OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: Before Plame there was Susan Lindauer

Plame's outing should have sounded the warning that intelligence operatives were being threatened. Lindauer predates that incident, so I guess keeping her silenced was even more important in setting precedent. Good thing Joe Wilson wasn't intimidated into silence, although Wilson made the mistake of underestimating the lengths to which the administration would go to try to keep the Iraq intelligence deception from being revealed. Operating covertly, Plame was presumably vulnerable; Wilson therefore must not have known that his wife would be outed in retaliation.

Contrasting Lindauer's case with Plame brings up some noticeable contrasts. Active in the CIA, Plame was not as easy a target. She couldn't have anticipated that the administration would retaliate for Wilson's revelations about Iraq not seeking yellowcake from Niger as the President had claimed on at least two occasions. Lindauer was far easier to isolate, being an outside contractor. Kept at arm's length in her dealings with the CIA, she could be more easily cast aside.

I am leery of Lindauer's association with anyone in the Bush White House, even a marginal relationship. Having "CIA links" is enough to convince me that someone's credibility might be questionable; this may be the specter of disinformation that seems to accompany involvement with any covert intelligence service. This of course doesn't mean that Lindauer never worked for and/or with the CIA, but rather that she may have ended up mingling with the kind of people who work in the shadows and like to remain anonymous.

Plame's active status within the CIA should have shielded her from marginalization efforts but right-wing supporters of the administration were quick to decry her covert status, claiming Plame's employment at CIA was well known around Washington, which simply wasn't true. Plame's closest friends and family members didn't know that she worked for the CIA--why would she tell random passers-by? The effort to reduce Plame's status hints at typical damage control methods. For administration defenders to thrash her covert status meant that it was most likely was a major issue, and made the group of conspirators work quite diligently to reveal her identity indirectly, through their contacts in the press.

Women targetted

Bush and his gang of neocons seem fond of targetting women instead of their husbands. As the author of his editorial, Joe Wilson, a former Ambassador, was a bigger target than his wife, but victimizing women is a recurring theme as there've been several women targets of the administration. The question remains, however, that if Joe Wilson had been the covert agent and his wife the former ambassador making the public revelations, would he have been outed?

Oppressing women seems to be a recurring theme in the neo-fascist environment which emerged post-9/11. In Cleveland Heights, Ohio, attorney Carol Fisher was arrested for putting up posters critical of Bush. Greg Szymanski has her story here. In an outrageous case, Fisher spent five weeks in jail, and was subjected to extensive psychiatric treatment during her detention. Her crime: opposing the regime.

Another prominent woman who hasn't faced any prosecutorial or pharmacological abuse is Sibel Edmonds, a whistleblower and former translator at the FBI. Edmonds has a lot to tell about the close relationships between key adminsitration officials and the Turkish government. At one point, she was put under a gag order--I believe before the 2004 election--but has said much since then.

Looking at the Sibel Edmonds case, it's clear government employees, even those under strict limits under their national security clearance, do tend to talk. This is the sign of a healthy democracy, a counterweight to the idea wrongdoing won't be exposed or revealed. As the Edmonds case demonstrates, even if exposure comes years later, a good deal of damage can be done, as ex-employees employees do carry a lot of credibility.

Women's stories have been manipulated for positive propaganda purposes as well. We saw the Jessica Lynch story and other instances where the US military lied about her rescue. The raid that freed Jessica Lynch hadn't saved her from any immediate danger. At considerable risk to themselves, Iraqi doctors had twice gone to US soldiers to tell them that they had Lynch at the hospital and wanted them to come get her.

The effort to look good motivated the Pentagon to make a more powerful case for war with Iraq through the use of fabricated pre-war intelligence. Subsequent to that, the Department of Offense placed active military officers posing as impartial analysts throughout the mainstream media, to keep the good news rolling.

Media Non-coverage

I've heard virtually nothing about this woman's case, not even on the Web, which testifies to the magitude of the marginalization of the story she tries to tell. How deliberate is the process to silence Lindauer? The scope of the effort to keep her out of the public eye shows how important keeping her story quiet was.

Lindauer is referred to as a "political prisoner," which implies Soviet-era tactics against dissidents: a dark cell, isolation, torture, and the forced injection of psychotropic drugs meant as an inducement to talk, or just to turn perfectly sane and mentally health people into drooling idiots--a sort of lobotomy without the lobotomy. Drugs can induce a near-comatose state. If professionally applied, psychotropic drugs can be allow the recipient to remain medicated, incoherent, harmless or in a catatonic state more or less indefinitely.

We know that licensed medical professionals were involved in the use of psychotropic drugs in managing the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as well as in black sites throughout the world, including even some prison ships whose existence has only been recently acknowledged. In addition, some professional medical services must have been rendered in the process of extraordinary rendition, as we know from the accounts of released detainees that they'd been drugged before or in-flight.

Theoretically, the use of psychotropic drugs will leave far fewer after-effects than physical trauma. LSD, it should be remembered, was developed as an interrogation method for Soviet agents by the CIA. Flashbacks can and do occur, but these might not be so unpleasurable. With other drugs, long-term psychological effects could linger in the form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, although the specific trauma-causing incidents might be forgotten, it's unlikely memories of mistreatment can be forgotten altogether. Also, if detainees are kept too drugged, they can't communicate and therefore possess no "intelligence value" if indeed they could have provided any "actionable intelligence."

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