Why Is Julian Assange Being Tortured to Death?

By Karen Kwiatkowski
LewRockwell.com
Sep. 16, 2019

I think we already know the answer. We need to go further and try and understand what this partially veiled, but completely serious, US and UK destruction of a modern journalist means for all of us.

Assange is an advocate for whistleblowers, a promoter of information access and information security for everyone, not just governments and major government-connected corporations. He, with the help of information security specialists, codewriters, truthtellers and witnesses around the world, received and published material that embarrassed and exposed a number of powerful organizations, including the US government and its many cronies and beneficiaries.

Why is he being tortured to death? Why is he still being subjected to new and experimental variants of BZ fresh from Porton Down, and deprived, not only of friends, relatives, and unsupervised access to his legal team, but to food and basic care?

The short answer is that he is being held on behalf of the United States and he is being chemically and physically interrogated in Belmarsh (the British Gitmo) in order to reveal his private cryptographic keys, and the names and cryptographic information relating to others within the Wikileaks information network. The arrest of Ola Bini in April with new charges filed last month, and the re-arrest and incarceration of Chelsea Manning, speak to part of the effort to find the anonymous leakers of information from the NSA vaults, specifically their hacking tools cache leaked in 2016. This is generally indicated but not completely put forth in the US indictment.

It is fascinating that the plea deals of two recent NSA "spies" -- government employees who took home and "hoarded" vast quantities of NSA material were remarkably mild, when compared to what Julian Assange is going through, and how Bini and Manning have been and are being treated.

A Mr. Pho, a 67 year old who worked as a developer for NSA's Tailored Access Operations, pled guilty to one count of willful removal of defense information, and was free on bail prior to his sentencing in early 2018 to 66 months. The NSA bit-hoarder extraordinaire, Harold Martin, recently was sentenced to nine years, for his "crimes against the state." Even Reality Winner, who was tried under the Espionage Act and did not plea out, received a relatively light sentence, to be completed in a prison close to her home with promises that she can be treated for bulimia. John Kiriakou did little more than reveal what the whole country already knew about torture conducted by the CIA, and he was sentenced to 30 months of prison.

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