Fund raising for Susan

Some of you may remember, in March of 2004, Andy Card's second cousin being arrested for letters she wrote to him conveying infomation from Iraq diplomats. Because of those letters, and her accepting expense reimbursements for trips to meet with those diplomats, the Bush Justice Department accused her of being an unregistered agent of Iraq Intelligence Service. Currently, she is in prison without having been tried and convicted.

Her court appointed attorney and the prosecutor agreed to argue that she was incompetent to stand trial. The court then sent her to Carswell FMC, in the Federal Bureau of Prisons to see whether she could be made fit for trial. Last Thursday, a hearing began in Judge Mukassey's Federal Court, the Southern District of New York, to approve the Justice Department's request to forcibly medicate her. Obstensibly, this is to render her fit for trial. However, it is somwhat clear they have no specific diagnosis for her other than "psychotic not otherwise specified" and literally proposed, in court, that as they could not determine a cause for her condition could only treat the symptoms. It gets worse. They went on to describe medications that had been proven 50% effective in two studies treating similar symptoms of patients with different diagnosis: one study with 15 people, another with only 1. Under cross-examination, they admit that some of the side effects of such medication are known to be fatal.

It seems that the Republican party and the Justice Department, in order to punish somebody who had the temerity to work for the end of sanctions and the suffering it was causing in Iraq (she had studied under a professor at Smith who argues against the effectiveness of such methods), is attempting to do to Susan what they did to Martha Mitchell during Watergate.

We need donations.

Liz Fink, a famous lawyer who defended the Attica inmates and recently won a substantial judgement for them, is interested in representing Susan. We need to raise about $25,000 so that she can say that she really is Susan's attorney, and so that we can get the public defender whose poor choice of a twinky defense (over Susan's objections and requests for a regular trial and traditional defense) out of the mix. We also will need the funds to get her into a Private facility, somewhere, and that can run another $100,000 a year! But first things first.

If you want to donate to my gas and travel expenses, you can do that over PayPal, but please don't send money until we know what to do with it. Just let me know if you can help, please.

I've posted links to news about Susan on my web site www.jbfields3.com/jbf.htm and am blogging her affairs at http://jayspolitics.blogspot.com

Any other ideas are welcom.