EXTREME PREJUDICE:
THE TERRIFYING STORY OF
THE PATRIOT ACT & THE
COVER UPS OF 911 AND IRAQ
BY SUSAN LINDAUER
CHAPTER 25:
PRISON
DIARY
Courage is resistance to
fear, and the mastery of
fear—
Not the absence of fear.
“What are you saying? They lied? What do you mean? They fucking lied?”
“They can’t lie to a federal judge! That’s perjury! That’s a federal crime. They know it’s a crime. Half the prisoners here got arrested for making false statements to the FBI. The other half got sentenced for obstruction of justice. They know they can’t do that.”
“That’s right, ” Ted Lindauer told me. “People lie in court all the time.”
“Yeah, criminals lie. Not staff for the Bureau of Prisons! They’re supposed to be the ones telling the truth.”
It was February 3rd . My 120 days were up. I was supposed to board an airplane in Dallas to fly home to Maryland. I was practically hysterical as Uncle Ted gave me the low down on my release, which Carswell had delayed “indefinitely.” 481
That wasn’t the agreement. Granted, they cut the deal without my knowledge or consent. However, it looked pretty good that morning. In exchange for overlooking the violation of my right to a hearing before detention, and my cooperation for the sake of “national security” the Prosecutor was supposed to drop the charges and send me home— not detain me “indefinitely!” That was the end game they sold to Judge Mukasey.
Worst yet, Carswell was arguing that I should be strapped to a gurney, and forcibly drugged with needle injections of Haldol, 482 until I stopped claiming that I worked as a “U.S. Intelligence Asset in anti-terrorism for Nine Years, ” 483 and that I warned about a major terrorist attack involving airplane hijackings and a strike on the World Trade Center throughout the spring and summer of 2001.
Carswell decreed it a “psychotic disorder, not otherwise specified.”
This attack came out of nowhere.
Or did it come straight from Republican headquarters? At that point, I had not seen Carswell’s report prepared by Dr. James Shadduck, but Ted had. Apparently, it carefully overlooked the unhappy truth that my story checked out in total. The report faithfully omitted critical acknowledgements that Shadduck himself had spoken with two witnesses, and fully authenticated the key structure of my history. 484 Documents in Maryland proved my CIA handler’s expertise on Iraq, including his Congressional testimony on Iraq’s SCUD Mobile Missile Launchers in the first Gulf War. 485, 486, 487
I checked out alright. Not a problem.
Dr. Shadduck had also spoken with Parke Godfrey, who provided critical corroboration of my 9/11 warnings. 488
Godfrey had promised to make sure Carswell understood he was repeating what he’d already told the FBI in Toronto in September, 2004. So the FBI and my prosecutor, Edward O’Callaghan, already knew it, too—a year before I got sent to Carswell Prison.
My insistence on pretrial validation had strategically removed “plausible deniability, ” whereby one party shields another from responsibility for their actions by withholding vital information. They couldn’t hide behind the pretence of ignorance—a favorite Washington trick.
I had blocked “deniability” from every angle.
Everybody understood I was telling the truth. The FBI. The U.S. Attorneys Office in New York. Uncle Ted. The hack psychiatrists at Carswell. They’d all verified it.
Distinctly, the only individual who had not verified my authenticity was Judge Mukasey. And he was forced to rely on the integrity of the Justice Department, which has a sworn obligation not to lie about such things to the Court.
Dr. Shadduck was on the inside of the cover up. He could see that Ferguson and Godfrey were eager to bring clarity to the legal confusion. At trial, there would be more high powered witnesses, who would expose more truth. In this pre-trial phase, however, Dr. Shadduck had more than sufficient validation for his purposes.
Knowing all of that, Shadduck deliberately structured his psych evaluation to suggest that no independent corroboration existed. In so doing, Carswell effectively falsified its psychiatric report to Judge Mukasey— who was also hearing the financial lawsuit by World Trade Center owner, Larry Silverstein. 489 And Carswell psychiatrists sought to forcibly drug a known Asset to stop me from saying that I was an Asset who warned about 9/11. 490
With a high enough dosage of psychotropic Haldol, Carswell argued I could be made to forget the details of my activities at the Iraqi Embassy, which contradicted the fanciful “truths” invented by Republican leaders, including my own dear cousin, Andy Card, Chief of Staff to President Bush.
As for “indefinite detention, ” Carswell argued that I should be locked in prison until whatever time psychiatrists could guarantee the “cure” had been effective. 491 Psych evaluations speculated this “cure” would require many years of detention, because my beliefs in my Asset work are so deeply ingrained in my psyche. (It ain’t easy to eradicate reality, even for psychiatry!)
If that’s not Soviet style revisionism, I don’t know what is. It’s something Stalin would have done in the Cold War to crush opponents and enforce political conformity. For sure, when O’Callaghan and Shadduck falsified that psych evaluation, they committed gross professional misconduct.
Vital exculpatory knowledge was withheld from the Court, which Judge Mukasey urgently “needed to know—”
For those outside the intelligence community, “need to know” status gets conferred when any individual, federal judge or not, risks making a decision that would damage the functioning of intelligence operations, or otherwise cause negative blowback on the Intelligence Community. The person “needs to know” to guide their actions, so they don’t do something incredibly stupid or dangerous.
Threatening to forcibly drug an Asset to “cure” her of knowing real intelligence would certainly qualify as a most obscene sort of mistake.
It rendered psychiatry an instrument of State Fascism.
And it put Judge Mukasey in the position of judicially endorsing a cover up of my team’s 9/11 warning and Iraqi Pre-War Intelligence—something he would never have done of his own volition.
O’Callaghan and Carswell didn’t stop to consider the consequences for Judge Mukasey's integrity. They only imagined that if they could forcibly administer enough psychotropic drugs, we could all lie about 9/11 and Iraq together!
They wanted to chemically lobotomize me. And they sought to compromise a senior federal Judge to do it.
Drugging was a political weapon, alright. And my prosecutor, O’Callaghan was nothing if not a political animal. He left the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York to become a top adviser to John McCain and Sarah Palin’s Presidential Campaign in 2008. 492 I could never forget— or forgive— that I got arrested 30 days after contacting McCain’s Senate office in Washington, asking to testify before the Presidential Commission on Pre-War Intelligence.
The next thing I know, I’m under arrest. What a coincidence that my Prosecutor worked for McCain at election time.
O’Callaghan now works at the Law Firm of Peabody Nixon, the haunts of former President Richard Nixon.
You can only imagine the horror that I experienced receiving this news. I was terrified beyond words. Ordinarily, “indefinite detention” implies the maximum prison sentence, 10 years in my case. Typically that’s how the Courts handle violent offenders who get declared incompetent. They get hit with the full sentence. It appeared the Bureau of Prisons wanted to test whether the Patriot Act could be categorized with other major crimes, pushing me into a permanent legal abyss.
On February 3rd , in a moment of blinding panic, I wasn’t sure what part of my situation was the worst— Getting stuck in prison indefinitely, without due process, because of a bogus psychiatric evaluation. Or getting threatened with forcible injections of Haldol throughout my incarceration.
I would have to say drugs tipped the balance.
Haldol was a rhinoceros tranquilizer. It’s a zombie drug that imitates the stonelike effects of Parkinson’s Disease. It kills all daily functioning. And they wanted to shoot me up like some street junkie.
Honestly, I would rather get waterboarded.
There was never any question of compromising on drugs, in exchange for freedom. I would stay in prison as long as it took, but I would never put drugs in my body. Not to save some hack politician in Washington. Not in this lifetime. This would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary. Ted Lindauer and I were confident there’d been enough irregularities that we could overturn forcible drugging in the 2nd Circuit Appellate Court, if Judge Mukasey ruled against me.
“Indefinite detention” could still be in force in that equation. We did not know. Honestly though, for the next months, I was more terrified wondering whether the Court would allow us to “stay” a decision on forcible drugging— to stop Carswell from strapping me to a gurney, while the Court appeals raged on. That frightened me more than anything else.
Uncle Ted demanded that I must not panic. He promised to visit me in Texas, so that we could work out a counter strategy together. 493 Obviously, my attorney, Sam Talkin was out of his depth, and unable to cope with this shocking twist in events. He took no action to fight for my release. He appeared to be stumped as how to proceed.
My beloved Uncle Ted swore that I was not alone. Ted has such a forceful presence as an attorney that he’s practically in the cell with you, talking side by side, hammering out strategies. Ted promised to exert his best energies to broker a solution with the Judge that would get me out of the “hoosiegow, ” as he called it.
Ted kept my courage strong in moments of absolute terror and despair. I could never have survived —and won—without him.
But inside those prison walls after February 3, 2006, a surreal drama began to play out. Reality was thrown out the window. Staff aggressively declared that my Asset work in PreWar Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism from 1993 to 2003 was manifestly delusional, and must be corrected. They began to impose their own psychosis on me, brutally reinventing the truth of my life. All external factors stopped mattering, by order of prison psychiatry. A lifetime’s work against war and violence, the support of senior. Congressional staffers, journalists, attorneys from the Lockerbie case. U.N. diplomats who watched my work for years—None of that external reality mattered any more.
They had tried to force me to recant voluntarily. And they had failed. Now they proposed physically crippling me, so that I would be too destroyed to speak. Or think.
On several occasions, I protested to Dr. Vas that Dr. Shadduck had spoken to witnesses who verified my story.
To which he replied: “That doesn’t matter. I’m going to tell the Judge you made it up. Who do you think they’re going to believe? You or me?”
“I am a doctor.”
In one terrifying episode, a psychiatrist declared, “Don’t worry. I’m going to give you so many drugs, you won’t be troubled by those memories any longer.”
Who cared about reality at Carswell? Who cared about the law? Who cared about ethical behavior and truthful testimony?
Nobody that I could see.
One of the psychology staff said to me: “Reality is whatever I say it is.”
I remember that I looked him hard in the face. I wanted to stare him straight in the eyes, inmate to prison officer, when I shook my head and replied: “You Are Wrong.”
For these reasons, I am firmly convinced that Carswell should be closed to all psychiatric evaluations immediately. Some women prisoners should be entitled to new evaluations, and a reconsideration of their sentencing and any court ordered drugging. This corruption of psychiatry did not start with my case. And it did not end with my case either. It’s endemic to Carswell’s approach to psychiatry and the Courts. A lot of other women inmates have suffered from it, and a lot of other Judges have been fooled by it. Those sentences should be reconsidered at once.
As for me, my nightmare of “extreme prejudice” was beginning in earnest.
It comes down to the old cliché that courage is not the absence of fear, but fighting through fear. Thinking back on it, I was terrified beyond words— and the odds of my victory were stunningly low, at least in the first round, without an appeal to the higher court. Prison staff on that Texas military base had no doubts they would prevail against me. They did not expect me to win.
I began to have a recurring nightmare.
In my dream, I was living in a room filled with water up to the ceiling. I could only breathe through a small air tube that snaked up to a vent above me.
In my dream, the tube was thin, and breathing was difficult. I had so little oxygen.
I was chained to the floor. Looking up through the water, I could see the vent. But I could not see behind it to know if my oxygen would be cut off by some unseen hand. In my dream, I feared that hand intensely.
I remember distinctly knowing that I must stay focused, and concentrate on breathing. If I panicked, I would lose what small source of oxygen I had, and the effect would be catastrophic.
I could not lose control. Yet I had no control. You see?
Imagine a place where prisoners can be physically tortured, crippled and maimed without any rights to stop the abuse. That abuse continues month after month, year after year, until inmates are utterly destroyed beyond the possibility of healing.
Now you’ve got an inkling of what I’m talking about.
My daily life was controlled by an extraordinary confluence of fairly decent prison guards — and a group of sadistic psychology staff. Unhappily, the psych staff appeared to relish their power to inflict tremendous suffering on inmates through crippling dosages of drugs. The women on M-1 had no legal right whatsoever to protect ourselves from their abuse — which had no correlation to prisoner behavior or real life personality traits.
Forcible drugging was about power.
The experience haunts me to this day.
Prisoner Abuse_
Lots of bad things happened at Carswell. But nobody suffered like the women inmates on M-1. Black, white, Hispanic, everybody got hurt. But black women especially got victimized by the All Caucasian psychology staff — and not only those who are poor, less educated and less familiar with their legal rights.
Middle class black women got attacked savagely, too. Apparently it wasn’t “normal” to live outside the ghetto. Think Jennifer Hudson”s role in “Sex and the City.” That’s exactly the sort of black woman targeted on M-1. No joke. The torture of those women would astonish and devastate most Americans. It would break your heart if you saw them. They had no legal counsel that cared for them.
The outcome was hideous. During my 7 month detention at Carswell, I saw these women at the time of their arrival at the prison. Mostly they were in good health, confident and friendly, not violent, not threatening. Just nice people. That was the most striking thing about their behavior. They smiled. They joked with other inmates. They were the girls next door who’d got into trouble, without criminal intent. Mostly their boyfriends or husbands engaged in some criminal act, and they got picked up together. A large number of these women wouldn’t talk to the FBI— called “obstruction of justice—” or else they got hit with making “false statements” to protect their men. (Ladies, that’s a bad idea!) Loyalty to their men caught them several years in prison.
Over the weeks, I would watch their transformation from happy and confident to something terrified and confused. Then zombie-like. It was the most God awful transformation that you could imagine only in your worst nightmares. You would be heartless to wish this sort of violence on an enemy.
None of the prisoners on M-1 showed signs of schizophrenia or hallucinations. That turned out to be another joke about court psychiatry. Almost none of these prisoners qualify as mentally ill. Not until the prison got hold of them! Most of us suffered “post traumatic stress” after the abuse— but nothing else.
In the schism of prison society, we were the Most Normal. We were not the murderers or thugs. We were not predatory towards other inmates. We were the “guests” who shouldn’t be in prison at all. We were strikingly out of place in prison culture.
All of that makes the abuse by prison staff more ugly in that, by all rational assessment, it was totally unnecessary.
Instead of getting abused by hard-core inmates, we got preyed on by vicious, self righteous psychiatrists, who sought to double punish us through crippling dosages of drugs. It’s a great tribute to the strength of these women that despite our lowly legal status, the brutality of the psych department prompted every one of us to discover extraordinary personal resources to survive the damage Carswell tried to inflict on us. Some of these women are truly admirable in how they persevere every day, with graciousness and stamina, through years of prison trauma.
One of my cellmates kept a haunting poem by Maya Angelou taped to her locker.
“And still I rise.”
She stood in front of it every day to read it— like a prayer.
On M-1, Maya Angelou gained fresh significance that would dismay the Poet Laureate herself.
A lot of inmates on M-1 got drugged so badly that they slept 15 to 18 hours a day. Throughout the unit, beds would be full by 1 o’clock in the afternoon every single day.
We ate lunch at 10:30 in the morning, and dinner at 3:30pm. Then everybody on M-1 would take their afternoon drugs and go back to sleep until about 6:30 pm. They’d get up to microwave a snack before the evening count. After the inmate count, most of the women would sleep until the next morning, when prison staff required us to report for indoor recreation. A striking number of inmates would collapse on the floor of the recreation rooms. Drugs knocked them out cold.
Black women always got drugged the worst.
They could not walk. They could not speak in sentences or answer questions. Typically, a response would be “what?” “dunno, ” “huh?” Like that.
Eating took tremendous effort for a lot of women on M-1, white or black. They could not lift a cup to drink without shaking hands. They would spill juice all over their clothes. They could not lift a fork to put food into their mouths, without intense concentration.
