entire case tonight in this diary http://www.dailykos.com/...
I need to thank dharmafarmer, halcyon, and schpilk for talking me through my initial reactions to the story, and the original diarist, gkfahnbulleh for making me aware of it.
Something is not right about all of this. There are a lot of links in the comments to gkfanbulleh's diary that are more reputable than the original "scopes" link posted. See also emptywheel's diary and the legal documents referred to by dharmafarmer.
I just thought it important to get this out into the community before the Bush administration slips off with perhaps some of our interest in pursuing possible leads that could aid in their indictments.
And I'll leave you with two of the most chilling excerpts I read about Susan Lindauer tonight:
In October 2001, according to the federal indictment, she met with officers of Iraqi intelligence in New York. On Dec. 2, Lindauer wrote to Card again, to convey further news: The Iraqis were willing to permit the return of weapons inspectors and offered other concessions. ''These are not intended to limit the universe of possibilities, Andy,'' she wrote
One conversation John had with his sister in the summer of 2001 stuck in his mind for a different reason. ''So she goes, 'Listen, the gulf war isn't over,''' he told me over dinner at a sushi place on the Sunset Strip. '''There are plans in effect right now. They will be raining down on us from the skies.''' His sister told him that Lower Manhattan would be destroyed. ''And I was like, Yeah, whatever,'' he continued. When he woke up six weeks later to the news that two planes had crashed into the twin towers, and watched as ash settled on the window ledge of his sublet in Brooklyn, he had a dislocating sense of having his reality replaced by Susan's strange world -- an experience he would have again when he learned that his sister had been arrested by the F.B.I.
Parke Godfrey, a close friend of Lindauer's for the last 15 years, is a professor of computer science at York University in Ontario. He says that Lindauer warned him not to take a job at N.Y.U. the summer before the Sept. 11 attacks. That Lindauer's outlandish predictions actually came true, Godfrey suggests, further encouraged the exalted sense of personal mission that brought her to Washington in the first place
http://query.nytimes.com/...