Susan Lindauer

Susan Lindauer

: Photo from Wikimedia Commons / Author of Photo: RT America

Overview

* Anti-American, pro-Socialist radical
* Was arrested for conspiring to act as a spy for Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Intelligence Service
* Allegedly received $10,000 in funds from Hussein’s regime


The Democratic Party has a big problem named Susan Lindauer, but you would never know this from the reporting by America’s dominant Left-leaning news media.

On March 11, 2004, Ms. Lindauer, 41, was arrested in her suburban Washington, D.C. home and charged with “prohibited financial transactions” from, acting as “an unregistered agent of,” and “conspiring” to act as a spy, both before and after the incursion a year ago, for Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS).

Known in Arabic as the Mukhabbarat, the IIS has reportedly been involved in terrorist operations, intimidating and killing Iraqi defectors and dissidents, and according to Anwar Iqbal of United Press International, was said to have been involved in the attempted assassination of President George H.W. Bush.

In 2003 Lindauer also met repeatedly with an FBI undercover agent posing as a Libyan agent. She is accused of working with him on plans for resistance groups to fight back against Americans in Iraq. If tried and found guilty on all counts, she could be sentenced to up to 25 years in prison.

Lindauer has worked in the offices of four prominent Democratic lawmakers in Congress. Among the as-yet-unanswered questions about this case are whether or how her connections to these Democrats helped Lindauer obtain confidential information she supplied to Saddam’s secret police in an effort to keep Hussein in power.

Information from Lindauer might, among other things, have enabled Hussein’s hit men to locate and assassinate key Iraqi expatriate opponents of the regime. Her co-defendants are charged with providing such information.

Around May 1993 Lindauer was hired by Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio, whose political views matched her own. DeFazio is not just a member but also an officer of the “Progressive Caucus” in Congress, long allied with the Democratic Socialists of America.

The Progressive Caucus is chaired by Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Cleveland. This vegetarian, anti-war candidate for the 2004 Democratic Presidential nomination proposes replacing the Department of Defense with a Department of Peace.

According to the rating of America’s premier liberal organization, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), Kucinich in 2000 voted on the Left side of legislation 86 percent of the time, and in 2002 he did so 80 percent of the time. Using this as a benchmark, DeFazio’s ADA rating was 90 in year 2000 and 95 – voting Left 95 percent of the time – in 2002.

In January 1994, two years before he would be elected Senator, another Oregon Congressman named Ron Wyden hired Susan Lindauer. Wyden had his 15 minutes of fame during a TV interview, as he praised President Bill Clinton’s war policy in Bosnia, when the interviewer handed Wyden a globe of the world and asked him to show where Bosnia was. Wyden had no idea and rightly became a national laughingstock. But this ideological soul mate of Susan Lindauer remains a Left-loyalist, winning ADA ratings of 90 in 2000 and 85 in 2002.

In January 1996 Lindauer was hired as press secretary to Illinois Senator Carol Moseley Braun, who would be removed from office by voters two years later.  Braun’s lifetime ADA rating is a far-Left 88 percent, but during her brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 it was not enough to top frontrunner Senator John F. Kerry’s ADA rating of 93, five points higher than his fellow Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy.

As the spy scandal broke, Moseley Braun told reporters that she “doesn’t remember” Lindauer. Here is an April 1996 story from the Daily Egyptian, student newspaper of Southern Illinois University Carbondale, quoting Lindauer at length as “spokeswoman” for Senator Moseley Braun. She ceased working for Moseley Braun in September 1996.

One 1998 news item identified her as an executive with a proposed new television station in Washington, D.C., that would cover the Executive Branch as C-SPAN does the Congress, but this apparently never materialized.

In 2002 Lindauer was hired by California Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, who represents San Jose near San Francisco. She worked in the Congresswoman’s office from March 11 until May 14, said Lofgren.

“To my knowledge, this former employee had no access to sensitive information,” said a formal statement by Lofgren. “Obviously, I had no reason to think that she was involved in this alleged activity. I have had no further contact with her since she left my employ.”