They wet their beds at night, because they could not coordinate their body movements to climb out of bed to use the restrooms. There was such sympathy that inevitably one of the other cellmates would get up in the middle of the night, and wash their sheets, if they got diarrhea and couldn’t make it to the toilet.
Urine could wait until the next morning, except for the stink.
Nobody complained about washing their sheets. We grieved for these ladies.
Most hideous of all, they could not bathe themselves. Staff and fellow inmates had to take these women to the showers, strip them naked, and wash them. Every time they bathed, they required help. It was not an occasional thing.
I can still hear those voices in the shower room. They are the stuff of nightmares:
“Raise your arms. Lift your titties, so I can wash you. Let me see your back side. Spread your cheeks for me. Good girl. Can you stand up? No? Let’s get the chair. Sit on that chair now. I’m going to wash your hair. Lean your head back. Don’t get soap in your eyes. Let me towel you off. Let’s dry you off, so I can get your clothes back on you.”
“Do you want me to pull up your underwear? Let me pull up your pants. Can you do that? No? OK, I’ll do that for you.”
Showering in a nearby stall, I would sob for these women. I mean it, I would turn on the water, and weep as I listened to the humiliation they suffered. These adult women had become infantile, like very small children, totally incapacitated.
I would cry for them. It was grotesque and humiliating.
These were young women in their 20s and 30s. They weren’t old or handicapped. They’d been normal until Carswell got hold of them. I cannot emphasize sufficiently that nothing in their outward behavior justified such heavy overdrugging. But Carswell used psychotropic drugs as a form of punishment. Drugs offered another way to inflict suffering, and degrade women who’d already lost their families and freedom anyway. It was sadistic and abusive.
One black woman in her 30s had been tortured like this for years. She suffered all the worst side effects of Haldol, and whatever drug cocktail Carswell kept feeding her. She was docile like a baby. She could no longer speak in sentences. Or eat. Or dress. Or bathe. She slept 18 to 20 hours a day, and wet the bed frequently. All family ties had been lost, since she could not talk on the prison phones.
But she could sing gospel like an angel. Her name was Priscilla, and she could sing beautifully. We’d have to start the lyrics for her. Then something in her memory would kick in, and she’d start singing. The whole room would go silent to listen. Her voice was so melodic and pure, and it accentuated our grief for her daily suffering.
Her prison life was the stuff of nightmares.
Another black woman, about 32 years old, could no longer speak properly. She had trouble eating. Very slowly she would raise a fork, and stare at it for a long time, before putting the food in her mouth. But she made a special promise to the other women on M-1 that she would go to the showers by herself every night. She wanted no help undressing or washing herself. She would persevere in cleaning herself, no matter how bad it got. And it got very bad.
Her ability to shower by herself was the only dignity left in her pride. In all other ways, Carswell had utterly destroyed her. To help her out, other inmates kept a chair in the shower room at all times, so she could sit down. By this stage, it had become an arduous task to look for a chair, or carry it any distance. Those simple actions were beyond her skill level.
Understand— this would continue for years, throughout their sentences. It was a thousand times worse than prison itself. You can survive prison. It’s not pleasant. But this stuff qualifies as actual torture. It’s cruel and unusual—and grossly unnecessary.
The greatest irony was how Carswell quickly screened prisoners in the pre-trial phase, according to whom prosecutors wanted to take to trial, and those they wanted to block from going to trial— like me.
If a pre-trial defendant arrived at Carswell, toying with a psychology angle at trial, Carswell took an entirely different approach.
Let’s say the Defense wanted to prove “diminished capacity” on the basis of a long-time bipolar disorder, a common ploy for leniency from the Courts.
The first thing Carswell asked was whether the new inmate used antidepressants or mood stabilizers? Almost nobody arrived at Carswell on harsher drugs than that.
If the answer was yes, Carswell would pull back the drugs to test whether the condition was authentic.
Taking defendants off prescription drugs was the number one method for restoring competence to stand trial— or otherwise proving a defendant suffered no true diminished capacity. (Mostly Carswell rejected claims of incompetence.)
Guess what? After a few weeks of detox, most prisoners would be just fine without drugs. They’d show their true personality. Low and behold, there would be nothing wrong with those women. Carswell would argue in Court—and I would have to agree, based on their behavior— that they’d been taking prescription drugs for years without cause. Somewhere along the way these women got “misdiagnosed, ” and encouraged to confuse personal problems with mental defects. They’d gotten comfortable taking prescription drugs. Drugs provided a crutch for their lives. But they functioned just fine after a medically supervised detox.
That surprised some of these women, who’d limited their expectations to fit the constraints of their so called “mental diseases or defects.”
Some of these women thanked Carswell after the detox! They felt empowered getting off psych drugs!
Once they got cleaned up, Carswell shipped the women right back to federal court. They were judged competent to stand trial, or plead guilty for sentencing without much leniency.
That says a lot about how psychotropic drugs affect personal performance and self expectations—and not for the better.
It speaks volumes about the phony medical credentials of psychiatry, too, and its propensity for inventing “disease” out of non- observable “symptoms, ” or double prescribing a second set of drugs to mask symptoms created by the first set of drugs.
But heaven protect women inmates who arrived at Carswell for a psych evaluation as part of sentencing, or those of us declared incompetent over our objections, because a prosecutor really had no evidence to support the case against us, and we, defendants refused to accommodate the Court by accepting a guilty plea.
Women like us suffered the most. Carswell would declare us “delusional” and “lacking responsibility” for insisting on our innocence. Then they would file requests to the Court requiring obstructionist defendants to take massive quantities of drugs, usually Haldol, Ativan and Prozac, as part of their “rehabilitation.” That was standard practice. Everyone got the same cocktail of drugs. Even prisoners outside of M-1 and M-2 got heavy doses of psychotropic drugs.
I was at Carswell long enough that I observed new prisoners upon their arrival– healthy, in good spirits, full of good conversation. None of these women struck me as violent or threatening. To the best of my knowledge, I never saw women on M-1 threaten other inmates or guards. Most of the women were guilty as charged. Very few got convicted of serious crimes like bank robbery or child killing. Some might have benefited from counseling, which ironically, was very mediocre at the prison. But 9 times out of 10, they committed crimes of stupidity, drug crimes, tax fraud, or crimes associated with a husband or boyfriend. They’re not instigators. They’re not diabolical. They are followers. They would not be repeat offenders if they got jobs after prison. Employment would be the decisive factor.
All of a sudden, these women could not speak anymore. They could no longer read a book, or write letters home to their families, because they could no longer grip a pen in hand, or process ideas from the written word.
Ominously, I’d hear prison staff talking about how a certain woman liked to read the newspaper— particularly black women.
A black woman wouldn’t read newspapers at Carswell for long. Drugs would take care of that literacy problem.
Other prisoners had to write letters home for them, though most of these women could hardly put together a sentence to tell us what to write. We would suggest greetings, while they sat next to us, mute. Sometimes tears would stream down their cheeks, nodding or mostly grunting, as we proposed messages to their families. It would take considerable effort to express a simple thought.
Since they could no longer read a book, or process ideas in any form, most definitely they could not work at the prison law library. So they could not appeal their sentencing or assist their attorneys– who let’s be honest, did not want their help anyway.
One woman, dragged to Carswell by U.S. Marshals on a bail revocation, could not remember her husband’s phone number, though they’d been married twenty years with an adult son. We took her to the Chaplain’s office, so she could try to phone home, and she stumbled several times trying to dial. This simple act was so difficult that we questioned if she had a husband at all.
It turned out that she was a former Carswell prisoner who stopped taking court-ordered drugs after her release. So the U.S. Marshals picked her up, and doped her to the levels required by Carswell, then shipped her back to prison. She was so over-drugged that she’d lost the ability to perform the most simple tasks, like dialing a telephone. Her husband had no idea what happened to her. She could not speak to anybody. She had trouble washing herself. All of the ugly things.
Horribly enough, prior to her imprisonment, this woman worked in a bank, in a supervisory position—She was a bank manager, with no history of mental illness. She got picked up by the Feds in their sweep of an embezzlement scam by other bank employees.
Ignoring the reality of her life, Carswell declared her incompetent over her desperate objections. Like me, she wanted to fight the charges. Suspiciously, Carswell overruled her demands, then filed a request to forcibly drug her with heavy dosages of Haldol. She lost the fight against forcible drugging, and was detained 11 months. The Court released her on condition that she take the drugs voluntarily. After about a year, she stopped.
Now she was back in prison—but with a different attorney, who challenged the original indictment. The new attorney questioned why the first attorney argued she was “unfit for Trial” in the first place. Critically, her co-defendants filed affidavits saying that she had nothing to do with their crime.
This poor woman wasn’t guilty after all. With the help of her new kick ass attorney, Carswell pulled back the amount of drugs that she was forced to take.
And guess what? This poor abused woman showed no signs of mental illness whatsoever. There was nothing wrong with her. It was another case of Carswell brutalizing a woman prisoner just because they could.
Her story proves something of critical importance to the debate on prison psychiatry:
If you change the attorney, you change the prisoner “diagnosis.” You change the defense strategy, and all the psycho-babble goes away—It rushes away. That’s because most of the time, psychological evaluations are scripted to support the attorney’s legal strategy— not a reflection of the defendant’s true state of mental health. So when you start poking, there’s almost nothing left of a psychological profile, except in the most extreme situations of genuine schizophrenia, or severe bipolar disorder, or long term domestic violence or child abuse.
To put that in context, in 7 ½ months at Carswell, I saw exactly one prisoner with schizophrenia, two prisoners suffering bipolar disorder to a crippling degree, and two prisoners who heard voices— which might have been caused by the heavy psychotropic drugs they were forced to take.
The rest of the inmates were normal, but they broke the law. For whatever reason, they engaged in criminal activity. And they got sent to prison for it.
Psychology in the courts is all about legal strategy in disposing of a case, so an attorney can get out of it. Like mine.
Unhappily, this poor lady, once a bank supervisor, suffered through Two Tours of Carswell to prove it. The first time she served 11 months. The second time she served four months. Plus, she had time at home between Carswell, suffering the crippling effects of Haldol, which had been wrongly administered at high dosages for punitive reasons.
Last I heard, she intended to file a lawsuit.
It was sheer hell from start to finish, and all because Carswell abuses its authority in the courts, and advocates excessive, unnecessary drugging for all prisoners.
That’s what Carswell wanted to do to me. And remember, this was happening in Texas. Think of every worst stereotype of corrupt Texas prison staff, and you’re beginning to get the idea.
Without the “inconvenience” of due process, Carswell can get away with anything. And they know it. When the Hospital Accreditation Review Board shows up to survey the prison facilities, the most chemically lobotomized women get transferred to the SHU until the performance review has been completed. That way nobody on the outside is troubled to see them. And Carswell doesn’t have to answer questions about the crippling impact of drugs on their daily functioning.
It’s a serious problem. I am not the exceptional inmate who was abused at Carswell. I am the exceptional prisoner who escaped abuse.
I escaped, because I fought back as hard as I have fought anything in my life.
For the good of all prisoners, Carswell should lose the right to perform psych evaluations for the federal courts, and all drugging orders should be reviewed with fresh eyes. Cruelty should never be part of that evaluation process. And corruption should never be tolerated when drug recommendations are imposed on prisoners, forcibly or not, in a court of law.
My Own Private Guantanamo
My nightmare was double-force.
When I describe Carswell as my own “private Guantanamo, ” and my status as pretty close to an “enemy non-combatant, ” there are good reasons why.
After Jose Padilla, I was the second non-Arab Americans ever indicted on the Patriot Act. There’s great irony to that. Congress approved the 7000 page law that eviscerated our Constitutional rights in a midnight vote, without reading it first, in frenzied hysteria after 9/11. The Patriot Act supposedly exists to empower law enforcement to break up terrorist cells.
Yet one of the very first Americans to get clobbered by the Patriot Act was an antiwar activist and whistleblower—not exactly what comes to mind when Congress argued for the Patriot Act.
Unforgivably, the Patriot Act was first used to keep Americans ignorant of national security issues, when ordinary people started asking Good Questions about White House policies. Those of us who know the truth got ravaged by the Patriot Act to silence us, while Congress glorified its performance and manipulated the public debate That’s what the Patriot Act accomplished. It has been crafted as an ideal tool for any government cover up. The government arrests the whistleblower, and politicians are safe to make up stories to protect their access to power.
Soldiers at Carswell Air Force Base had no idea that I was a U.S. Asset who got in trouble for providing accurate forecasts about the War in Iraq They had no idea I warned about 9/11, and contributed extensively to the 9/11 investigation.
If you read the mainstream media, I was caught “spying for the Iraqis.” That’s what a lot of soldiers on Carswell Air Force Base believed. The indictment was dirty smoke and propaganda. But soldiers believed what they were told. An accused “Iraqi agent” was locked up on their military base. Having lost my rights to due process under the Patriot Act, I lost my ability to challenge their perceptions of my alleged crimes.
At that moment, American soldiers were losing the War in Baghdad. U.S. forces sustained heavy casualties in 2006, including thousands of amputations, paralysis and head injuries from suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). While I was locked up at Carswell, Sunni factions attacked the golden dome of the famous AlAskariya Mosque in Samarra, launching bloody sectarian strife against the Shi’ites. U.S. soldiers had lost control on the battlefield, and were heading back for third tours of duty away from wives and children. Returning U.S. soldiers showed deep emotional scars and post traumatic stress. The U.S. military faced daunting pressure of two battle fronts, with angry Mujahideen in Afghanistan on the sidelines of Baghdad.
Locking up an accused “Iraqi Agent” inside a Texas military base was like waving a suicide bomb vest in front of a battalion. They couldn’t stop Al Qaeda in Iraq. But they could sure as hell punish me, an “enemy non-combatant, ” (read that, Iraqi spy).
They tried their damnedest to screw me every chance they got. My beloved Uncle Ted Lindauer kept his promise to drive 700 miles from southern Illinois to visit me at Carswell Air Force Base, northwest of Fort Worth, Texas. It’s an 11 hour road trip, driving straight through —in each direction.
When he arrived, Ted identified himself as part of my legal defense team, a fully accurate description by this point. He carried documentation to verify his attorney’s license. Critically, the soldiers understood he was visiting the “accused Iraqi Agent.”
The Sentry guard refused to let Ted Lindauer enter that military base.
The first time it happened, soldiers swore there was no prison inside Carswell Air Force Base. And I was not a detainee. Quite perplexed, Ted assured soldiers at the sentry gate they were mistaken. He had Court papers ordering my surrender to Carswell, and letters postmarked from the prison. He asked to speak with a commanding officer. The commanding officer on duty came out to meet him, but refused to acknowledge that a prison was located inside the military base, either. 494
Ted explained that he had traveled 700 miles, and he was quite positive the prison was there. They didn’t care. He wasn’t coming onto their base. Ted doesn’t give up easily on anything, and he doesn’t play. So they spent a good couple of hours arguing over whether there was a prison inside Carswell Air Force Base. Above all, Ted argued aggressively for my Constitutional rights to attorney access.
Oh yes, the Iraqi agent wanted an attorney.
Ted warned that he would go to the Judge and file a complaint. And that’s exactly what he did. He notified Judge Mukasey’s clerk that he had been denied access to the prison on a weekend— when it was open for family members, attorneys or not. And he complained that my rights to an attorney visit had been violated.
That was Ted’s first attempt to visit me at Carswell Prison. The second time Ted drove 700 miles and 11 hours from southern Illinois, soldiers had a new excuse for denying him access to the base.
