WASHINGTON, 12 September 2006 — A former news reporter and press secretary to four members of Congress was released Friday after a federal court judge ruled the US government had no legal grounds to keep her locked away.
Susan Lindauer was being held in a New York federal correctional facility for more than year and was under psychiatric evaluation.
Federal Judge D.J. Mukasey ruled against the government’s motion to keep Lindauer in prison with forced medication, saying “There is simply not enough here to warrant a finding by clear and convincing evidence that Lindauer is substantially likely to be rendered competent by forced medication and substantially unlikely to suffer effects that will impinge upon a fair trial.”
Judge Mukasey also criticized the government’s case, saying that the legal standard for forcibly administering medication requires a strong government interest in prosecution, and that the government has not been able to establish that standard in this case.
The ruling was a setback for the government’s case against Lindauer, who was arrested in March 2004 at her home in a Washington DC suburb.
The indictment charged that Lindauer, 43, conspired to act as an unregistered agent of the government of Iraq from October 1999 until February 2004, and engaged in illegal financial transactions.
Although he was reluctant to analyze the government’s case before trial, the judge said, “There is no indication that Lindauer ever came close to influencing anyone, or could have.” The indictment, he said, describes an attempt to influence an unnamed government official as unsuccessful.
In March 2001, Lindauer wrote a letter to her distant cousin, Andrew Card, former White House Chief of Staff, saying an Iraqi delegation was urging the US to send weapons inspectors into Iraq in order to avert war and prove categorically there existed no weapons of mass destruction.
Judge Mukasey said that for Lindauer to succeed as an agent of the Iraqi government, she would have had to influence other people. But her mental condition makes that highly unlikely, he said.
“The record shows that even lay people recognize that she is seriously disturbed,” Judge Mukasey said in a 35-page ruling issued on Wednesday. He said that a neighbor had suspected her of being mildly schizophrenic.
Lindauer denied involvement as an Iraqi agent who took $10,000 in payoffs from Iraqi intelligence officers, saying she was just trying to “do the right thing” by alerting the government that she learned through credible sources that no WMD existed in Iraq, making the war unnecessary. The indictment alleges that Lindauer met with a representative of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in New York on Sept. 19, 2001, just eight days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and continued to meet with Iraqi intelligence agents several times in New York and was reimbursed for her travel and meals.
According to Lindauer and other observers, the Bush administration viewed her as a threat to the administration’s illegal intentions of going to war.
At least six doctors for both the defense and the prosecution have found that Lindauer suffers from delusions of grandeur and paranoia, which makes her incompetent to stand trial, the judge said. But she refuses to accept the diagnosis or to take medication, he said.
At a hearing before Judge Mukasey last week, prosecutors offered a backup plan, asking the judge to order Lindauer to either voluntarily take anti-psychotic drugs for 30 days or be held in contempt. Contempt charges could be punished with jail time.
Judge Mukasey declined to rule on the prosecutor’s suggestion, saying that the case was being assigned to another judge and that he would leave that decision to her.
Meanwhile, he ordered Lindauer to be released under previously determined terms, including on bail of $500,000, on the condition that she receive psychological counseling and that her travel be restricted. Lindauer faces up to 10 years in prison on the most serious charge and five years on the lesser charge if convicted.
Lindauer is a former journalist for US News & World Report, as well as for Fortune magazine and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She also worked as a spokeswoman for then-representative (and now senator) Ron Wyden of Oregon, as well as former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun.
