IMPLICATIONS OF THE LINDAUER CASE

It happens nearly every day-- every day we hear about more shocking incursions on our liberties. First there was the Patriot Act, and then the Military Commissions Act, which was not overturned by Boumediene v. Bush. This decision, which has not even been implemented yet, applied only to the detainees at Guantanamo-- it is still possible for American citizens to be arrested on charges of being "unlawful enemy combatants" and incarcerated without due process. If one receives a trial at all it will not be a fair one, as was the case with Joe Padilla. And now we hear, from the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, that President Obama is considering instituting an unconstitutional "preventative detention system" (BORDC Newsletter, "Dissent is Patriotic", June 2009 Vol. 8 No. 6). Most sinister of all are the plans of the so-called "New Freedom Commission on Mental Health" to initiate universal mental health screening, helped by TeenScreen, the Mother's Bill, and policies which force dangerous drugs on our soldiers. These measures are threatening precisely because most people think that a psychiatric diagnosis of mental illness and psychiatric "treatments" are instruments designed to help people. They are not. They are weapons designed to reduce all American citizens to what Henry David Thoreau called "conscienceless robots". Nowhere is this shown more clearly than in the case of Susan Lindauer.

Susan Lindauer is a former journalist and Congressional aide with links to the American intelligence community. I have never seen any credible evidence that she has any history of mental illness whatsoever, and her writings reveal a mind which is not only sane but possessed of an insight and prescience lacking in any government official. The only thing which might indicate a lack of judgement is her faith in the United States government, but this failing is all too common today. Her intelligence connections enabled her to see as early as 2001 that not only did Iraq have no weapons of mass destruction, but that Saddam Hussein was eager to distance himself from Islamic extremists. From that year until 2003 she sent a series of impassioned memos to her second cousin, Andrew Card, who was then White House Chief of Staff, arguing against an invasion of Iraq. In these memos she said that Saddam Hussein would welcome an FBI task force into Baghdad, which would be able to "interview witnesses and make arrests." If the U.S. did not accept this offer of cooperation on Saddam's part, the consequences could be catastrophic, because Iraqis already hated the U.S. as a result of the U.N. sanctions it had sponsored: "That hatred has kindled deeply because of the sanctions, Andy. Sanctions have killed 1.7 million human beings, including almost one million little children. Stop and think. What would an American father do to the man who had killed three of his children, once that father could lay hands on the aggressor? [H]e'd beat him to death and stab him 100 times until his arms were sore. And then he'd look for the next man..." In her last memo, Lindauer warned that an invasion would only strengthen terrorism: "Above all, you must realize that if you go ahead with this invasion, Osama bin Laden will triumph, rising from his grave of seclusion. His network will be swollen with fresh recruits and other charismatic individuals will seek to build on his model multiplying those networks." (Interview with Michael Collins, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0710/S00266.htm)

As we all know, Lindauer's predictions have proven accurate. But what did she get for her conscientious efforts? On March 11, 2004, she was shocked to find FBI agents pounding on the door of her Takoma Park house in Maryland with a warrant for her arrest. She had been accused of acting as an "unregistered agent" for Saddam Hussein. If that was what she really was, she could have been easily tried and convicted for the crime. But the prosecution must not have been serious, because it never tried her for it. Instead it sent her to a prison on a military base in Carswell, Texas, where she was subjected to a psychiatric evaluation. The Carswell psychiatrists decided that she was "deluded" into thinking that she had worked as a CIA asset, although had she been given a trial, she could easily have called witnesses to prove that she had. Most tellingly, they pressured her into taking Haldol, a neuroleptic drug which the Soviet government had favored for use against dissidents. Its effects were described in a 1976 interview with Soviet dissident Leonid Plyushch: "I was horrified to see how I deteriorated intellectually, morally and emotionally from day to day. My interest in political problems quickly disappeared, then my interest in scientific problems, and then my interest in my wife and children." (Peter Breggin, Toxic Psychiatry, pp. 57-8). She wisely refused to take the medication, and her refusal was upheld in a hearing before Judge Michael Mukasey (later Attorney General) in September 2006, but in terms which completely discredited her as a person capable of influencing anyone. "The record shows that even lay people recognize that she is seriously disturbed," said Muakasey. It seems that a neighbor had suspected her of being mildly schizophrenic. That such flimsy evidence could take precedence over the undeniable rationality of her argument against an invasion speaks volumes about how low the legal system-- indeed the entire government of the United States has sunk.