Yeah, soldiers at the entry gate acknowledged. Carswell prison existed. But the Sentry swore up and down that the prison had no visiting hours on the weekends. Again Ted argued that was ridiculous. Again the sentry contacted a ranking officer on duty. He came down and refused Ted’s request to enter the base, with the flagrant lie that the prison had no weekend visiting hours. 495
Meanwhile, other families visiting the prison got ushered through the gates around Ted. Inside Carswell, other inmates had visitors all day.
Ted Lindauer had his attorney papers. He had contact names inside the prison. He was on my visitor’s list. None of that mattered. Soldiers told him not to come back the next day, because they would not let him onto the military base then, either.
The Iraqi agent was not getting an attorney visit. End of discussion.
All this time my attorney in New York had done nothing to secure my freedom. If any solution could be brokered, it would have to come from Ted. There was nobody else to do it. This visit was critically important to ending our standoff.
Knowing that, Ted had done everything properly. He notified the Court that he was performing as Co-Counsel for my defense. Judge Mukasey had observed Ted’s presence in Court the day I got ordered to Carswell, and recognized the importance of our relationship. The prison staff on M-1 was fully aware of his close involvement in my case.
He’s also 70 years old, and a very dignified gentleman, with 40 years of senior legal practice. He doesn’t suffer fools. It’s sort of a Lindauer thing.
And still soldiers at Carswell Air Force Base refused to grant him access to me.
Now Ted was furious. This was his second trip to Carswell in several weeks, and he’d been refused entry to the base both times, for the flimsiest of excuses. 496
He warned the Commanding Officer that he would return in a few days. And by God, he would bring the U.S. marshals with him. And those U.S. marshals would escort him onto that military base, into that prison, if soldiers tried to deny Ted Lindauer access to me a third time. 497
While he was at it, he would see that they all got court-martialed for failing in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution. (We know a few Generals, too.)
Unhappily, soldiers guarding Carswell Air Force Base appeared to have a very limited understanding of the Constitution, which is not particularly hopeful, since they’re sworn to protect it. In its most simple maxim, “We, the people of the United States of America” have fundamental protections that define our whole system of government and laws. Those inalienable rights exist to protect us from exactly this sort of arbitrary and tyrannical government abuses like these. For starters, Americans are innocent until proven guilty, with carefully defined rights of due process. And by the way, political prosecutions are expressly frowned upon as tyrannical violations of free speech.
Alas, the U.S. Constitution got fed into the shredder in my case. That illustrates poignantly why prisons should be separate from military establishments. It’s disastrous to allow them to function co-dependently. The military itself does not know how to handle those situations.
Well, Ted Lindauer is a marvelously persevering man. When challenged, he refused to back down.
First thing Monday morning, he called Judge Mukasey and raised all kinds of hell about my Constitutional rights, and how Sam Talkin’s failure to perform had compelled him to intercede, in order to guarantee that I had real, interested legal counsel. He filed a formal protest with the Court, and demanded that U.S. Marshals escort him onto that base. 498
Judge Mukasey could see the situation was spiraling out of control. The whole agreement sending me to Carswell for 120 days, in exchange for ending the case, had collapsed. Obviously the original deal had been hammered out in the black of night, without my consent, by an attorney who now appeared impotent to protect my rights, and took no action to gain my freedom. And I was trapped in prison 1600 miles away.
This violation of my rights to legal counsel was occurring at a critical moment. As a defendant, I desperately required the guidance of a senior legal adviser. Judge Mukasey’s hands were tied by the thinly disguised collusion between the prosecutor and my attorney. And here was the answer to our prayers— a senior, savvy attorney anxious to play a very helpful role brokering a workable solution.
With great perspicacity and fury over the abrogation of my legal rights, Judge Mukasey agreed to have U.S. Marshals standing by to escort Ted Lindauer onto that military base, when he returned to see me a few days later. Judge Mukasey ordered that this legal visit would be protected by the Court. And he ordered Carswell Prison to open the visitor center just for me. 499
Ted Lindauer had Judge Mukasey’s private cell phone number to invoke the power of the U.S. Marshals at the first sign of trouble or delay.
Judge Mukasey kicked some Texas ass that week. Junior staff at Carswell told me he boxed the ears of top prison officers, who sent the message down the ranks that guards had better find me when Ted Lindauer arrived. There would be hell to pay if Ted didn’t get to see me.
As they say, third time’s the charm. It took the threat of U.S. marshals standing by, flanking Ted at the front gate, but we finally got to talk. 500
Mercifully, Ted Lindauer possessed the legal insight to craft a workable compromise to our problem. He arrived carrying a pledge for my signature to submit to Judge Mukasey. Very simply, I would have to agree to attend psychology meetings in Maryland. And I would have to agree to use any drugs prescribed locally
Experience convinced us that once politics got removed from the equation, there would be no drugs. Nevertheless, I had to consent. 501
This agreement gave the court a vehicle for addressing the prosecutor’s demands for drugs, while sidestepping my refusal to use drugs prescribed by Carswell for nonexistent conditions that had nothing to do with real life.
It was simple, but it accomplished what my Uncle Ted understood the Judge needed. He’d done his homework, and he got the agreement in precise language that would be acceptable to the Court, in order for me to go home. He forbade me from changing a single word of it. Truly, Ted Lindauer was a blessing, a jewel, given this massive headache for the Court.
Now it’s always risky to extrapolate a Judge’s thinking. Since no defendant can resist doing it however, I confess that we believed Judge Mukasey was alarmed and frustrated by these surprise developments.
We did not believe Judge Mukasey expected O’Callaghan to pull this stunt, demanding forcible drugging after the Court accepted the finding of incompetence. It put the Judge in a bad position, having ordered me to Carswell for 120 days, without a hearing that would have answered questions about my story. I had begged for that hearing.
Arguably, it gave the Court something else to chew over. It proved the strongest defendant could not overcome the hazards of the Patriot Act, whether guided by senior counsel like Ted Lindauer, or junior counsel like Sam Talkin. My attorney relationship was already burdened by “secret evidence” and “secret charges.” Now I was locked up on a military base — without attorney access — facing indefinite detention. Those factors crippled my capacity to prepare for trial. As a defendant, I was totally helpless to overcome these external obstacles, which were flagrantly unconstitutional anyway.
Judge Mukasey possesses an extremely sophisticated legal mind and a profound sense of fairness. Refusing to allow Ted Lindauer onto Carswell Air Force Base for a crucial attorney visit sent a sobering message.
Ted Lindauer particularly believed that Judge Mukasey saw the legal structure impeding my defense. He trusted Judge Mukasey throughout this whole nightmare.
For myself, as a defendant, I didn’t know what to think. It terrified me not to know how the Court would rule. Judge Mukasey appeared inscrutable, exhibiting a fierce and uncanny depth of insight to the law.
Honestly, I was scared to death.
Saved by the Blogs
This was the most evil thing I’ve ever confronted in my life. And I’ve seen evil before.
People ask me all the time how I survived.
I escaped the fate of other inmates, because I fought back as hard as I’ve ever fought anything in my life.
At the outset, the prospect of my success appeared stunningly low. Usually the courts rubberstamp prison requests for drugs, pretty much automatically. There’s no doubt that Carswell expected the same for me.
Carswell didn’t count on my two secret weapons.
The first, of course, was my beloved Uncle Ted, who fought forcefully and strategically, behind the scenes to broker an agreement that would satisfy the Court, and get me home.
The second surprised me, too— my own beloved companion, JB Fields, who desperately appealed for help in the blog community and internet radio.
JB refused to stand by passively, and let the attack on my rights go unchallenged.
“JB” stood for J Burford of all things. That’s just the initial “J” without any other name attached to it. Born in Kansas, raised in Wyoming, JB was a proud Navy guy who spent six years of his life underwater, trawling the ocean floors on naval submarines. In 11 years of active service, he toured on the “Grayback, ” the “Barb, ” and the “Thomas A. Edison.”
He bragged about surviving a submarine accident, with ocean water spilling into the hold up to his chest. On Hawaii, he ran marathons and swim races alongside friends in the Navy Seals. Afterwards, he worked at the State Department in Washington in computer technology. While living with me, he got his “Top Secret” security clearance, and returned to the State Department as a computer contractor.
So much for my threat to national security.
JB was a generous, warm hearted man, whose greatest passion in life was his motorcycle, nicknamed “Drifty.” Every weekend he blasted off on “Drifty, ” exploring the back roads of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Friends joked that JB knew every ice cream stand, every barbecue pit and every diner from Maryland to North Carolina. JB would just smile, and tell you those things mattered most in life.
One Christmas, JB gave me some fancy motorcycle gear for winter riding. With a big grin, he said, “Isn’t this better than an engagement ring?”
Every moment counted with JB. He had the social flair to enjoy black tie affairs with State Department colleagues, ensconced in policy talk. And the next night, he’d eat crab legs and drink beer at the American Legion in Silver Spring, or at some motorcycle bar. He looked sexy as hell in a Tux, and even sexier in blue jeans and a leather jacket.
Different opinions always excited him. That was key to understanding his nature. He was a fierce civil libertarian, and a strong believer that ideas must be respected. Though he was fiercely opinionated himself, and would argue for hours over the most arcane points, he would gleefully defend the rights of others to hold a different philosophy on life and politics. And he believed those differences made conversation interesting.
Above all, he strongly believed the greatest privilege of the U.S. military is to defend the freedoms of our country— which he adored— and to protect the Constitution— which he held sacred.
And woe to the wicked of Carswell!
From my first days at Carswell, JB championed my cause. He was horrified that I got locked up without a trial or hearing He was appalled the national media didn’t care. My case had intense political overtones, involving Iraq and antiterrorism policy, and a strong human interest angle. Yet corporate media gave short shrift to my nightmare. There was no outcry. My home town newspaper, the Washington Post, showed no curiosity that one of its local gals, a U.S. Asset involved with Pre-War Intelligence, had got locked up on a Texas military base for doing exactly what pundits and Congress swore on the Front Page of the newspaper I should have done.
Journalists wouldn’t touch my story, though JB pleaded for attention. Corporate media watched from the sidelines, abandoning the role of watchdog.
Carswell watched this dynamic, too— closely. Once they saw the media’s indifference, prison staff taunted me that nobody cared. Nobody would help me. They could do anything at all to me, and nobody would stop them.
Sadly, if not for JB Fields, they would have been right.
Terrified by Carswell’s refusal to release me, JB Fields hit the airwaves of alternative radio, with some very cool talk show hosts like Michael Herzog, Greg Szymanski, Derek Gilbert, RJ Hender and Cosmic Penguin — to name a few of the awake and vigilant alternative radio hosts, who broadcast my story from the very beginning.
Republic Broadcasting, Oracle, Orion and Liberty Radio carried my story to their listeners before anybody else! And their scrutiny made all the difference!
JB was so frightened that he started posting my story on blogs all over the internet, with a cry for help to defend my rights to a hearing, so I’d have a chance to prove my story in court.
The hand of Providence moved for me again, and JB was soon joined by a passionate and highly articulate activist named Janet Phelan, who’s got a long tradition defending America’s liberties in her own right. Janet hosted a radio talk show, “One if by Land.” An incredibly talented lady, Janet brought a deeper perspective on the abuse of women by psychology, and the Soviet style of abusing creative thinkers and activists under the guise of “mental health.” She also fiercely condemned the Patriot Act.
Janet Phelan was phenomenal. Together, she and JB smoked the blogs with outrage over the irregularities of my imprisonment on the Patriot Act, and the outrageous threat to forcibly drug me until I could be “cured” of knowing inconvenient truths that the government wished to obliterate.
Corporate media might have been sleeping, but the blogging community woke up, and gave JB and Janet a forum to fight. What I call “awake blogs, ” like “Scoop” Independent News, Smirking Chimp, Intel Daily, Op Ed News, American Politics Journal, Atlantic Free Press, and The Agonist joined the battle, appalled by what was happening. Cutting edge bloggers like WelcomebacktoPottersville.com watching the road ahead, championed my cause from day one.
Later, as my legal drama continued, one of the truly outstanding blog journalists today, Michael Collins, picked up my story. Then we were off to the races!
At Carswell, JB Fields fought like a banshee to free me — what he described as the most lonely and frightening experience of his life. JB declared that he could not say if I was innocent—and he did not always agree with my politics, which made for some lively conversations. But he insisted that I had the right to face my accusers in open court. He urged blog readers to support my right to an evidentiary hearing, so I could a fair chance to call my witnesses to prove the authenticity of my claims!
This was about America, and the bad things happening to ordinary people under the Patriot Act. JB and Janet argued fiercely and passionately that the legal traditions of this country must be defended. They kicked up one helluva fight. And they refused to back down.
Blowback from the blogs fired seismic shock waves through Washington. You’d be amazed who told me they heard JB’s radio interviews after I got out.
As long as the corporate media stayed silent, Capitol Hill could pretend this judicial abuse of a U.S. Intelligence Asset was not occurring. Safe behind their ivory tower walls, the Power Elite of Washington imagined they were untouchable, their fortress impenetrable.
Only now, thanks to JB Fields and Janet Phelan, Capitol Hill confronted the emerging force of the blogs and alternative radio, at a crucial moment when the internet community was proving it’s got the muscle to shatter the media silence.
JB and all the other bloggers who picked up my story saved my life and my freedom. Without that outcry, my fate would have been very different.
That’s what separated my victory from the tragedy of so many others. Other women don’t have those resources. Sadly, their stories suffocate and die from lack of exposure, while my ordeal was redeemed by JB’s perseverance.
Finally, JB and I got a break.
On April 24, 2006, the Court made a surprise announcement.
Like the lovely April morning I got the news that I was finally transferring out of Carswell.
With a mischievous grin, the guard on duty stuck his head in the doorway to my cell.
“Hey Lindauer, pack up! You’re outta here. You’re leaving tomorrow night.”
I think I screamed with joy, because other inmates in the hallway came running to hear my news. I started to grab the guard for a hug before I caught myself.
It was April 24, 2006. I crowed in jubilation, ecstatically thrilled. Elated with joy!
In all, I had been detained 7 ½ months for a psych evaluation that ordinarily takes six to eight weeks, and only because so many prisoners are getting processed simultaneously. Federal guidelines set a maximum of 120 days for prison evaluations. 502 My detention lasted 210 days— in strict violation of federal law. Not to mention the evaluation lacked purpose. I’d proven myself over and over again. The whole thing amounted to a convoluted scheme so the Justice Department could escape a trial.
But that morning I felt overjoyed.
“I’m going home! I’m going home!” I started dancing around my cell.
“Um, Lindauer. Uh, no. I’m driving a bus-load of prisoners to the inmate transfer center in Oklahoma City tomorrow night. You’re, uh, flying to New York. On Con Air.”
“To New York? On Con-Air? There must be a mistake. I live in Maryland.”
“You’re not going home, Lindauer. They’re sending you to the Metropolitan Correctional Center for Pre-Trial detention in Manhattan.”
The wheel of “extreme prejudice” was turning alright.
They were coming in for the kill.
At that moment I wasn’t nearly paranoid enough to conceive the depth of their malevolence.
“I’m staying in prison? Seriously? I don’t understand. I’m supposed to go home after the evaluation.” (Carswell filed its report on December 22, 2005—four months earlier).
“I talked to my attorney yesterday. Why didn’t he tell me that I’m going to Court? How could my attorney not know I’m getting transferred?”
“I don’t know.” The guard shook his head. “Hey, you’re out of here, Lindauer.”
He leaned closer. “That’s a good thing, right? Your Judge has something he wants to say before he lets you go. That’s all. Be cool.” This guy was a good guard.
“Yeah, yeah. That’s got to be it. My Uncle just sent a settlement offer to the Court. My uncle had to do it, because my stupid ass attorney couldn’t figure it out.”
