Thursday 13 August 2009

From Susan Lindauer

[I have been asked by Susan Lindauer to post the following on this blog.]

I urgently request that you post the following information on your Lockerbie blog.

As the Scottish Courts study the possible release of Mr. Megrahi, the families of Pan Am 103 should be advised that without doubt, Libya gave sanctuary to at least one of the terrorists involved in that bombing.

Until 1998, LIbya gave sanctuary to Abu Nidal, who has been identified by Arab and US sources as one of the masterminds of that attack. His family and friends have confessed it, and he confessed it, too, before his death.

During negotiations for the Lockerbie [?trial?] -- which I started in New York with Libya's diplomats at the UN -- I saw documents* which prove Abu Talb and Ahmed Jibril orchestrated the attack. Abu Nidal was the third head of the hydra.

That means Libya would not be entitled to rescind its apology, or to expect any compensation for the financial damages paid to the Lockerbie families. All of that would remain intact. The only thing that would change is that an innocent man would go home to his family to die shortly. That's most crucial of all.

On those grounds, I urge the families of Pan Am 103 to accept the release of Mr. Megraghi on compassionate grounds. Send him home immediately. He is fully innocent of this crime.

[*In a further e-mail Ms Lindauer writes:]

In late 1997, I gave those documents to Gadhafi's diplomats in New York. That's what persuaded Gadahfi to go forward with talks for the handover of the two men. In back-channel talks, I assured his government that his two men would have access to witnesses and documents to prove their innocence..

That's what changed everything. It wasn't sanctions, and it wasn't appeals from the families that changed Gadhafi's mind. It was those documents.

[Note by RB: If all that Libya can be proved to have done was to provide sanctuary to one of the bombers, that would not under the law of Scotland make that country an accessory to the crime. Nor has Libya made any apology. It has acknowledged responsibility for the acts of its citizens. If Mr Megrahi's conviction is overturned there is then no Libyan citizen convicted of anything for which the state has accepted responsibility.]

8 comments:

  1. If Abu Nidal was a spy for the CIA then there's a very strong likelihood the US was responsible for the bombing and that the perversion of justice seen in British courts was to help the country the UK has a special relationship with.

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  2. Lindauer was arrested on Thursday, 11 March 2004 in Takoma Park, Maryland and charged with "acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government". The indictment alleged that she accepted US$10,000 from Iraqi intelligence services in 2002. Lindauer denies receiving the money, but admits taking a trip to Baghdad. She was released on bond on March 13, 2004 to attend an arraignment the following week. She was later incarcerated in Carswell, Texas then the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.

    In 2006 she was released from prison after Michael B. Mukasey ruled that Lindauer was unfit to stand trial but that she could not be forced to take antipsychotic medication to make her competent to stand trial. In 2008 Loretta A. Preska of the Federal District Court in New York City reaffirmed that Lindauer was mentally unfit to stand trial.

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  3. At least a half dozen doctors for both the defense and the prosecution have found that Ms. 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. One doctor found that Ms. Lindauer had a history of psychotic episodes going back to her childhood, possibly at the age of 7, the judge said. These include her contention that she had gifts of prophecy that allowed her to report 11 bombings before they happened, that she spoke with divine inspiration and that she was an angel."

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  4. One of the procedures for people who are a threat to the UK government is to set them up on false charges and/or slur them.

    The Soviet Union used a similar method declaring such people insane.

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  5. Ruth,
    It is understandable that you would be well informed about insanity.
    However, perhaps you didn't notice the portion of the posting about Lindauer's insanity which reads:
    "AT LEAST HALF A DOZEN DOCTORS for both the DEFENSE and the prosecution have found that Ms. Lindauer suffers from delusions of grandeur and paranoia.

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  6. From Susan Lindauer:

    Thank you so much Professor Black for managing this blog! It's such a relief to share information in a way that bypasses the censors. The fact that so many Lockerbie family members don't know who I am exemplifies how all of you have been kept in the dark. For the record, I had close to 150 meetings with Libyan diplomats in New York, starting in May, 1995 and carrying onwards through the Lockerbie Appeals. My efforts were supervised by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency for the purpose of building a relationship with Libya and starting talks for the Trial.

    It is true that in March, 2004, I was one of the first and only non-Arabs arrested on the U.S. Patriot Act, on the bogus charge of acting as an "unregistered Iraqi agent." Notably, 30 days before my arrest, I had approached the Senate staff of Senator John McCain and Senator Trent Lott and requested to testify before the newly formed Presidential Commission on Iraqi Pre-War Intelligence. (I'm now finishing a book on this whole legal debacle; all of this was documented by transcripts of FBI phone taps).

    I demanded a trial, but I had a public defender who was overworked & incapable of mounting what he thought was such a complex defense. The U.S. government's case was so bad that they couldn't go to trial, or risk exposing all of the Iraqi Pre-War intelligence that they had been hiding from the public.

    They cut a deal over my strongest objections that I should be declared incompetent, so that they could kill the case. In a horrifying story straight out of the Cold War or the Soviet Union, I was ordered to surrender to a Texas military base for a psychiatric evaluation to determine if I could "become competent" to stand trial. Or if it was hopeless.

    If I had agreed to plead guilty, I would have been declared competent immediately,. Instead I continued to demand a trial. There were never "half a dozen psychiatrists" from the real world who evaluated me. There was a panel of three psychiatrists from the Texas military base, and they admitted in testimony under oath that in 7 months of incarceration, under observation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, they saw no signs of depression, no schizophrenia/ hallucinations/ hearing voices, no violence towards anybody; no crying or weeping or hysteria. I was active, working at the law library every day; reading books; "socializing well" with other inmates. I was not disruptive in any way.

    I have a masters degree in Public Policy from the London School of Economics and an undergraduate degree from Smith College. I'm a former congressional press secretary and journalist. But most significantly, I worked in anti-terrorism for 9 years as a primary source covering Libya and Iraq. I also covered Yemen, Egypt, Syria/Hezbollah and Malaysia.

    Now, do you think that the CIA would send a lightweight to cover LIbya and Iraq in the 1990s, when those countries were pariahs and suspected of supporting terrorism??

    No, that's just stupid.

    Something very special was going on in those years. The CIA knows what it was, and they don't want anybody, anywhere to hear about it. They are trying to destroy my reputation so that you won't listen.

    Never fear, I am without question strong enough to stand up to them. That's why they had to hit me so hard.

    Cheers folks!

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  7. Brilliant!
    There are very few people like you who stand up against such corruption and take the awful consequences.

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