But it is clear why Lindauer felt drawn to the ultra-Leftwing Lofgren, and why Lofgren seemed almost frantic to distance herself from someone whose extremist politics are so close to Lofgren’s own. The Congresswoman’s ADA rating for 2000 was 85, nearly tied with that of “Progressive Caucus” Leftist Rep. Kucinich. Her ADA rating for 2002 was 100 – a perfect 100 percent Leftist voting record identical to that of her fellow San Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader.

In the dominant press news reports about accused spy Susan Lindauer, however, her jobs on the staffs of four prominent Democrat lawmakers get buried many paragraphs into the stories, if they get mentioned at all. The fact that these are not ordinary lawmakers but are four of the farthest Left members of Congress never gets mentioned at all.

Instead, America was told that Susan Lindauer was a kook, a nut, an eccentric wacko who could not hold a job for long with the lawmakers who hired her. But these Leftist Democrats knew one another’s staffs, and her first three jobs transitioned smoothly from DeFazio to fellow Oregonian Wyden to Moseley Braun.

Yet presumably the public is expected to believe that none of these lawmakers warned fellow Democrats that Lindauer was any kind of problem. Presumably each checked her references and inquired of the fellow lawmaker who was only a few doors away.

Those who have worked as staffers or journalists in D.C. can attest to the fact that Capitol Hill is a smaller place than one might think. Truth is, their comrade Lindauer was quite acceptable to these Leftist Democrats until the spy issue became news too hot to handle. But now the Left-aligned media is scurrying to dissociate her from their lawmaker allies.

The New York Times dutifully quoted a newspaper man she worked for in 1989 on the Washington Post-owned Everett Herald in a suburb north of Seattle who “saw some signs of flakiness” in her. The headline to Jame Dao’s Times story called her “Committed Yet Erratic.” The word “committed” is ambiguous, meaning either “dedicated” or locked up in a mental asylum. Adding the word “erratic” skews its subconscious meaning in the latter direction.

“She lives in a fantasy world,” a neighbor told Associated Press reporter Larry Neumeister. And to emphasize her mental instability, he described Lindauer first and foremost as a “former journalist,” not a congressional aide, speechwriter or flack.

The Washington Post found various neighbors who described Susan Lindauer as “eccentric,” “a little delusional or on something,” a paranoid who “believed she was under surveillance” and that “my house was bugged with listening devices and cameras – little red laser lights in the shower vents.”

The Post story depicts Lindauer as believing that “someone put acid on the steering wheel of my car” and that “I survived several assassination attempts. Oh, I could write a book.”  The New York Times story says that she aspires to be a writer and has shown one neighbor “manuscripts for a children’s book and a satirical novel.”

She is, the Post quotes a neighbor, “a little bit strange, a bit of a character…a Takoma Park-type person.”

In Washington, D.C. conservatives tend to prefer life in suburban Virginia, and liberals prefer to move north into Montgomery County, Maryland, a do-gooder Democratic bastion where towns banish not only Jesus but also Santa Claus as too religious, and have tried to prohibit residents from smoking inside their own homes.

The steamiest Leftist fever swamp in Montgomery County is where Lindauer made her home, Takoma Park, whose lawmakers declared this town a “nuclear free zone.”

How far to the Left is this hothouse community in which Lindauer chose to make her home? It makes Berkeley, California seem moderate by comparison. On Friday the New York Times described this community as a “left-leaning enclave on the northern doorstep of Washington, a place fondly known by its residents as “the People’s Republic of Takoma Park.”

By the employers she has had, the company she kept, and the community in which she chose to live, it seems irrefutable that Susan Lindauer is a far Leftist. But is she a nut whose potential treason is out of character for the Left?