“That’s probably what the meeting’s for. Hey, Lindauer, it’s all good! You’re packin’ up. You’re leaving Carswell. Stay happy.”
As for divining my future in New York, my fellow prisoners jumped straight into the tea leaves. Their verdict was unanimous.
“If they’re sending you out of here, Susan, you’re not coming back. Why else would they go to the trouble? You’re done! It’s over! Your uncle’s taken care of you.”
I could not count how many of my fellow inmates wished they had an Uncle Ted Lindauer.
“You’re going home. You’ve just got a stop over in New York first.”
J.B was ecstatic. He saw it as proof that the blog community had forced Carswell’s abuse and threats into the open. The game was becoming untenable to continue.
I was deliriously happy. There are few moments in life that I have experienced such joy.
My attorney was less enthusiastic.
“The Judge has called a hearing, Susan. You wanted a hearing, right? Well, you’re going to get one, ” Talkin told me, glumly. “That’s why they’re sending you to M.C.C.”
I gave a deep sigh, and shook my head.
It was everything Ted and I feared when Judge Mukasey ordered me to surrender to Carswell in September. It put us back to square one. I’d suffered seven months in prison for nothing!
Ted warned that anger would be a waste of energy. I had to focus on getting home.
I growled to myself, but Ted was right. At least Judge Mukasey would learn the truth. There would be no more question marks. He could hear it for himself— just like the FBI, the U.S Attorney’s Office, the prison staff at Carswell, and Uncle Ted. We’d all be on the same page. Nobody could pretend I had invented this story.
I imagined that after the hearing, the Court would restore my bail until trial. I’d already surrendered to prison once, on the court’s whim. I was hardly a flight risk.
But what a waste of 7 months. We could have gone to trial already. I could have been acquitted without spending a single night in a prison cell.
I grit my jaw. That made me so angry.
I could see Ted’s face, and hear his words: “Stay focused. How you got here is less important than what you do next. We’ve got to get you out of the Hoosiegow, kid.” At least I had an excellent source of legal advice, even if it wasn’t my own attorney.
I turned my attention back to Sam Talkin.
“Very well. We’ll call witnesses to prove my story’s true. That’ll put an end to this psychology garbage. Judge Mukasey will hear enough to know it’s all baloney.”
Now I could see Richard Fuisz before me again, solemnly raising his finger, counting like a metronome. “Every situation, every encounter gives you a weapon or a tool. Anything that comes at you, you must use.”
Okay then. A hearing it would be. I would have been overjoyed if the Prosecutor kept his word about dropping the charges. Who could blame me? On the other hand, once witnesses verified my story, we could argue for dismissing the indictment ourselves. It would be up to the Judge. But this gave us a fresh chance to undo the damage of Dr. Drob’s report, which misrepresented the quality of my witnesses. The Justice Department had its pound of flesh. A pre-trial hearing might be the best thing for everybody. It might satisfy the Court of my innocence, and make the case go away.
Not to mention the great satisfaction I would get proving the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office had always known I was telling the truth. They’d been playing games with Judge Mukasey, gratis of the Patriot Act.
I heard another whisper from my mother, Jacqueline Shelly Lindauer. “Save your emotions for revenge.”
Alright then. A hearing it would be!
“I don’t know if we want those witnesses—” Sam Talkin began to whine.
“What are you saying? Of course we want those witnesses!”
Idiot! Sam Talkin was exasperating! As soon as I got home, I intended to fire him. In the meantime, any hearing before Judge Mukasey would be precious.
“We can talk about it when you get here, ” Talkin pouted. How do you break the news to a prisoner that she’s getting fucked again? (As delicately as possible.)
“See, the hearing isn’t about your competence, ” Talkin started whining. “It’s on forcible drugging.”
“WHAT THE FUCK are you saying? A hearing on forcible drugging? Are they INSANE!!???!!!”
My heart thudded to the floor at this bad news. Now I saw with clarity why Talkin had dreaded telling me before. The mere suggestion staggered with obscenity.
I mean, reality is not a disease. Psychology might be, however.
“No, Sam. No F—G— Damn Way, ” I’d buffed up my prison vocabulary at the law library, too.
(JB declared that I “cursed like a pirate” when I got home.)
“The law guarantees my right to a competence hearing, and I refuse to give up that right. I’m entitled to call witnesses and show evidence to address the questions raised in these idiotic psych evaluations. 503 That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“Yeah well, I told them we didn’t need to do that, ” Talkin mumbled into the phone. “I didn’t know the Prosecutor was going to ask for this.” He whined, pitifully.
“You did WHAT?!”
This was “extreme prejudice” alright, to the hundredth degree. And my public attorney walked into their trap, every time. Talkin would refuse to listen to me or Ted. He would miscalculate their sincerity, and he would be wrong again and again.
Except he was playing with another person’s freedom.
I suspect Talkin was afraid the Court would hear how Uncle Ted had been forced to interview my witnesses for my Defense, and how effortlessly he succeeded in validating my story. 504 His success contradicted the image of difficulty Talkin was projecting, and exposed his own mediocrity in the case.
“YOU agreed to give up MY rights? Oh no. I’m going to send Judge Mukasey a letter today. I will demand the Court uphold my rights as guaranteed by federal statute. JB will get in touch with everybody, so they know they have to come. We’ll be ready.”
“I’m not playing, Sam.” I swore adamantly. “That’s one good thing about prison. I’ve had lots of time to Read the Law.” I was ferocious.
“We’re having the God damn hearing. I don’t give a f— what you told Judge Mukasey. You are not entitled to violate my rights. I’m going to make sure that Judge Mukasey registers my demand, as the Defendant. Parke Godfrey will be in Court that day, ready to testify that I warned him about 9/11.”
“And he’s going to tell Judge Mukasey that he told the FBI all about my 9/11 warning a FULL YEAR before I got shipped to Carswell. He talked to Shadduck here, too. So the FBI, the US Attorneys Office and the Bureau of Prisons all know that it’s true, and they’ve all been playing games with Judge Mukasey.”
“There’s a name for that in prison, Sam. It’s called perjury.”
“If I were the Judge, I would be madder than hell about it.”
I always saw Judge Mukasey as the second victim of psychiatry in my case.
Again I saw the face of Richard Fuisz, stern and quiet: “Every situation gives you a weapon or a tool.”
That was the best advice I’d heard all day.
Alright then, I was getting out of Carswell. I was going to face my Judge. There’d be no distance between us. I would look him straight in the eye, and I’d bloody well lay out the whole thing.
A weapon or a tool was right.
After 7 months cut off from Court access, we’d all be in the same time zone, the same city! Glory hallelujah!
How could any defendant expect to prepare a legal strategy separated by a distance of 1,600 miles from her attorney? I was stuck in Texas, and my attorney was half way across the country in New York. It struck me as legally absurd to complain about my capacity to assist my defense, then deny me physical access to legal counsel. That’s a killer for any defendant.
OK, so a prison transfer to New York would be like paradise. I swore to God on a stack of Bibles that I would never go back to Texas again! I know lots of proud and wonderful Texans. They can visit me in Maryland.
Driving out of Carswell on the prison bus that night felt surreal. We stayed up all night, excited to leave. The bus pulled out at four in the morning, while it was still dark, for the 200 mile drive to Oklahoma City. It felt like a party, a heart-felt celebration.
Some of my fellow inmates had been trapped inside that razor wire for years. Getting on that bus, you wanted to grab that free earth and give thanks to God!
Surprisingly, the prison transit center is located at the Oklahoma City Airport — It occupies a separate compound, like an island outpost, with its own runway in sight of the main passenger terminals. That intrigued me. It appeared to house 300 women at a time, with a separate shed for male prisoners.
The detention center had the look and feel of a huge hangar for airplanes. There were no windows that I recall, just extra large holding cells big enough for 40 to 50 people, used for inmate processing. Each holding cell had two open toilets with no seat rim or toilet paper. The toilets were mostly broken and couldn’t flush. That’s prison for you. They don’t want anybody coming back.
After processing, we got escorted into a vast open room behind locked doors, with cafeteria tables and a prison laundry. Some of the women inmates folded towels and sheets to stay busy throughout the day. Tiny cells lined the edge of the walls.
First though, we had to go through inmate screening. One by one, guards called us out of the holding cell, lined us up, and ran through our records.
When they called me, I discovered that Carswell had played dirty. Again.
Carswell had singled me out of all the transfer prisoners, with an urgent recommendation that I should be locked in the SHU, or solitary confinement during transit, citing the Patriot Act.
To their credit, Oklahoma City stopped to ask some questions. The guards said only the most violent and dangerous prisoners go to the SHU in transit. They assured me it would be terribly unpleasant for a woman. Besides that, Carswell’s request made no sense. Looking at my prison record, I had no disciplinary problems. Some of the other women had serious behavior problems at Carswell, and none of them was going to the SHU. The guards finally struck down Carswell’s recommendation.
Oh but I understood Carswell’s motivation immediately. And it had nothing to do with behavioral problems or confrontations with prison guards.
Don’t forget— Just as I contributed to the 9/11 investigation, I also contributed to the Oklahoma City bombing investigation. And I complained the Justice Department was suppressing intelligence from Iraq, proving a broader conspiracy in the Oklahoma attack. Iraq claimed to possess proof of Middle East involvement in Oklahoma, including financial records for early Al Qaeda fighters, formerly known as the “Inter-Arab Group.”
There was circumstantial evidence that Terry Nichols, the lead coconspirator of the Oklahoma bombing, had meetings with Ramzi Yousef, ringleader of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, while both men visited the same University in the Philippines, known for Islamic radicalism. Both attacks relied on truck bombs loaded with fertilizer.
Carswell didn’t want me talking to prisoners or guards in Oklahoma City. They didn’t want those folks listening to what I had to say. Odds are those detention officers might know some of the Oklahoma families, and the word would get out.
Still, the SHU is a bad place for any prisoner. It’s for heavy duty punishment. I could only imagine what Carswell would concoct once I got to New York.
Try to imagine this brutal irony from where I was standing—in shackles and prison uniform.
I was booked for transport on Con-Air from Oklahoma City— where I contributed to their bombing investigation. My final destination was New York City, where I gave advance warning about 9/11 and the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. New York had been a primary beneficiary of my antiterrorism work for almost a decade.
If that’s not ironic enough, the federal courthouse in New York sat approximately 1,000 yards from where the World Trade Center once graced the New York skyline.
Pending the outcome of the decision, I would be locked up at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) a couple of blocks from Ground Zero. I would be detained in the same prison where Ramzi Yousef and other defendants waited for trial in the 1993 terrorist conspiracy that launched my career as an Asset.
Like the cycle of a Greek tragedy, the most profound experiences of my life turned on the World Trade Center, from start to finish.
I gave my whole life to this work. It defined me. I sacrificed all of my personal life for it. For all of the excitement of it, I enjoyed no public fame. Very quietly I celebrated my triumphs with a small number of people who understood my contributions. If most of my work was anonymous however, my role as a back channel to Iraq and Libya was no less critical, for the simple fact that almost nobody engaged in direct conversations with those pariah nations in the 1990s. I quietly provided an opening for covert dialogue.
If I must say, my team did a damn fine job.
And this was how America paid me back.
I was not traveling by limousine to a red carpet reception with roses and champagne. I would receive no special plaque with the Keys to the City from the Mayors of New York and Oklahoma City.
There would be no “first class” seating with a wine bar and cocktails on a 757 jumbo jetliner. No five star hotel accommodations at the Trump Plaza in Manhattan.
I would travel in shackles and chains.
I would fly the friendly skies of “Con Air, ” with hard core criminals and brokenhearted souls and stripped down creature comforts. I would be gawked at by male prisoners who hadn’t seen a woman in years. Some of the women prisoners flirted mercilessly, teasing them. Odds are they’d be remembered for years.
Since I was handcuffed, when I had to go to the bathroom, a U.S. Marshal would have to pull down my pants, and raise ‘em up again when I was finished.
Oh yeah, it would be a helluva flight.
And for what? I stood accused of engaging in anti-terrorism that politicians on Capitol Hill declared their highest priority for national security. Now those same leaders wanted to exaggerate their success to voters in Oklahoma City and New York.
Is that ironic enough for you?
I choked on the outrage of it.
Shamefully, I suffered ridicule in court proceedings 505, 506 for declaring my faith that New Yorkers would appreciate what I had done on behalf of their city.
They say New York has a cold, cold heart. Maybe they would care in Oklahoma City, where a nursery school filled with toddlers and infants got destroyed in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building. 507 Do you think those 19 babies died quickly crushed under all that concrete? Did they scream for their mommies as they suffocated with broken bones?
Do you care?
Well I care. If those parents told me to stop, I would consent out of respect for their grief. But I would be damned to hell before I ever stop hunting men who kill anybody’s children— and certainly not because some creepy politician in Washington winks that it’s okay.
It’s not okay. But hey, that’s just me.
And now I was on my way to argue before Judge Michael B. Mukasey why I should not get forcibly drugged for 10 years in prison— without a trial— for contributing to the 9/11 investigation, and warning Colin Powell and my own cousin, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, about the catastrophe of invading Iraq.
Or was that 25 years in prison?
That’s just too much irony for me.
It was a miserable flight.
Yeah, you bet it was. Some things really are unforgivable in a democracy.
to be continued...
notes
CHAPTER 25
481. (i) Court papers. Carswell filing. U.S. vs. Lindauer. Request for Indefinite Detention. February 3, 2006. (ii) Ibid. Bureau of Prison Inmate Locator. Online.
482. Court papers. Carswell filing Request for Involuntary Drugging with Haldol. Feb 3, 2006 (ii) Carswell Federal Medical Center. Internal Memo marked “Sensitive Limited Official Use, ” to Bureau of Prisons, Government Exhibit 2. Drug Recommendations by Dr. Collin J. Vas, Staff Psychiatrist, December 19, 2005
483. Carswell Opinion on Competency. By Dr. Shadduck U.S. vs Lindauer Dec 22, 2005.
484. Ibid. Decision on Internal Medication Hearing. Carswell Prison. Dec 28, 2005. Appendix.
485. Ibid. Congressional Investigation by Rep. Charlie Rose (North Carolina) into U.S. Corporation that supplied Iraq with SCUD Mobile Missile Launchers before the first Gulf War.
486. Ibid. U.S. Linked to Iraqi Scud Launchers, Seymour M. Hersh, New York Times, January 25, 1992
487. Ibid. Letter from Rep. Charlie Rose to Mr. Charles Murdter, Fraud Division of U.S. Department of Justice requesting criminal investigation of a U.S. Corporation accused of supplying SCUD mobile missile launchers to Iraq, citing obstruction of justice in a congressional investigation.
488. (i) Ibid. Court testimony. Parke Godfrey, Southern District of New York, June, 2008 (ii) Affidavit of Parke Godfrey (See Appendix)
489. Ibid. Carswell Opinion on Competency. U.S. vs Lindauer Dec 22, 2005. Omits any and all reference to witness confirmations.
490. Ibid. Decision on Internal Medication Hearing. Carswell Prison. Dec 28, 2005.
491. Carswell Request for Indefinite Detention. U.S. vs. Lindauer. February 3, 2006
492. Biography of Edward O’Callaghan,
493.Law Firm of Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
494. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
495. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
496. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
497. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
498. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
499. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
500. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
501. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
CHAPTER 26
502. Federal Statute on Competence
503. Ibid. Federal Statute on Competence.
504. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
505. Psychiatric Report. Dr. Stuart Kleinman. September 17, 2005.
506. Court Transcript. Ruling on Competence. Judge Loretta Preska. September 15, 2008.
–Mark Twain
“What are you saying? They lied? What do you mean? They fucking lied?”