In one of a series of exclusive interviews which she granted to Michael Collins, Lindauer exposed the corrupt nature of forensic psychiatry in this country, in terms which suggest that psychiatry as a whole is corrupt. She said, "I am furious about the abuse I have suffered. I regard this as a Soviet-style attackon my rights to dissent from the government... Psychiatry was corrupt enough to help the Bush Administration out of a jam, which says a lot. Forensic psychiatry is a profitable business. In my opinion they are charlatans and court prostitutes who are abusing their access to the courts in order to get money out of the state and federal budgets. They have little or no value. For myself, I have never engaged in therapy or counseling. I would never confide personal affairs to them, or listen to anything they have to say. In a weird twist, anything I say could get reported to pre-trial services. It's not private. They were a huge waste of time, burning the clock on my 6th Amendment rights... Psychiatrists are terrified of witness testimony to the point of psychotic reaction. They're so insecure as to be deeply threatened that reality will impose limitations on their phony authority in the courtroom. The consequences for due process of law is quite terrifying. On horrific shrink-- Dr. Robert L. Goldstein-- actually testified that the depth of my belief in witness testimony confirmed "the seriousness of my mental illness"... It was the most terrifying and Kafkaesque experience of my life. Truly it proves that psychiatry is out of control in the courts. They invent and fabricate, and if the truth contradicts them, they don't even care. As Dr. Vas at Carswell put it, "We'll just tell the court you made it up. Who do you think the judge is going to believe? I'm a doctor!" (http://thejournal.epluribusmedia.net) If Lindauer was indeed deluded about having worked as an intelligence asset, this fact could have been proven within a single session in court. She says that she could, using witnesses, prove her case in fifteen minutes. But the evidence for or against her contention has in fact never been heard. To date, the government has not permitted her a fair trial, instead declaring her mentally incompetent on the testimony of the sort of psychiatrist she described.

Lindauer was fortunate in that she was spared the necessity of taking Haldol. Perhaps this was the one benefit she reaped from having had a second cousin working as Chief of Staff in the White House. But what about the dissident with no such connections? For American dissidents must recognize that the time is coming when we will all be arrested for our convictions. The government has been keeping tabs on our organizing and protesting activities-- indeed, as soon as this blog is published, it will be split off from all irrelevant, non-political material in a special room at my local AT&T office and sent to the National Security Agency. It would be wisest under the circumstances for me to keep silent, but I am conscience-bound to do my best to save others. And what can we expect if the FBI should one day pound on our doors and say that they are there to arrest us for some imagined crime? Should the dissident suspect cooperate under the illusion that certainly, in this great nation of ours, he will have his day in court? That even if he is sentenced to prison, it will be for something which all recognize as a crime of conscience, like refusing to go to Vietnam in the nineteen-sixties? That he will emerge from the crisis a hero, like Henry David Thoreau? If he thinks this, he is a fool. The authorities will incarcerate him and subject him to psychiatric examination as they did Lindauer-- and most probably, if he has no relatives in the White House, psychiatric torture as well. It will use ECT to wipe out his memory and psychiatric drugs to remove his emotions, causing him to forget all the convictions for which he was arrested and why they mattered to him. By the time he emerges, it will be as a broken man or woman, a walking advertisement for totalitarianism.

Under these circumstances, he must fight to the death in order to avoid apprehension, and either take his own life or place himself in a position in which his assailants will be forced to kill him. The decision to die is not an easy one, but there is much to be learned from the traditions of the Japanese samurai who steeled themselves every day for this eventuality and about which I shall be writing in future blogs. For the time being I have only this to say: never allow yourself to be arrested, never allow yourself to be taken alive, for to do so in today's society is to surrender and suffer total defeat. Suicide under such circumstances is not an expression of depression or despair but rather of defiance. Today's dissident is like a soldier--nay, more like a warrior-- although he does not want to die, although he may passionately love life and resent those who have pushed him to this choice, he must recognize that for him, death is the only alternative to defeat. In the end the decision to die at a moment of our own choosing, in defiance of the totalitarian monster under which we live, will be the most important choice we will ever make.