Susan Lindauer

Susan Lindauer (born July 17, 1963) is an American journalist and antiwar activist. She was charged with "acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government" after being accused of spying for the Iraqis in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. She was incarcerated in 2005 and released the next year, after a judge ruled her mentally unfit to stand trial. The government dropped her prosecution in 2009.
Personal life
Lindauer is the daughter of John Howard Lindauer II, a newspaper publisher and former Republican nominee for Governor of Alaska. Her mother was Jackie Lindauer (1932-1992) who died of cancer.
Education and employment
Lindauer attended East Anchorage High School in Anchorage, Alaska, where she was an honor student and was in school plays. She graduated from Smith College in 1985. She earned a masters degree in public policy from the London School of Economics.
She then worked for Representative Peter DeFazio (D-OR, 1993) and then Representative Ron Wyden (D-OR, 1994) before joining the office of Senator Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL), where she worked as a press secretary and speech writer.
Arrest, incarceration and release
Lindauer claims she was conducting peace negotiations with representatives of Muslim countries (including Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, and Yemen) in New York. According to transcripts Lindauer presented to the New York Times in 2004, these included meetings with Iraqi Muthanna al-Hanooti, another peace activist later accused of spying. Lindauer also says that the U.S. intelligence community was aware of these meetings and monitoring her.Starting in 2000, she delivered multiple letters to Andrew Card, leaving them on the doorstep of his home in Northern Virginia. In her letters, she urged Card to intercede with President George W. Bush to not invade Iraq, and offered to act as a back channel in negotiations. She claims the former Chief of Staff is a distant cousin. Lindauer later said she was charged under the PATRIOT Act.
Lindauer was charged with "acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government". The indictment alleged that she accepted US$10,000 from the Iraqi Intelligence Service in 2002. Lindauer denied receiving the money, but confirmed taking a trip to Baghdad. Lindauer was also accused of meeting with an FBI agent posing as a Libyan, with whom she spoke about the "need for plans and foreign resources to support resistance groups operating in Iraq."
She was released on bond on March 13, 2004, to attend an arraignment the following week. Sanford Talkin of New York was appointed by the court as Lindauer's lawyer.
In 2005 she was incarcerated at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas, for psychological evaluation. She was then moved to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. He noted that the severity of Lindauer's mental illness, which he described as a "lengthy delusional history", weakened the prosecution's case. In his decision he wrote, "Lindauer ... could not act successfully as an agent of the Iraqi government without in some way influencing normal people .... There is no indication that Lindauer ever came close to influencing anyone, or could have. The indictment charges only what it describes as an unsuccessful attempt to influence an unnamed government official, and the record shows that even lay people recognize that she is seriously disturbed."
During her incarceration she refused antipsychotic medication which the United States Department of Justice claimed would render her competent to stand trial. The presiding judge would not allow her to be forcibly medicated, as requested by the prosecution.
At a hearing in June 2008, Lindauer told reporters that she had been a CIA asset, and said she had "been hung out to dry and scapegoated". Preska ruled that Lindauer's belief in her connection to the intelligence community was evidence of her insanity.
On January 16, 2009, the government decided to not continue with the prosecution saying "prosecuting Lindauer would no longer be in the interests of justice."
Book and subsequent claims
Lindauer has written a self-published book about her experience, Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover-Ups of 9/11 and Iraq.
Lindauer claims that for a number of years she had worked for the CIA and DIA undertaking communications with the Iraqi government, serving as a back-channel in negotiations. She started making visits to the Libyan mission at the United Nations in 1995,<ref nameerratic/> lasting until 2001.<ref namemission/>

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