“They can’t lie to a federal judge! That’s perjury! That’s a federal crime. They know it’s a crime. Half the prisoners here got arrested for making false statements to the FBI. The other half got sentenced for obstruction of justice. They know they can’t do that.”
“That’s right, ” Ted Lindauer told me. “People lie in court all the time.”
“Yeah, criminals lie. Not staff for the Bureau of Prisons! They’re supposed to be the ones telling the truth.”
It was February 3rd . My 120 days were up. I was supposed to board an airplane in Dallas to fly home to Maryland. I was practically hysterical as Uncle Ted gave me the low down on my release, which Carswell had delayed “indefinitely.” 481
That wasn’t the agreement. Granted, they cut the deal without my knowledge or consent. However, it looked pretty good that morning. In exchange for overlooking the violation of my right to a hearing before detention, and my cooperation for the sake of “national security” the Prosecutor was supposed to drop the charges and send me home— not detain me “indefinitely!” That was the end game they sold to Judge Mukasey.
Worst yet, Carswell was arguing that I should be strapped to a gurney, and forcibly drugged with needle injections of Haldol, 482 until I stopped claiming that I worked as a “U.S. Intelligence Asset in anti-terrorism for Nine Years, ” 483 and that I warned about a major terrorist attack involving airplane hijackings and a strike on the World Trade Center throughout the spring and summer of 2001.
Carswell decreed it a “psychotic disorder, not otherwise specified.”
This attack came out of nowhere.
Or did it come straight from Republican headquarters? At that point, I had not seen Carswell’s report prepared by Dr. James Shadduck, but Ted had. Apparently, it carefully overlooked the unhappy truth that my story checked out in total. The report faithfully omitted critical acknowledgements that Shadduck himself had spoken with two witnesses, and fully authenticated the key structure of my history. 484 Documents in Maryland proved my CIA handler’s expertise on Iraq, including his Congressional testimony on Iraq’s SCUD Mobile Missile Launchers in the first Gulf War. 485, 486, 487
I checked out alright. Not a problem.
Dr. Shadduck had also spoken with Parke Godfrey, who provided critical corroboration of my 9/11 warnings. 488
Godfrey had promised to make sure Carswell understood he was repeating what he’d already told the FBI in Toronto in September, 2004. So the FBI and my prosecutor, Edward O’Callaghan, already knew it, too—a year before I got sent to Carswell Prison.
My insistence on pretrial validation had strategically removed “plausible deniability, ” whereby one party shields another from responsibility for their actions by withholding vital information. They couldn’t hide behind the pretence of ignorance—a favorite Washington trick.
I had blocked “deniability” from every angle.
Everybody understood I was telling the truth. The FBI. The U.S. Attorneys Office in New York. Uncle Ted. The hack psychiatrists at Carswell. They’d all verified it.
Distinctly, the only individual who had not verified my authenticity was Judge Mukasey. And he was forced to rely on the integrity of the Justice Department, which has a sworn obligation not to lie about such things to the Court.
Dr. Shadduck was on the inside of the cover up. He could see that Ferguson and Godfrey were eager to bring clarity to the legal confusion. At trial, there would be more high powered witnesses, who would expose more truth. In this pre-trial phase, however, Dr. Shadduck had more than sufficient validation for his purposes.
Knowing all of that, Shadduck deliberately structured his psych evaluation to suggest that no independent corroboration existed. In so doing, Carswell effectively falsified its psychiatric report to Judge Mukasey— who was also hearing the financial lawsuit by World Trade Center owner, Larry Silverstein. 489 And Carswell psychiatrists sought to forcibly drug a known Asset to stop me from saying that I was an Asset who warned about 9/11. 490
With a high enough dosage of psychotropic Haldol, Carswell argued I could be made to forget the details of my activities at the Iraqi Embassy, which contradicted the fanciful “truths” invented by Republican leaders, including my own dear cousin, Andy Card, Chief of Staff to President Bush.
As for “indefinite detention, ” Carswell argued that I should be locked in prison until whatever time psychiatrists could guarantee the “cure” had been effective. 491 Psych evaluations speculated this “cure” would require many years of detention, because my beliefs in my Asset work are so deeply ingrained in my psyche. (It ain’t easy to eradicate reality, even for psychiatry!)
If that’s not Soviet style revisionism, I don’t know what is. It’s something Stalin would have done in the Cold War to crush opponents and enforce political conformity. For sure, when O’Callaghan and Shadduck falsified that psych evaluation, they committed gross professional misconduct.
Vital exculpatory knowledge was withheld from the Court, which Judge Mukasey urgently “needed to know—”
For those outside the intelligence community, “need to know” status gets conferred when any individual, federal judge or not, risks making a decision that would damage the functioning of intelligence operations, or otherwise cause negative blowback on the Intelligence Community. The person “needs to know” to guide their actions, so they don’t do something incredibly stupid or dangerous.
Threatening to forcibly drug an Asset to “cure” her of knowing real intelligence would certainly qualify as a most obscene sort of mistake.
It rendered psychiatry an instrument of State Fascism.
And it put Judge Mukasey in the position of judicially endorsing a cover up of my team’s 9/11 warning and Iraqi Pre-War Intelligence—something he would never have done of his own volition.
O’Callaghan and Carswell didn’t stop to consider the consequences for Judge Mukasey's integrity. They only imagined that if they could forcibly administer enough psychotropic drugs, we could all lie about 9/11 and Iraq together!
They wanted to chemically lobotomize me. And they sought to compromise a senior federal Judge to do it.
Drugging was a political weapon, alright. And my prosecutor, O’Callaghan was nothing if not a political animal. He left the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York to become a top adviser to John McCain and Sarah Palin’s Presidential Campaign in 2008. 492 I could never forget— or forgive— that I got arrested 30 days after contacting McCain’s Senate office in Washington, asking to testify before the Presidential Commission on Pre-War Intelligence.
The next thing I know, I’m under arrest. What a coincidence that my Prosecutor worked for McCain at election time.
O’Callaghan now works at the Law Firm of Peabody Nixon, the haunts of former President Richard Nixon.
You can only imagine the horror that I experienced receiving this news. I was terrified beyond words. Ordinarily, “indefinite detention” implies the maximum prison sentence, 10 years in my case. Typically that’s how the Courts handle violent offenders who get declared incompetent. They get hit with the full sentence. It appeared the Bureau of Prisons wanted to test whether the Patriot Act could be categorized with other major crimes, pushing me into a permanent legal abyss.
On February 3rd , in a moment of blinding panic, I wasn’t sure what part of my situation was the worst— Getting stuck in prison indefinitely, without due process, because of a bogus psychiatric evaluation. Or getting threatened with forcible injections of Haldol throughout my incarceration.
I would have to say drugs tipped the balance.
Haldol was a rhinoceros tranquilizer. It’s a zombie drug that imitates the stonelike effects of Parkinson’s Disease. It kills all daily functioning. And they wanted to shoot me up like some street junkie.
Honestly, I would rather get waterboarded.
There was never any question of compromising on drugs, in exchange for freedom. I would stay in prison as long as it took, but I would never put drugs in my body. Not to save some hack politician in Washington. Not in this lifetime. This would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary. Ted Lindauer and I were confident there’d been enough irregularities that we could overturn forcible drugging in the 2nd Circuit Appellate Court, if Judge Mukasey ruled against me.
“Indefinite detention” could still be in force in that equation. We did not know. Honestly though, for the next months, I was more terrified wondering whether the Court would allow us to “stay” a decision on forcible drugging— to stop Carswell from strapping me to a gurney, while the Court appeals raged on. That frightened me more than anything else.
Uncle Ted demanded that I must not panic. He promised to visit me in Texas, so that we could work out a counter strategy together. 493 Obviously, my attorney, Sam Talkin was out of his depth, and unable to cope with this shocking twist in events. He took no action to fight for my release. He appeared to be stumped as how to proceed.
My beloved Uncle Ted swore that I was not alone. Ted has such a forceful presence as an attorney that he’s practically in the cell with you, talking side by side, hammering out strategies. Ted promised to exert his best energies to broker a solution with the Judge that would get me out of the “hoosiegow, ” as he called it.
Ted kept my courage strong in moments of absolute terror and despair. I could never have survived —and won—without him.
But inside those prison walls after February 3, 2006, a surreal drama began to play out. Reality was thrown out the window. Staff aggressively declared that my Asset work in PreWar Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism from 1993 to 2003 was manifestly delusional, and must be corrected. They began to impose their own psychosis on me, brutally reinventing the truth of my life. All external factors stopped mattering, by order of prison psychiatry. A lifetime’s work against war and violence, the support of senior. Congressional staffers, journalists, attorneys from the Lockerbie case. U.N. diplomats who watched my work for years—None of that external reality mattered any more.
They had tried to force me to recant voluntarily. And they had failed. Now they proposed physically crippling me, so that I would be too destroyed to speak. Or think.
On several occasions, I protested to Dr. Vas that Dr. Shadduck had spoken to witnesses who verified my story.
To which he replied: “That doesn’t matter. I’m going to tell the Judge you made it up. Who do you think they’re going to believe? You or me?”
“I am a doctor.”
In one terrifying episode, a psychiatrist declared, “Don’t worry. I’m going to give you so many drugs, you won’t be troubled by those memories any longer.”
Who cared about reality at Carswell? Who cared about the law? Who cared about ethical behavior and truthful testimony?
Nobody that I could see.
One of the psychology staff said to me: “Reality is whatever I say it is.”
I remember that I looked him hard in the face. I wanted to stare him straight in the eyes, inmate to prison officer, when I shook my head and replied: “You Are Wrong.”
For these reasons, I am firmly convinced that Carswell should be closed to all psychiatric evaluations immediately. Some women prisoners should be entitled to new evaluations, and a reconsideration of their sentencing and any court ordered drugging. This corruption of psychiatry did not start with my case. And it did not end with my case either. It’s endemic to Carswell’s approach to psychiatry and the Courts. A lot of other women inmates have suffered from it, and a lot of other Judges have been fooled by it. Those sentences should be reconsidered at once.
As for me, my nightmare of “extreme prejudice” was beginning in earnest.
It comes down to the old cliché that courage is not the absence of fear, but fighting through fear. Thinking back on it, I was terrified beyond words— and the odds of my victory were stunningly low, at least in the first round, without an appeal to the higher court. Prison staff on that Texas military base had no doubts they would prevail against me. They did not expect me to win.
I began to have a recurring nightmare.
In my dream, I was living in a room filled with water up to the ceiling. I could only breathe through a small air tube that snaked up to a vent above me.
In my dream, the tube was thin, and breathing was difficult. I had so little oxygen.
I was chained to the floor. Looking up through the water, I could see the vent. But I could not see behind it to know if my oxygen would be cut off by some unseen hand. In my dream, I feared that hand intensely.
I remember distinctly knowing that I must stay focused, and concentrate on breathing. If I panicked, I would lose what small source of oxygen I had, and the effect would be catastrophic.
I could not lose control. Yet I had no control. You see?
Imagine a place where prisoners can be physically tortured, crippled and maimed without any rights to stop the abuse. That abuse continues month after month, year after year, until inmates are utterly destroyed beyond the possibility of healing.
Now you’ve got an inkling of what I’m talking about.
My daily life was controlled by an extraordinary confluence of fairly decent prison guards — and a group of sadistic psychology staff. Unhappily, the psych staff appeared to relish their power to inflict tremendous suffering on inmates through crippling dosages of drugs. The women on M-1 had no legal right whatsoever to protect ourselves from their abuse — which had no correlation to prisoner behavior or real life personality traits.
Forcible drugging was about power.
The experience haunts me to this day.
Prisoner Abuse_
Lots of bad things happened at Carswell. But nobody suffered like the women inmates on M-1. Black, white, Hispanic, everybody got hurt. But black women especially got victimized by the All Caucasian psychology staff — and not only those who are poor, less educated and less familiar with their legal rights.
Middle class black women got attacked savagely, too. Apparently it wasn’t “normal” to live outside the ghetto. Think Jennifer Hudson”s role in “Sex and the City.” That’s exactly the sort of black woman targeted on M-1. No joke. The torture of those women would astonish and devastate most Americans. It would break your heart if you saw them. They had no legal counsel that cared for them.
The outcome was hideous. During my 7 month detention at Carswell, I saw these women at the time of their arrival at the prison. Mostly they were in good health, confident and friendly, not violent, not threatening. Just nice people. That was the most striking thing about their behavior. They smiled. They joked with other inmates. They were the girls next door who’d got into trouble, without criminal intent. Mostly their boyfriends or husbands engaged in some criminal act, and they got picked up together. A large number of these women wouldn’t talk to the FBI— called “obstruction of justice—” or else they got hit with making “false statements” to protect their men. (Ladies, that’s a bad idea!) Loyalty to their men caught them several years in prison.
Over the weeks, I would watch their transformation from happy and confident to something terrified and confused. Then zombie-like. It was the most God awful transformation that you could imagine only in your worst nightmares. You would be heartless to wish this sort of violence on an enemy.
None of the prisoners on M-1 showed signs of schizophrenia or hallucinations. That turned out to be another joke about court psychiatry. Almost none of these prisoners qualify as mentally ill. Not until the prison got hold of them! Most of us suffered “post traumatic stress” after the abuse— but nothing else.
In the schism of prison society, we were the Most Normal. We were not the murderers or thugs. We were not predatory towards other inmates. We were the “guests” who shouldn’t be in prison at all. We were strikingly out of place in prison culture.
All of that makes the abuse by prison staff more ugly in that, by all rational assessment, it was totally unnecessary.
Instead of getting abused by hard-core inmates, we got preyed on by vicious, self righteous psychiatrists, who sought to double punish us through crippling dosages of drugs. It’s a great tribute to the strength of these women that despite our lowly legal status, the brutality of the psych department prompted every one of us to discover extraordinary personal resources to survive the damage Carswell tried to inflict on us. Some of these women are truly admirable in how they persevere every day, with graciousness and stamina, through years of prison trauma.
One of my cellmates kept a haunting poem by Maya Angelou taped to her locker.
“And still I rise.”
She stood in front of it every day to read it— like a prayer.
On M-1, Maya Angelou gained fresh significance that would dismay the Poet Laureate herself.
A lot of inmates on M-1 got drugged so badly that they slept 15 to 18 hours a day. Throughout the unit, beds would be full by 1 o’clock in the afternoon every single day.
We ate lunch at 10:30 in the morning, and dinner at 3:30pm. Then everybody on M-1 would take their afternoon drugs and go back to sleep until about 6:30 pm. They’d get up to microwave a snack before the evening count. After the inmate count, most of the women would sleep until the next morning, when prison staff required us to report for indoor recreation. A striking number of inmates would collapse on the floor of the recreation rooms. Drugs knocked them out cold.
Black women always got drugged the worst.
They could not walk. They could not speak in sentences or answer questions. Typically, a response would be “what?” “dunno, ” “huh?” Like that.
Eating took tremendous effort for a lot of women on M-1, white or black. They could not lift a cup to drink without shaking hands. They would spill juice all over their clothes. They could not lift a fork to put food into their mouths, without intense concentration.
They wet their beds at night, because they could not coordinate their body movements to climb out of bed to use the restrooms. There was such sympathy that inevitably one of the other cellmates would get up in the middle of the night, and wash their sheets, if they got diarrhea and couldn’t make it to the toilet.
Urine could wait until the next morning, except for the stink.
Nobody complained about washing their sheets. We grieved for these ladies.