It is fair to say that most Leftists are either insane or opportunistic. What sane or ethical person would embrace the socialist philosophy of Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot? Yet that is precisely what the Left is – the belief by some that humankind can be perfected through dictatorship, slavery, and the genocide of undesirable peoples or ideas or values. If we can just exterminate the Jews, the Kulaks, or capitalist greed, Leftist utopians have promised, then heaven will appear on Earth.

But the fruits of 100 years of socialist experiments have been more than 100 million murdered human beings killed by Communism and perhaps another 40 million killed by Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism, the slightly smarter but equally evil near-twin of Marxism.

Added to this death toll have been more than two billion slaves. Communism stole from these people their right to liberty, their pursuit of happiness, and their right to the fruits of their own labor. These people were conscripts, slaves whose lives were spent in coercion, forced to build somebody else’s pyramid, somebody else’s absurd utopian dream – in exactly the same way that slaves 150 years ago had their lives and labor stolen to build someone else’s plantation house and Scarlett O’Hara dresses.

These experiments have, without exception, refuted the utopian claims Karl Marx made for “scientific socialism.”  The idea does not work. It is too far from human nature to work. It produces only dictatorship, suffering and death. Socialism kills. Socialism is theft. It is a pretty, poisoned flower that has always produced poisoned fruit.

But the toxin in this fruit intoxicates many. It does feed one dark aspect of the human soul – the covetousness, envy and impulse to steal from others that are marked out as evils by the 10 Commandments.

Marx called religion the opiate of the masses. He was wrong.

Today Marxism is the opiate of the masses.  It is the drug of choice for millions who think as if they are part of a herd or lynch mob instead of as free, rational individuals.

And socialism’s deepest impulse, as David Horowitz explores in his new masterwork Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey, is not “progressive” but rather destructive and reactionary. As Horowitz observes, Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire invokes a dictum of Goethe’s devil: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”  When the Left speaks of “peace” or “liberation,” it really aims to destroy all that is “and begin again in the year zero of creation,” rather like Shiva the Destroyer aspect of divinity worshipped in Hinduism.

Or in the words of anti-Communism from half a century ago: “I love humanity,” says the Communist. “It’s just these individual human beings I despise.”  These are what the idolatrous cult of Marxism and its brainwashed acolytes ultimately seek to eradicate.

Class warfare continues because some would rather steal than work for what they get. In their shortsightedness, they would rather get even than get ahead.

And some opportunistic politicians and demagogues are always willing to gain power and wealth for themselves by promising to rob those you envy through the power of taxation and the government, and to give their expropriated property to YOU. As Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw observed: “He who robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on Paul’s support.”

In America one of our two largest political parties is built entirely on this irrational, self-destructive philosophy. And envy is so strong an emotion that its voters seldom notice that they never get more than chickenfeed from the wealth government confiscates. It is enough for these conned fools to believe that the rich have lost their wealth – when in fact a new, less deserving class of the politically enriched has merely fattened on the stolen loot.

Is Susan Lindauer delusional? Almost certainly, yes. Everyone who genuinely believes in the failed god of socialism is delusional.  Only the willfully blind cannot see that socialism does vastly more evil than good. But this is precisely why Lindauer fit so perfectly into a symbiotic relationship with her fellow believers, including those four leading Democratic lawmakers.

“I did more to stop terrorism in this country than anybody else,” said Lindauer.

She has been a very public anti-war activist, from the bumper stickers on her aging Mazda to her signature in 2002 among 3,138 others on a published anti-war petition. And she herself seems to believe that her cooperation with Saddam Hussein’s secret police, including a trip to Baghdad in 2002 during which she met with IIS agents, somehow makes the world a more peaceful place.

Part of the indictment against her is that Lindauer did well by doing what she deemed good. She allegedly received approximately $10,000 in recompense for her expenses and services to Hussein’s regime.

One of the things Lindauer apparently did for this money was to deliver a letter on January 8, 2003, to the home of her second cousin, Andrew H. Card, who happens to be President Bush’s White House Chief of Staff. In this letter she reportedly conveyed her access to and contacts with members of  Saddam’s regime.

