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http://cnnstudentnews.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0403/12/lt.01.html

CNN LIVE TODAY
Aired March 12, 2004 - 11:00 ET

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KELLI ARENA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Susan Lindauer is due back in court today. The former journalist and congressional aide insists that she is not an Iraqi spy.

SUSAN LINDAUER, ARRESTED FOR SPYING: I'm an anti-war activist, and I'm innocent!

ARENA: An indictment says Lindauer had repeated contacts with Iraqi intelligence officers in New York and Baghdad between 1999 and 2002 and conspired with two sons of Iraq's former liaison with U.N. weapons inspectors.

Lindauer says she was trying to get inspectors back into Iraq.

LINDAUER: I'm very proud, and I will very proudly stand by my achievements.

ARENA: In January 2003, two months before the U.S. invaded Iraq, prosecutors say she took a letter to the home of a U.S. official, saying she had access to Saddam Hussein's regime. Sources tell CNN that official was White House chief of staff Andrew Card, Lindauer's second cousin. The White House says Card never met with Lindauer and called the incident very sad.

LINDAUER: I'm an anti-war activist.

ARENA: Sources say Card alerted authorities; then the FBI set up a sting operation.

In June, prosecutors say, Lindauer met with an undercover FBI agent posing as an agent for Libyan intelligence, looking to support resistance groups in post-war Iraq. And near her home in Takoma Park, they say she followed instructions to leave unspecified documents at dead drop locations.

Neighbors were surprised.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: She was a Takoma Park-type person, pretty unique around here. We're a nuclear-free zone, as you know. So a very laid back, liberal sort of person.

ARENA: Prosecutors say Iraq paid Lindauer $10,000 for expenses and services. She faces up to 25 years in prison if she's convicted on all charges.

LINDAUER: This is what democracy is all about.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, she's not going to make any comments.

ARENA: Kelli Arena, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KAGAN: Kobe Bryant's accuser will have to break her silence. Her sexual past is about to be questioned. That story is coming up next.

And then, the incredible story out of Utah, a mother charged with murder after her baby is still born. Was her refusal to listen to doctors to blame?

And later, if it were a boxing match, you wouldn't even be into round one yet, but the gloves are already coming off. Kerry and Bush go at it when CNN LIVE TODAY returns.

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RENA: In January 2003, two months before the U.S. invaded Iraq, prosecutors say she took a letter to the home of a U.S. official, saying she had access to Saddam Hussein's regime. Sources tell CNN that official was White House chief of staff Andrew Card, Lindauer's second cousin. The White House says Card never met with Lindauer and called the incident very sad.

LINDAUER: I'm an anti-war activist.

http://www.time.com/time/classroom/glencoe/ourworld2002/unit_7_4.html

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Nobody was arguing with that, but not everyone was applauding Thursday when Attorney General Ashcroft announced that he was rewriting the rules that govern the way FBI agents launch and conduct probes of suspected terrorists here at home. The new rules, Ashcroft said, would help the feds prevent terrorist strikes rather than deal with them after they happen. But lawmakers of both parties complained that Ashcroft had cast off a 26-year-old policy without giving them any notice. Civil libertarians cried that the FBI was trampling on privacy in the name of security. And even George W. Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, was irked that the White House had been left out of the loop.

The new rules were presented as dramatic reforms to protect us, and yet for many people the truly shocking discovery was that the FBI had not been doing these things all along: surfing the Web, sifting through commercial databases, lurking in chat rooms, monitoring public activities. Under the old rules, Ashcroft said, FBI agents were proscribed from doing what any local cop or reporter or concerned citizen would do. An Ashcroft staff member recalls the tortured investigation of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik convicted after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. "Here was a guy you knew had ties to a terrorist organization," he says. "You knew he was meeting with his followers in the mosque. The agents couldn't go in. They had to stop at the door because no crime had been committed yet. You look at that and say, 'You've gotta be kidding me.'"

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