Most hideous of all, they could not bathe themselves. Staff and fellow inmates had to take these women to the showers, strip them naked, and wash them. Every time they bathed, they required help. It was not an occasional thing.
I can still hear those voices in the shower room. They are the stuff of nightmares:
“Raise your arms. Lift your titties, so I can wash you. Let me see your back side. Spread your cheeks for me. Good girl. Can you stand up? No? Let’s get the chair. Sit on that chair now. I’m going to wash your hair. Lean your head back. Don’t get soap in your eyes. Let me towel you off. Let’s dry you off, so I can get your clothes back on you.”
“Do you want me to pull up your underwear? Let me pull up your pants. Can you do that? No? OK, I’ll do that for you.”
Showering in a nearby stall, I would sob for these women. I mean it, I would turn on the water, and weep as I listened to the humiliation they suffered. These adult women had become infantile, like very small children, totally incapacitated.
I would cry for them. It was grotesque and humiliating.
These were young women in their 20s and 30s. They weren’t old or handicapped. They’d been normal until Carswell got hold of them. I cannot emphasize sufficiently that nothing in their outward behavior justified such heavy overdrugging. But Carswell used psychotropic drugs as a form of punishment. Drugs offered another way to inflict suffering, and degrade women who’d already lost their families and freedom anyway. It was sadistic and abusive.
One black woman in her 30s had been tortured like this for years. She suffered all the worst side effects of Haldol, and whatever drug cocktail Carswell kept feeding her. She was docile like a baby. She could no longer speak in sentences. Or eat. Or dress. Or bathe. She slept 18 to 20 hours a day, and wet the bed frequently. All family ties had been lost, since she could not talk on the prison phones.
But she could sing gospel like an angel. Her name was Priscilla, and she could sing beautifully. We’d have to start the lyrics for her. Then something in her memory would kick in, and she’d start singing. The whole room would go silent to listen. Her voice was so melodic and pure, and it accentuated our grief for her daily suffering.
Her prison life was the stuff of nightmares.
Another black woman, about 32 years old, could no longer speak properly. She had trouble eating. Very slowly she would raise a fork, and stare at it for a long time, before putting the food in her mouth. But she made a special promise to the other women on M-1 that she would go to the showers by herself every night. She wanted no help undressing or washing herself. She would persevere in cleaning herself, no matter how bad it got. And it got very bad.
Her ability to shower by herself was the only dignity left in her pride. In all other ways, Carswell had utterly destroyed her. To help her out, other inmates kept a chair in the shower room at all times, so she could sit down. By this stage, it had become an arduous task to look for a chair, or carry it any distance. Those simple actions were beyond her skill level.
Understand— this would continue for years, throughout their sentences. It was a thousand times worse than prison itself. You can survive prison. It’s not pleasant. But this stuff qualifies as actual torture. It’s cruel and unusual—and grossly unnecessary.
The greatest irony was how Carswell quickly screened prisoners in the pre-trial phase, according to whom prosecutors wanted to take to trial, and those they wanted to block from going to trial— like me.
If a pre-trial defendant arrived at Carswell, toying with a psychology angle at trial, Carswell took an entirely different approach.
Let’s say the Defense wanted to prove “diminished capacity” on the basis of a long-time bipolar disorder, a common ploy for leniency from the Courts.
The first thing Carswell asked was whether the new inmate used antidepressants or mood stabilizers? Almost nobody arrived at Carswell on harsher drugs than that.
If the answer was yes, Carswell would pull back the drugs to test whether the condition was authentic.
Taking defendants off prescription drugs was the number one method for restoring competence to stand trial— or otherwise proving a defendant suffered no true diminished capacity. (Mostly Carswell rejected claims of incompetence.)
Guess what? After a few weeks of detox, most prisoners would be just fine without drugs. They’d show their true personality. Low and behold, there would be nothing wrong with those women. Carswell would argue in Court—and I would have to agree, based on their behavior— that they’d been taking prescription drugs for years without cause. Somewhere along the way these women got “misdiagnosed, ” and encouraged to confuse personal problems with mental defects. They’d gotten comfortable taking prescription drugs. Drugs provided a crutch for their lives. But they functioned just fine after a medically supervised detox.
That surprised some of these women, who’d limited their expectations to fit the constraints of their so called “mental diseases or defects.”
Some of these women thanked Carswell after the detox! They felt empowered getting off psych drugs!
Once they got cleaned up, Carswell shipped the women right back to federal court. They were judged competent to stand trial, or plead guilty for sentencing without much leniency.
That says a lot about how psychotropic drugs affect personal performance and self expectations—and not for the better.
It speaks volumes about the phony medical credentials of psychiatry, too, and its propensity for inventing “disease” out of non- observable “symptoms, ” or double prescribing a second set of drugs to mask symptoms created by the first set of drugs.
But heaven protect women inmates who arrived at Carswell for a psych evaluation as part of sentencing, or those of us declared incompetent over our objections, because a prosecutor really had no evidence to support the case against us, and we, defendants refused to accommodate the Court by accepting a guilty plea.
Women like us suffered the most. Carswell would declare us “delusional” and “lacking responsibility” for insisting on our innocence. Then they would file requests to the Court requiring obstructionist defendants to take massive quantities of drugs, usually Haldol, Ativan and Prozac, as part of their “rehabilitation.” That was standard practice. Everyone got the same cocktail of drugs. Even prisoners outside of M-1 and M-2 got heavy doses of psychotropic drugs.
I was at Carswell long enough that I observed new prisoners upon their arrival– healthy, in good spirits, full of good conversation. None of these women struck me as violent or threatening. To the best of my knowledge, I never saw women on M-1 threaten other inmates or guards. Most of the women were guilty as charged. Very few got convicted of serious crimes like bank robbery or child killing. Some might have benefited from counseling, which ironically, was very mediocre at the prison. But 9 times out of 10, they committed crimes of stupidity, drug crimes, tax fraud, or crimes associated with a husband or boyfriend. They’re not instigators. They’re not diabolical. They are followers. They would not be repeat offenders if they got jobs after prison. Employment would be the decisive factor.
All of a sudden, these women could not speak anymore. They could no longer read a book, or write letters home to their families, because they could no longer grip a pen in hand, or process ideas from the written word.
Ominously, I’d hear prison staff talking about how a certain woman liked to read the newspaper— particularly black women.
A black woman wouldn’t read newspapers at Carswell for long. Drugs would take care of that literacy problem.
Other prisoners had to write letters home for them, though most of these women could hardly put together a sentence to tell us what to write. We would suggest greetings, while they sat next to us, mute. Sometimes tears would stream down their cheeks, nodding or mostly grunting, as we proposed messages to their families. It would take considerable effort to express a simple thought.
Since they could no longer read a book, or process ideas in any form, most definitely they could not work at the prison law library. So they could not appeal their sentencing or assist their attorneys– who let’s be honest, did not want their help anyway.
One woman, dragged to Carswell by U.S. Marshals on a bail revocation, could not remember her husband’s phone number, though they’d been married twenty years with an adult son. We took her to the Chaplain’s office, so she could try to phone home, and she stumbled several times trying to dial. This simple act was so difficult that we questioned if she had a husband at all.
It turned out that she was a former Carswell prisoner who stopped taking court-ordered drugs after her release. So the U.S. Marshals picked her up, and doped her to the levels required by Carswell, then shipped her back to prison. She was so over-drugged that she’d lost the ability to perform the most simple tasks, like dialing a telephone. Her husband had no idea what happened to her. She could not speak to anybody. She had trouble washing herself. All of the ugly things.
Horribly enough, prior to her imprisonment, this woman worked in a bank, in a supervisory position—She was a bank manager, with no history of mental illness. She got picked up by the Feds in their sweep of an embezzlement scam by other bank employees.
Ignoring the reality of her life, Carswell declared her incompetent over her desperate objections. Like me, she wanted to fight the charges. Suspiciously, Carswell overruled her demands, then filed a request to forcibly drug her with heavy dosages of Haldol. She lost the fight against forcible drugging, and was detained 11 months. The Court released her on condition that she take the drugs voluntarily. After about a year, she stopped.
Now she was back in prison—but with a different attorney, who challenged the original indictment. The new attorney questioned why the first attorney argued she was “unfit for Trial” in the first place. Critically, her co-defendants filed affidavits saying that she had nothing to do with their crime.
This poor woman wasn’t guilty after all. With the help of her new kick ass attorney, Carswell pulled back the amount of drugs that she was forced to take.
And guess what? This poor abused woman showed no signs of mental illness whatsoever. There was nothing wrong with her. It was another case of Carswell brutalizing a woman prisoner just because they could.
Her story proves something of critical importance to the debate on prison psychiatry:
If you change the attorney, you change the prisoner “diagnosis.” You change the defense strategy, and all the psycho-babble goes away—It rushes away. That’s because most of the time, psychological evaluations are scripted to support the attorney’s legal strategy— not a reflection of the defendant’s true state of mental health. So when you start poking, there’s almost nothing left of a psychological profile, except in the most extreme situations of genuine schizophrenia, or severe bipolar disorder, or long term domestic violence or child abuse.
To put that in context, in 7 ½ months at Carswell, I saw exactly one prisoner with schizophrenia, two prisoners suffering bipolar disorder to a crippling degree, and two prisoners who heard voices— which might have been caused by the heavy psychotropic drugs they were forced to take.
The rest of the inmates were normal, but they broke the law. For whatever reason, they engaged in criminal activity. And they got sent to prison for it.
Psychology in the courts is all about legal strategy in disposing of a case, so an attorney can get out of it. Like mine.
Unhappily, this poor lady, once a bank supervisor, suffered through Two Tours of Carswell to prove it. The first time she served 11 months. The second time she served four months. Plus, she had time at home between Carswell, suffering the crippling effects of Haldol, which had been wrongly administered at high dosages for punitive reasons.
Last I heard, she intended to file a lawsuit.
It was sheer hell from start to finish, and all because Carswell abuses its authority in the courts, and advocates excessive, unnecessary drugging for all prisoners.
That’s what Carswell wanted to do to me. And remember, this was happening in Texas. Think of every worst stereotype of corrupt Texas prison staff, and you’re beginning to get the idea.
Without the “inconvenience” of due process, Carswell can get away with anything. And they know it. When the Hospital Accreditation Review Board shows up to survey the prison facilities, the most chemically lobotomized women get transferred to the SHU until the performance review has been completed. That way nobody on the outside is troubled to see them. And Carswell doesn’t have to answer questions about the crippling impact of drugs on their daily functioning.
It’s a serious problem. I am not the exceptional inmate who was abused at Carswell. I am the exceptional prisoner who escaped abuse.
I escaped, because I fought back as hard as I have fought anything in my life.
For the good of all prisoners, Carswell should lose the right to perform psych evaluations for the federal courts, and all drugging orders should be reviewed with fresh eyes. Cruelty should never be part of that evaluation process. And corruption should never be tolerated when drug recommendations are imposed on prisoners, forcibly or not, in a court of law.
My Own Private Guantanamo
My nightmare was double-force.
When I describe Carswell as my own “private Guantanamo, ” and my status as pretty close to an “enemy non-combatant, ” there are good reasons why.
After Jose Padilla, I was the second non-Arab Americans ever indicted on the Patriot Act. There’s great irony to that. Congress approved the 7000 page law that eviscerated our Constitutional rights in a midnight vote, without reading it first, in frenzied hysteria after 9/11. The Patriot Act supposedly exists to empower law enforcement to break up terrorist cells.
Yet one of the very first Americans to get clobbered by the Patriot Act was an antiwar activist and whistleblower—not exactly what comes to mind when Congress argued for the Patriot Act.
Unforgivably, the Patriot Act was first used to keep Americans ignorant of national security issues, when ordinary people started asking Good Questions about White House policies. Those of us who know the truth got ravaged by the Patriot Act to silence us, while Congress glorified its performance and manipulated the public debate That’s what the Patriot Act accomplished. It has been crafted as an ideal tool for any government cover up. The government arrests the whistleblower, and politicians are safe to make up stories to protect their access to power.
Soldiers at Carswell Air Force Base had no idea that I was a U.S. Asset who got in trouble for providing accurate forecasts about the War in Iraq They had no idea I warned about 9/11, and contributed extensively to the 9/11 investigation.
If you read the mainstream media, I was caught “spying for the Iraqis.” That’s what a lot of soldiers on Carswell Air Force Base believed. The indictment was dirty smoke and propaganda. But soldiers believed what they were told. An accused “Iraqi agent” was locked up on their military base. Having lost my rights to due process under the Patriot Act, I lost my ability to challenge their perceptions of my alleged crimes.
At that moment, American soldiers were losing the War in Baghdad. U.S. forces sustained heavy casualties in 2006, including thousands of amputations, paralysis and head injuries from suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). While I was locked up at Carswell, Sunni factions attacked the golden dome of the famous AlAskariya Mosque in Samarra, launching bloody sectarian strife against the Shi’ites. U.S. soldiers had lost control on the battlefield, and were heading back for third tours of duty away from wives and children. Returning U.S. soldiers showed deep emotional scars and post traumatic stress. The U.S. military faced daunting pressure of two battle fronts, with angry Mujahideen in Afghanistan on the sidelines of Baghdad.
Locking up an accused “Iraqi Agent” inside a Texas military base was like waving a suicide bomb vest in front of a battalion. They couldn’t stop Al Qaeda in Iraq. But they could sure as hell punish me, an “enemy non-combatant, ” (read that, Iraqi spy).
They tried their damnedest to screw me every chance they got. My beloved Uncle Ted Lindauer kept his promise to drive 700 miles from southern Illinois to visit me at Carswell Air Force Base, northwest of Fort Worth, Texas. It’s an 11 hour road trip, driving straight through —in each direction.
When he arrived, Ted identified himself as part of my legal defense team, a fully accurate description by this point. He carried documentation to verify his attorney’s license. Critically, the soldiers understood he was visiting the “accused Iraqi Agent.”
The Sentry guard refused to let Ted Lindauer enter that military base.
The first time it happened, soldiers swore there was no prison inside Carswell Air Force Base. And I was not a detainee. Quite perplexed, Ted assured soldiers at the sentry gate they were mistaken. He had Court papers ordering my surrender to Carswell, and letters postmarked from the prison. He asked to speak with a commanding officer. The commanding officer on duty came out to meet him, but refused to acknowledge that a prison was located inside the military base, either. 494
Ted explained that he had traveled 700 miles, and he was quite positive the prison was there. They didn’t care. He wasn’t coming onto their base. Ted doesn’t give up easily on anything, and he doesn’t play. So they spent a good couple of hours arguing over whether there was a prison inside Carswell Air Force Base. Above all, Ted argued aggressively for my Constitutional rights to attorney access.
Oh yes, the Iraqi agent wanted an attorney.
Ted warned that he would go to the Judge and file a complaint. And that’s exactly what he did. He notified Judge Mukasey’s clerk that he had been denied access to the prison on a weekend— when it was open for family members, attorneys or not. And he complained that my rights to an attorney visit had been violated.
That was Ted’s first attempt to visit me at Carswell Prison. The second time Ted drove 700 miles and 11 hours from southern Illinois, soldiers had a new excuse for denying him access to the base.
Yeah, soldiers at the entry gate acknowledged. Carswell prison existed. But the Sentry swore up and down that the prison had no visiting hours on the weekends. Again Ted argued that was ridiculous. Again the sentry contacted a ranking officer on duty. He came down and refused Ted’s request to enter the base, with the flagrant lie that the prison had no weekend visiting hours. 495
Meanwhile, other families visiting the prison got ushered through the gates around Ted. Inside Carswell, other inmates had visitors all day.