Such an act constituted an illegal attempt to influence U.S. policy by an unregistered agent of the Iraqi Government, and Card may have reported this attempt to authorities. Card says he was not home at the time, and that he last spoke to his Democrat cousin during the 1991 Bush Inaugural period.

By such behavior, Susan Lindauer demonstrated yet another Leftist characteristic. She believed herself to be above the law. She assumed as a matter of right that she as a private citizen had the right to carry out foreign policy, and as part of that process to give aid and comfort to a listed terrorist regime that had already used poison gas to murder large numbers of its own citizens as well as those of a neighboring nation.

The Left-leaning media has made much of Card’s distant biological relationship with Lindauer. At the same time, the establishment press has thus far not lifted a finger to investigate her direct and active work in the offices of four Democratic Capitol Hill lawmakers.

The press has also made much of Susan Lindauer’s father John, who moved his family to Alaska in 1976 when she was 13 after he was hired as chancellor of the University of Alaska Anchorage. He would go on to own a chain of Alaskan newspapers during the 1980s and early 1990s, get elected to the state legislature, and become a failed Republican gubernatorial candidate disavowed by the Republican Party and brought down by scandal in 1998.

Susan’s mother Jackie Lindauer who dressed stylishly in black capes died of cancer in 1992. In 1995 John married Dorothy Oremus, a Chicago attorney who along with other members of her family owned the largest cement concern in the Midwest. For the soap opera of how her secret money funded and then destroyed his 1998 try for Alaska’s governorship, click here.

Susan Lindauer “liked being in the spotlight and having attention,” said one friend from her 1981 class at East High, Anchorage. She was an honor student and thespian, but the school’s “in” crowd never accepted her and gave her the nickname “Squid” or “Squiddy.”

Acquaintances told the Anchorage Daily News that Lindauer was “intellectual and a bit ethereal…super smart,” “more worldly than the average East High kid,” “a bit of a wild child,” and “one of those that was kind of ‘Katie bar the door.’”  She was already beginning to embrace and advocate Leftist ideas.

After attending liberal Smith College in Massachusetts, Lindauer worked during the early 1980s for her parents’ newspaper chain. In 1987 she moved to the Seattle area, working for a few months as a business reporter for the Leftist Seattle Post-Intelligencer and thereafter for two years as the most liberal editorial writer at the suburban Everett Herald. By 1991 she had moved to Washington, D.C. and was working for the liberal newsmagazine U.S. News & World Report. Along the way she also earned a Master’s Degree in public policy from the socialist London School of Economics.

Twisting ever more leftward, Susan Lindauer would soon move from being a liberal media ally of Leftist Democratic politicians to being a member of their staffs. And from serving these socialists, it probably to her seemed a short step to serving the Ba’athist socialist regime of Saddam Hussein, whose hatred for America sounded so much like what she was accustomed to hearing from liberal reporters, Leftist lawmakers, and her anti-war neighbors and fellow-travelers in Takoma Park.

More than half a century earlier thousands of Americans followed that same leftward path that led them to betray America to serve the monster Joseph Stalin. A proper education in history, economics and ethics would blow up the bridges on this worn path, but America’s “socializing” public schools refuse to teach such lessons.

“A key to the mentality of the Left,” writes David Horowitz in Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey, “is that it judges itself by its best intentions, and judges its opponents – America chief among them – by their worst deeds.”  Such an unbalanced perception is the mark of sick minds, the kind of totalitarian minds that easily rationalize treason and even mass murder in the name of socialist idealism.

Lindauer, after decades of feeding deeper and deeper at the trough of Leftist anti-American hatred, became willing to betray the United States to protect a socialist monster, Saddam Hussein, whose mass graves covered 300,000 tortured bodies and whose aim was to acquire weapons capable of killing tens of millions.


This profile was adapted from the article “
The Face of Treason,” written by Lowell Ponte and published by FrontPageMagazine.com on March 15, 2004.

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