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Wed 18 Oct 2006 9:35
by Kevin McGehee
in Coweta County, GA
2 comments
[Courting Disaster]
[Wackadoodle]
[Yippee-Ki-Yay!]
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People betray their country for several different reasons, most commonly money or ideology. While many traitors live deeply troubled lives, and a touch of megalomania and messianic fervor often motivates them, none of the traitors I am familiar with have been certifiably crazy. Which makes sense, since an agent worth recruiting by a foreign power needs to be lucid enough to avoid detection, and stable enough to be entrusted with enough power or responsibility to betray. That is what makes the case of Susan Lindauer so unusual.
My first venture into punditry dealt with the arrest of Susan Lindauer on various charges, amounting to her acting as a paid agent for Saddam’s intelligence service. Lindauer worked for several Democratic lawmakers, including Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Peter DeFazio, and Senators Ron Wyden and Carol Moseley-Braun, and also wrote for Fortune and U.S. News & World Report. According to her indictment, Lindauer worked with Iraqi agents based in New York starting in 1999, and even met them in Manhattan on September 19, 2001. That’s right: eight days after the atrocity of September 11, Lindauer was allegedly meeting with enemy intelligence agents somewhere near the ruins of the World Trade Center. (According to the New York Times, her last job with Congress ceased in 2002, so she was allegedly working for both the Iraqi government and ours at the same time.)
She is also charged with flying to Baghdad in 2002 to meet with Iraqi intelligence agents (who dubbed her “Symbol Susan”), accepting money from them, and then attempting to influence American foreign policy. Apparently she contacted a distant relative, then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, about mediating the crisis between President Bush and Saddam.
After her arrest, it emerged that Lindauer was…not all there. Two court-appointed doctors found her mentally incompetent and unfit to stand trial.» Clinton W. Taylor: Turncoat or Straitjacket?
Her father, John Lindauer, was the 1998 Republican nominee for governor of Alaska, surely the low point for Republican gubernatorial politics up there. His nomination was later renounced by the Republican Party of Alaska after it was determined he had lied on financial disclosure forms, but it was too late to remove his name from the ballot (besides, the top state election official, the lieutenant governor, was seeking re-election on the Democrat incumbent’s ticket). If Alaska Republicans don’t reflexively spit whenever the name “Lindauer” is spoken in their presence, I’d be very surprised.
But when I learned that Susan Lindauer was John’s daughter, I wasn’t surprised at all.
Sadly, given the state of our judicial system, I am also not surprised (unlike Taylor) by this:
What did come as a surprise, however, was that she was freed from custody last month. She refused to take antipsychotic medication. A judge refused to order her to be medicated forcibly, and instead ordered her set free. Another judge will decide whether and how she will stand trial.
Nor by this:
An essay about Lindauer’s release at the left-wing website TPM Cafe quoted from my piece, but neglected to discuss the allegations of espionage for the Iraqi resistance. When I saw that, I began to wonder whether there was a groundswell to rehabilitate Lindauer’s reputation as a left-wing activist. Soon another journalist for a Takoma Park, Maryland paper contacted me for an upcoming retrospective on the Lindauer case. And recently I saw an article in the Detroit News about an FBI raidlast month on the Michigan headquarters of Focus on American and Arab Interests and Relations, an anti-war advocacy group. Who should be quoted defending the charity, but…
They can’t all be certifiably insane. Can they…?
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