Ted Lindauer had his attorney papers. He had contact names inside the prison. He was on my visitor’s list. None of that mattered. Soldiers told him not to come back the next day, because they would not let him onto the military base then, either.
The Iraqi agent was not getting an attorney visit. End of discussion.
All this time my attorney in New York had done nothing to secure my freedom. If any solution could be brokered, it would have to come from Ted. There was nobody else to do it. This visit was critically important to ending our standoff.
Knowing that, Ted had done everything properly. He notified the Court that he was performing as Co-Counsel for my defense. Judge Mukasey had observed Ted’s presence in Court the day I got ordered to Carswell, and recognized the importance of our relationship. The prison staff on M-1 was fully aware of his close involvement in my case.
He’s also 70 years old, and a very dignified gentleman, with 40 years of senior legal practice. He doesn’t suffer fools. It’s sort of a Lindauer thing.
And still soldiers at Carswell Air Force Base refused to grant him access to me.
Now Ted was furious. This was his second trip to Carswell in several weeks, and he’d been refused entry to the base both times, for the flimsiest of excuses. 496
He warned the Commanding Officer that he would return in a few days. And by God, he would bring the U.S. marshals with him. And those U.S. marshals would escort him onto that military base, into that prison, if soldiers tried to deny Ted Lindauer access to me a third time. 497
While he was at it, he would see that they all got court-martialed for failing in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution. (We know a few Generals, too.)
Unhappily, soldiers guarding Carswell Air Force Base appeared to have a very limited understanding of the Constitution, which is not particularly hopeful, since they’re sworn to protect it. In its most simple maxim, “We, the people of the United States of America” have fundamental protections that define our whole system of government and laws. Those inalienable rights exist to protect us from exactly this sort of arbitrary and tyrannical government abuses like these. For starters, Americans are innocent until proven guilty, with carefully defined rights of due process. And by the way, political prosecutions are expressly frowned upon as tyrannical violations of free speech.
Alas, the U.S. Constitution got fed into the shredder in my case. That illustrates poignantly why prisons should be separate from military establishments. It’s disastrous to allow them to function co-dependently. The military itself does not know how to handle those situations.
Well, Ted Lindauer is a marvelously persevering man. When challenged, he refused to back down.
First thing Monday morning, he called Judge Mukasey and raised all kinds of hell about my Constitutional rights, and how Sam Talkin’s failure to perform had compelled him to intercede, in order to guarantee that I had real, interested legal counsel. He filed a formal protest with the Court, and demanded that U.S. Marshals escort him onto that base. 498
Judge Mukasey could see the situation was spiraling out of control. The whole agreement sending me to Carswell for 120 days, in exchange for ending the case, had collapsed. Obviously the original deal had been hammered out in the black of night, without my consent, by an attorney who now appeared impotent to protect my rights, and took no action to gain my freedom. And I was trapped in prison 1600 miles away.
This violation of my rights to legal counsel was occurring at a critical moment. As a defendant, I desperately required the guidance of a senior legal adviser. Judge Mukasey’s hands were tied by the thinly disguised collusion between the prosecutor and my attorney. And here was the answer to our prayers— a senior, savvy attorney anxious to play a very helpful role brokering a workable solution.
With great perspicacity and fury over the abrogation of my legal rights, Judge Mukasey agreed to have U.S. Marshals standing by to escort Ted Lindauer onto that military base, when he returned to see me a few days later. Judge Mukasey ordered that this legal visit would be protected by the Court. And he ordered Carswell Prison to open the visitor center just for me. 499
Ted Lindauer had Judge Mukasey’s private cell phone number to invoke the power of the U.S. Marshals at the first sign of trouble or delay.
Judge Mukasey kicked some Texas ass that week. Junior staff at Carswell told me he boxed the ears of top prison officers, who sent the message down the ranks that guards had better find me when Ted Lindauer arrived. There would be hell to pay if Ted didn’t get to see me.
As they say, third time’s the charm. It took the threat of U.S. marshals standing by, flanking Ted at the front gate, but we finally got to talk. 500
Mercifully, Ted Lindauer possessed the legal insight to craft a workable compromise to our problem. He arrived carrying a pledge for my signature to submit to Judge Mukasey. Very simply, I would have to agree to attend psychology meetings in Maryland. And I would have to agree to use any drugs prescribed locally
Experience convinced us that once politics got removed from the equation, there would be no drugs. Nevertheless, I had to consent. 501
This agreement gave the court a vehicle for addressing the prosecutor’s demands for drugs, while sidestepping my refusal to use drugs prescribed by Carswell for nonexistent conditions that had nothing to do with real life.
It was simple, but it accomplished what my Uncle Ted understood the Judge needed. He’d done his homework, and he got the agreement in precise language that would be acceptable to the Court, in order for me to go home. He forbade me from changing a single word of it. Truly, Ted Lindauer was a blessing, a jewel, given this massive headache for the Court.
Now it’s always risky to extrapolate a Judge’s thinking. Since no defendant can resist doing it however, I confess that we believed Judge Mukasey was alarmed and frustrated by these surprise developments.
We did not believe Judge Mukasey expected O’Callaghan to pull this stunt, demanding forcible drugging after the Court accepted the finding of incompetence. It put the Judge in a bad position, having ordered me to Carswell for 120 days, without a hearing that would have answered questions about my story. I had begged for that hearing.
Arguably, it gave the Court something else to chew over. It proved the strongest defendant could not overcome the hazards of the Patriot Act, whether guided by senior counsel like Ted Lindauer, or junior counsel like Sam Talkin. My attorney relationship was already burdened by “secret evidence” and “secret charges.” Now I was locked up on a military base — without attorney access — facing indefinite detention. Those factors crippled my capacity to prepare for trial. As a defendant, I was totally helpless to overcome these external obstacles, which were flagrantly unconstitutional anyway.
Judge Mukasey possesses an extremely sophisticated legal mind and a profound sense of fairness. Refusing to allow Ted Lindauer onto Carswell Air Force Base for a crucial attorney visit sent a sobering message.
Ted Lindauer particularly believed that Judge Mukasey saw the legal structure impeding my defense. He trusted Judge Mukasey throughout this whole nightmare.
For myself, as a defendant, I didn’t know what to think. It terrified me not to know how the Court would rule. Judge Mukasey appeared inscrutable, exhibiting a fierce and uncanny depth of insight to the law.
Honestly, I was scared to death.
Saved by the Blogs
This was the most evil thing I’ve ever confronted in my life. And I’ve seen evil before.
People ask me all the time how I survived.
I escaped the fate of other inmates, because I fought back as hard as I’ve ever fought anything in my life.
At the outset, the prospect of my success appeared stunningly low. Usually the courts rubberstamp prison requests for drugs, pretty much automatically. There’s no doubt that Carswell expected the same for me.
Carswell didn’t count on my two secret weapons.
The first, of course, was my beloved Uncle Ted, who fought forcefully and strategically, behind the scenes to broker an agreement that would satisfy the Court, and get me home.
The second surprised me, too— my own beloved companion, JB Fields, who desperately appealed for help in the blog community and internet radio.
JB refused to stand by passively, and let the attack on my rights go unchallenged.
“JB” stood for J Burford of all things. That’s just the initial “J” without any other name attached to it. Born in Kansas, raised in Wyoming, JB was a proud Navy guy who spent six years of his life underwater, trawling the ocean floors on naval submarines. In 11 years of active service, he toured on the “Grayback, ” the “Barb, ” and the “Thomas A. Edison.”
He bragged about surviving a submarine accident, with ocean water spilling into the hold up to his chest. On Hawaii, he ran marathons and swim races alongside friends in the Navy Seals. Afterwards, he worked at the State Department in Washington in computer technology. While living with me, he got his “Top Secret” security clearance, and returned to the State Department as a computer contractor.
So much for my threat to national security.
JB was a generous, warm hearted man, whose greatest passion in life was his motorcycle, nicknamed “Drifty.” Every weekend he blasted off on “Drifty, ” exploring the back roads of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Friends joked that JB knew every ice cream stand, every barbecue pit and every diner from Maryland to North Carolina. JB would just smile, and tell you those things mattered most in life.
One Christmas, JB gave me some fancy motorcycle gear for winter riding. With a big grin, he said, “Isn’t this better than an engagement ring?”
Every moment counted with JB. He had the social flair to enjoy black tie affairs with State Department colleagues, ensconced in policy talk. And the next night, he’d eat crab legs and drink beer at the American Legion in Silver Spring, or at some motorcycle bar. He looked sexy as hell in a Tux, and even sexier in blue jeans and a leather jacket.
Different opinions always excited him. That was key to understanding his nature. He was a fierce civil libertarian, and a strong believer that ideas must be respected. Though he was fiercely opinionated himself, and would argue for hours over the most arcane points, he would gleefully defend the rights of others to hold a different philosophy on life and politics. And he believed those differences made conversation interesting.
Above all, he strongly believed the greatest privilege of the U.S. military is to defend the freedoms of our country— which he adored— and to protect the Constitution— which he held sacred.
And woe to the wicked of Carswell!
From my first days at Carswell, JB championed my cause. He was horrified that I got locked up without a trial or hearing He was appalled the national media didn’t care. My case had intense political overtones, involving Iraq and antiterrorism policy, and a strong human interest angle. Yet corporate media gave short shrift to my nightmare. There was no outcry. My home town newspaper, the Washington Post, showed no curiosity that one of its local gals, a U.S. Asset involved with Pre-War Intelligence, had got locked up on a Texas military base for doing exactly what pundits and Congress swore on the Front Page of the newspaper I should have done.
Journalists wouldn’t touch my story, though JB pleaded for attention. Corporate media watched from the sidelines, abandoning the role of watchdog.
Carswell watched this dynamic, too— closely. Once they saw the media’s indifference, prison staff taunted me that nobody cared. Nobody would help me. They could do anything at all to me, and nobody would stop them.
Sadly, if not for JB Fields, they would have been right.
Terrified by Carswell’s refusal to release me, JB Fields hit the airwaves of alternative radio, with some very cool talk show hosts like Michael Herzog, Greg Szymanski, Derek Gilbert, RJ Hender and Cosmic Penguin — to name a few of the awake and vigilant alternative radio hosts, who broadcast my story from the very beginning.
Republic Broadcasting, Oracle, Orion and Liberty Radio carried my story to their listeners before anybody else! And their scrutiny made all the difference!
JB was so frightened that he started posting my story on blogs all over the internet, with a cry for help to defend my rights to a hearing, so I’d have a chance to prove my story in court.
The hand of Providence moved for me again, and JB was soon joined by a passionate and highly articulate activist named Janet Phelan, who’s got a long tradition defending America’s liberties in her own right. Janet hosted a radio talk show, “One if by Land.” An incredibly talented lady, Janet brought a deeper perspective on the abuse of women by psychology, and the Soviet style of abusing creative thinkers and activists under the guise of “mental health.” She also fiercely condemned the Patriot Act.
Janet Phelan was phenomenal. Together, she and JB smoked the blogs with outrage over the irregularities of my imprisonment on the Patriot Act, and the outrageous threat to forcibly drug me until I could be “cured” of knowing inconvenient truths that the government wished to obliterate.
Corporate media might have been sleeping, but the blogging community woke up, and gave JB and Janet a forum to fight. What I call “awake blogs, ” like “Scoop” Independent News, Smirking Chimp, Intel Daily, Op Ed News, American Politics Journal, Atlantic Free Press, and The Agonist joined the battle, appalled by what was happening. Cutting edge bloggers like WelcomebacktoPottersville.com watching the road ahead, championed my cause from day one.
Later, as my legal drama continued, one of the truly outstanding blog journalists today, Michael Collins, picked up my story. Then we were off to the races!
At Carswell, JB Fields fought like a banshee to free me — what he described as the most lonely and frightening experience of his life. JB declared that he could not say if I was innocent—and he did not always agree with my politics, which made for some lively conversations. But he insisted that I had the right to face my accusers in open court. He urged blog readers to support my right to an evidentiary hearing, so I could a fair chance to call my witnesses to prove the authenticity of my claims!
This was about America, and the bad things happening to ordinary people under the Patriot Act. JB and Janet argued fiercely and passionately that the legal traditions of this country must be defended. They kicked up one helluva fight. And they refused to back down.
Blowback from the blogs fired seismic shock waves through Washington. You’d be amazed who told me they heard JB’s radio interviews after I got out.
As long as the corporate media stayed silent, Capitol Hill could pretend this judicial abuse of a U.S. Intelligence Asset was not occurring. Safe behind their ivory tower walls, the Power Elite of Washington imagined they were untouchable, their fortress impenetrable.
Only now, thanks to JB Fields and Janet Phelan, Capitol Hill confronted the emerging force of the blogs and alternative radio, at a crucial moment when the internet community was proving it’s got the muscle to shatter the media silence.
JB and all the other bloggers who picked up my story saved my life and my freedom. Without that outcry, my fate would have been very different.
That’s what separated my victory from the tragedy of so many others. Other women don’t have those resources. Sadly, their stories suffocate and die from lack of exposure, while my ordeal was redeemed by JB’s perseverance.
Finally, JB and I got a break.
On April 24, 2006, the Court made a surprise announcement.
CHAPTER 26:
THE
FRIENDLY
SKIES OF
CON AIR
JB and I used to joke
that I was starring in my
own Robert Ludlum spy
thriller. Every action
invoked a sinister plot twist
that got more dangerous as I
went along. Like the lovely April morning I got the news that I was finally transferring out of Carswell.
With a mischievous grin, the guard on duty stuck his head in the doorway to my cell.
“Hey Lindauer, pack up! You’re outta here. You’re leaving tomorrow night.”
I think I screamed with joy, because other inmates in the hallway came running to hear my news. I started to grab the guard for a hug before I caught myself.
It was April 24, 2006. I crowed in jubilation, ecstatically thrilled. Elated with joy!
In all, I had been detained 7 ½ months for a psych evaluation that ordinarily takes six to eight weeks, and only because so many prisoners are getting processed simultaneously. Federal guidelines set a maximum of 120 days for prison evaluations. 502 My detention lasted 210 days— in strict violation of federal law. Not to mention the evaluation lacked purpose. I’d proven myself over and over again. The whole thing amounted to a convoluted scheme so the Justice Department could escape a trial.
But that morning I felt overjoyed.
“I’m going home! I’m going home!” I started dancing around my cell.
“Um, Lindauer. Uh, no. I’m driving a bus-load of prisoners to the inmate transfer center in Oklahoma City tomorrow night. You’re, uh, flying to New York. On Con Air.”
“To New York? On Con-Air? There must be a mistake. I live in Maryland.”
“You’re not going home, Lindauer. They’re sending you to the Metropolitan Correctional Center for Pre-Trial detention in Manhattan.”
The wheel of “extreme prejudice” was turning alright.
They were coming in for the kill.
At that moment I wasn’t nearly paranoid enough to conceive the depth of their malevolence.
“I’m staying in prison? Seriously? I don’t understand. I’m supposed to go home after the evaluation.” (Carswell filed its report on December 22, 2005—four months earlier).
“I talked to my attorney yesterday. Why didn’t he tell me that I’m going to Court? How could my attorney not know I’m getting transferred?”
“I don’t know.” The guard shook his head. “Hey, you’re out of here, Lindauer.”
He leaned closer. “That’s a good thing, right? Your Judge has something he wants to say before he lets you go. That’s all. Be cool.” This guy was a good guard.
“Yeah, yeah. That’s got to be it. My Uncle just sent a settlement offer to the Court. My uncle had to do it, because my stupid ass attorney couldn’t figure it out.”
“That’s probably what the meeting’s for. Hey, Lindauer, it’s all good! You’re packin’ up. You’re leaving Carswell. Stay happy.”
As for divining my future in New York, my fellow prisoners jumped straight into the tea leaves. Their verdict was unanimous.
“If they’re sending you out of here, Susan, you’re not coming back. Why else would they go to the trouble? You’re done! It’s over! Your uncle’s taken care of you.”
I could not count how many of my fellow inmates wished they had an Uncle Ted Lindauer.
“You’re going home. You’ve just got a stop over in New York first.”
J.B was ecstatic. He saw it as proof that the blog community had forced Carswell’s abuse and threats into the open. The game was becoming untenable to continue.
I was deliriously happy. There are few moments in life that I have experienced such joy.
My attorney was less enthusiastic.
“The Judge has called a hearing, Susan. You wanted a hearing, right? Well, you’re going to get one, ” Talkin told me, glumly. “That’s why they’re sending you to M.C.C.”
I gave a deep sigh, and shook my head.
It was everything Ted and I feared when Judge Mukasey ordered me to surrender to Carswell in September. It put us back to square one. I’d suffered seven months in prison for nothing!
Ted warned that anger would be a waste of energy. I had to focus on getting home.
I growled to myself, but Ted was right. At least Judge Mukasey would learn the truth. There would be no more question marks. He could hear it for himself— just like the FBI, the U.S Attorney’s Office, the prison staff at Carswell, and Uncle Ted. We’d all be on the same page. Nobody could pretend I had invented this story.
I imagined that after the hearing, the Court would restore my bail until trial. I’d already surrendered to prison once, on the court’s whim. I was hardly a flight risk.
But what a waste of 7 months. We could have gone to trial already. I could have been acquitted without spending a single night in a prison cell.
I grit my jaw. That made me so angry.
I could see Ted’s face, and hear his words: “Stay focused. How you got here is less important than what you do next. We’ve got to get you out of the Hoosiegow, kid.” At least I had an excellent source of legal advice, even if it wasn’t my own attorney.
I turned my attention back to Sam Talkin.
“Very well. We’ll call witnesses to prove my story’s true. That’ll put an end to this psychology garbage. Judge Mukasey will hear enough to know it’s all baloney.”
Now I could see Richard Fuisz before me again, solemnly raising his finger, counting like a metronome. “Every situation, every encounter gives you a weapon or a tool. Anything that comes at you, you must use.”
Okay then. A hearing it would be. I would have been overjoyed if the Prosecutor kept his word about dropping the charges. Who could blame me? On the other hand, once witnesses verified my story, we could argue for dismissing the indictment ourselves. It would be up to the Judge. But this gave us a fresh chance to undo the damage of Dr. Drob’s report, which misrepresented the quality of my witnesses. The Justice Department had its pound of flesh. A pre-trial hearing might be the best thing for everybody. It might satisfy the Court of my innocence, and make the case go away.
Not to mention the great satisfaction I would get proving the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office had always known I was telling the truth. They’d been playing games with Judge Mukasey, gratis of the Patriot Act.
I heard another whisper from my mother, Jacqueline Shelly Lindauer. “Save your emotions for revenge.”
Alright then. A hearing it would be!
“I don’t know if we want those witnesses—” Sam Talkin began to whine.
“What are you saying? Of course we want those witnesses!”
Idiot! Sam Talkin was exasperating! As soon as I got home, I intended to fire him. In the meantime, any hearing before Judge Mukasey would be precious.
“We can talk about it when you get here, ” Talkin pouted. How do you break the news to a prisoner that she’s getting fucked again? (As delicately as possible.)
“See, the hearing isn’t about your competence, ” Talkin started whining. “It’s on forcible drugging.”
“WHAT THE FUCK are you saying? A hearing on forcible drugging? Are they INSANE!!???!!!”
My heart thudded to the floor at this bad news. Now I saw with clarity why Talkin had dreaded telling me before. The mere suggestion staggered with obscenity.
I mean, reality is not a disease. Psychology might be, however.
“No, Sam. No F—G— Damn Way, ” I’d buffed up my prison vocabulary at the law library, too.
(JB declared that I “cursed like a pirate” when I got home.)
“The law guarantees my right to a competence hearing, and I refuse to give up that right. I’m entitled to call witnesses and show evidence to address the questions raised in these idiotic psych evaluations. 503 That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“Yeah well, I told them we didn’t need to do that, ” Talkin mumbled into the phone. “I didn’t know the Prosecutor was going to ask for this.” He whined, pitifully.
“You did WHAT?!”
This was “extreme prejudice” alright, to the hundredth degree. And my public attorney walked into their trap, every time. Talkin would refuse to listen to me or Ted. He would miscalculate their sincerity, and he would be wrong again and again.
Except he was playing with another person’s freedom.
I suspect Talkin was afraid the Court would hear how Uncle Ted had been forced to interview my witnesses for my Defense, and how effortlessly he succeeded in validating my story. 504 His success contradicted the image of difficulty Talkin was projecting, and exposed his own mediocrity in the case.
“YOU agreed to give up MY rights? Oh no. I’m going to send Judge Mukasey a letter today. I will demand the Court uphold my rights as guaranteed by federal statute. JB will get in touch with everybody, so they know they have to come. We’ll be ready.”
“I’m not playing, Sam.” I swore adamantly. “That’s one good thing about prison. I’ve had lots of time to Read the Law.” I was ferocious.
“We’re having the God damn hearing. I don’t give a f— what you told Judge Mukasey. You are not entitled to violate my rights. I’m going to make sure that Judge Mukasey registers my demand, as the Defendant. Parke Godfrey will be in Court that day, ready to testify that I warned him about 9/11.”
“And he’s going to tell Judge Mukasey that he told the FBI all about my 9/11 warning a FULL YEAR before I got shipped to Carswell. He talked to Shadduck here, too. So the FBI, the US Attorneys Office and the Bureau of Prisons all know that it’s true, and they’ve all been playing games with Judge Mukasey.”
“There’s a name for that in prison, Sam. It’s called perjury.”
“If I were the Judge, I would be madder than hell about it.”
I always saw Judge Mukasey as the second victim of psychiatry in my case.
Again I saw the face of Richard Fuisz, stern and quiet: “Every situation gives you a weapon or a tool.”
That was the best advice I’d heard all day.
Alright then, I was getting out of Carswell. I was going to face my Judge. There’d be no distance between us. I would look him straight in the eye, and I’d bloody well lay out the whole thing.
A weapon or a tool was right.
After 7 months cut off from Court access, we’d all be in the same time zone, the same city! Glory hallelujah!
How could any defendant expect to prepare a legal strategy separated by a distance of 1,600 miles from her attorney? I was stuck in Texas, and my attorney was half way across the country in New York. It struck me as legally absurd to complain about my capacity to assist my defense, then deny me physical access to legal counsel. That’s a killer for any defendant.
OK, so a prison transfer to New York would be like paradise. I swore to God on a stack of Bibles that I would never go back to Texas again! I know lots of proud and wonderful Texans. They can visit me in Maryland.
Driving out of Carswell on the prison bus that night felt surreal. We stayed up all night, excited to leave. The bus pulled out at four in the morning, while it was still dark, for the 200 mile drive to Oklahoma City. It felt like a party, a heart-felt celebration.
Some of my fellow inmates had been trapped inside that razor wire for years. Getting on that bus, you wanted to grab that free earth and give thanks to God!
Surprisingly, the prison transit center is located at the Oklahoma City Airport — It occupies a separate compound, like an island outpost, with its own runway in sight of the main passenger terminals. That intrigued me. It appeared to house 300 women at a time, with a separate shed for male prisoners.
The detention center had the look and feel of a huge hangar for airplanes. There were no windows that I recall, just extra large holding cells big enough for 40 to 50 people, used for inmate processing. Each holding cell had two open toilets with no seat rim or toilet paper. The toilets were mostly broken and couldn’t flush. That’s prison for you. They don’t want anybody coming back.
After processing, we got escorted into a vast open room behind locked doors, with cafeteria tables and a prison laundry. Some of the women inmates folded towels and sheets to stay busy throughout the day. Tiny cells lined the edge of the walls.
First though, we had to go through inmate screening. One by one, guards called us out of the holding cell, lined us up, and ran through our records.
When they called me, I discovered that Carswell had played dirty. Again.
Carswell had singled me out of all the transfer prisoners, with an urgent recommendation that I should be locked in the SHU, or solitary confinement during transit, citing the Patriot Act.
To their credit, Oklahoma City stopped to ask some questions. The guards said only the most violent and dangerous prisoners go to the SHU in transit. They assured me it would be terribly unpleasant for a woman. Besides that, Carswell’s request made no sense. Looking at my prison record, I had no disciplinary problems. Some of the other women had serious behavior problems at Carswell, and none of them was going to the SHU. The guards finally struck down Carswell’s recommendation.
Oh but I understood Carswell’s motivation immediately. And it had nothing to do with behavioral problems or confrontations with prison guards.
Don’t forget— Just as I contributed to the 9/11 investigation, I also contributed to the Oklahoma City bombing investigation. And I complained the Justice Department was suppressing intelligence from Iraq, proving a broader conspiracy in the Oklahoma attack. Iraq claimed to possess proof of Middle East involvement in Oklahoma, including financial records for early Al Qaeda fighters, formerly known as the “Inter-Arab Group.”
There was circumstantial evidence that Terry Nichols, the lead coconspirator of the Oklahoma bombing, had meetings with Ramzi Yousef, ringleader of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, while both men visited the same University in the Philippines, known for Islamic radicalism. Both attacks relied on truck bombs loaded with fertilizer.
Carswell didn’t want me talking to prisoners or guards in Oklahoma City. They didn’t want those folks listening to what I had to say. Odds are those detention officers might know some of the Oklahoma families, and the word would get out.
Still, the SHU is a bad place for any prisoner. It’s for heavy duty punishment. I could only imagine what Carswell would concoct once I got to New York.
Try to imagine this brutal irony from where I was standing—in shackles and prison uniform.
I was booked for transport on Con-Air from Oklahoma City— where I contributed to their bombing investigation. My final destination was New York City, where I gave advance warning about 9/11 and the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. New York had been a primary beneficiary of my antiterrorism work for almost a decade.
If that’s not ironic enough, the federal courthouse in New York sat approximately 1,000 yards from where the World Trade Center once graced the New York skyline.
Pending the outcome of the decision, I would be locked up at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) a couple of blocks from Ground Zero. I would be detained in the same prison where Ramzi Yousef and other defendants waited for trial in the 1993 terrorist conspiracy that launched my career as an Asset.
Like the cycle of a Greek tragedy, the most profound experiences of my life turned on the World Trade Center, from start to finish.
I gave my whole life to this work. It defined me. I sacrificed all of my personal life for it. For all of the excitement of it, I enjoyed no public fame. Very quietly I celebrated my triumphs with a small number of people who understood my contributions. If most of my work was anonymous however, my role as a back channel to Iraq and Libya was no less critical, for the simple fact that almost nobody engaged in direct conversations with those pariah nations in the 1990s. I quietly provided an opening for covert dialogue.
If I must say, my team did a damn fine job.
And this was how America paid me back.
I was not traveling by limousine to a red carpet reception with roses and champagne. I would receive no special plaque with the Keys to the City from the Mayors of New York and Oklahoma City.
There would be no “first class” seating with a wine bar and cocktails on a 757 jumbo jetliner. No five star hotel accommodations at the Trump Plaza in Manhattan.
I would travel in shackles and chains.
I would fly the friendly skies of “Con Air, ” with hard core criminals and brokenhearted souls and stripped down creature comforts. I would be gawked at by male prisoners who hadn’t seen a woman in years. Some of the women prisoners flirted mercilessly, teasing them. Odds are they’d be remembered for years.
Since I was handcuffed, when I had to go to the bathroom, a U.S. Marshal would have to pull down my pants, and raise ‘em up again when I was finished.
Oh yeah, it would be a helluva flight.
And for what? I stood accused of engaging in anti-terrorism that politicians on Capitol Hill declared their highest priority for national security. Now those same leaders wanted to exaggerate their success to voters in Oklahoma City and New York.
Is that ironic enough for you?
I choked on the outrage of it.
Shamefully, I suffered ridicule in court proceedings 505, 506 for declaring my faith that New Yorkers would appreciate what I had done on behalf of their city.
They say New York has a cold, cold heart. Maybe they would care in Oklahoma City, where a nursery school filled with toddlers and infants got destroyed in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building. 507 Do you think those 19 babies died quickly crushed under all that concrete? Did they scream for their mommies as they suffocated with broken bones?
Do you care?
Well I care. If those parents told me to stop, I would consent out of respect for their grief. But I would be damned to hell before I ever stop hunting men who kill anybody’s children— and certainly not because some creepy politician in Washington winks that it’s okay.
It’s not okay. But hey, that’s just me.
And now I was on my way to argue before Judge Michael B. Mukasey why I should not get forcibly drugged for 10 years in prison— without a trial— for contributing to the 9/11 investigation, and warning Colin Powell and my own cousin, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, about the catastrophe of invading Iraq.
Or was that 25 years in prison?
That’s just too much irony for me.
It was a miserable flight.
Yeah, you bet it was. Some things really are unforgivable in a democracy.
to be continued...
notes
CHAPTER 25
481. (i) Court papers. Carswell filing. U.S. vs. Lindauer. Request for Indefinite Detention. February 3, 2006. (ii) Ibid. Bureau of Prison Inmate Locator. Online.
482. Court papers. Carswell filing Request for Involuntary Drugging with Haldol. Feb 3, 2006 (ii) Carswell Federal Medical Center. Internal Memo marked “Sensitive Limited Official Use, ” to Bureau of Prisons, Government Exhibit 2. Drug Recommendations by Dr. Collin J. Vas, Staff Psychiatrist, December 19, 2005
483. Carswell Opinion on Competency. By Dr. Shadduck U.S. vs Lindauer Dec 22, 2005.
484. Ibid. Decision on Internal Medication Hearing. Carswell Prison. Dec 28, 2005. Appendix.
485. Ibid. Congressional Investigation by Rep. Charlie Rose (North Carolina) into U.S. Corporation that supplied Iraq with SCUD Mobile Missile Launchers before the first Gulf War.
486. Ibid. U.S. Linked to Iraqi Scud Launchers, Seymour M. Hersh, New York Times, January 25, 1992
487. Ibid. Letter from Rep. Charlie Rose to Mr. Charles Murdter, Fraud Division of U.S. Department of Justice requesting criminal investigation of a U.S. Corporation accused of supplying SCUD mobile missile launchers to Iraq, citing obstruction of justice in a congressional investigation.
488. (i) Ibid. Court testimony. Parke Godfrey, Southern District of New York, June, 2008 (ii) Affidavit of Parke Godfrey (See Appendix)
489. Ibid. Carswell Opinion on Competency. U.S. vs Lindauer Dec 22, 2005. Omits any and all reference to witness confirmations.
490. Ibid. Decision on Internal Medication Hearing. Carswell Prison. Dec 28, 2005.
491. Carswell Request for Indefinite Detention. U.S. vs. Lindauer. February 3, 2006
492. Biography of Edward O’Callaghan,
493.Law Firm of Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
494. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
495. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
496. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
497. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
498. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
499. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
500. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
501. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
CHAPTER 26
502. Federal Statute on Competence
503. Ibid. Federal Statute on Competence.
504. Affidavit of Thayer Lindauer, See Appendix. 2010
505. Psychiatric Report. Dr. Stuart Kleinman. September 17, 2005.
506. Court Transcript. Ruling on Competence. Judge Loretta Preska. September 15, 2008.
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