October 3, 2019
Julian Assange is
reported to very thin, very sick and being treated at this point, as little
more than a “lab rat” by his state doctors and interrogators at Belmarsh.
Word is that his encryption key ring (with his private keys that unlock
his various public keys) has already been extracted, under physical duress,
cold, light and noise torture, food deprivation, BZ variants, some
experimental, and now that he is very physically weak, PCP. The arrests
have started and they won’t stop until the injured parties –mainly the US
government – have satisfied their bloodlust.
If the hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of donors of information to Wilikeaks around the world
haven’t begun to already, they need to rapidly take cover – legal, physical,
operational and otherwise.
The US, its allies
and understudies, its lackeys and satraps, both of the state and corporate
type, want to know where the leaks are. And they will find them.
Was Julian Assange
the publisher (like Google and Facebook)? Was he some
kind of fake whistleblower (like the CIA guy on loan to the
White House)? Might he be considered an
actual whistleblower like Chelsea Manning or Ed Snowden and Bill Binney and
many, many more driven by a sense of real patriotism and justice to share with
the people what is being done in their name?
Let’s walk it
out. If Assange is a publisher, as any newspaper that conducts
investigates and uses protected sources, utilizing Wikileaks, as much as a
“bulletin board” as is Google and Facebook – then under Section 230 of the
Communications Decency Act (which “immunizes online platforms for their users’
defamatory, fraudulent, or otherwise unlawful content”), we as a people or the
US State have no legal issues with Wikileaks. Julian Assange should not
be held indefinitely, tortured, and chemically interrogated. Donors or
contributors to Wikileaks, if lawbreakers, are subject a different kind of
investigation, conducted in their own countries by their own courts. Nothing
released on Wikileaks has subsequently been found to be untrue or libelous
(which was part of the publisher protection provided by Section 230).
Confirming by omission that Assange is a publisher, the USG case filed against Assange is playing a
different game, one that simply required Assange’s private key ring, not his
physical presence or testimony in the US District Court of Eastern Virginia,
not in 2020, not ever.
Maybe Assange can
be considered a partisan friendly hack whistleblower as in the case of the CIA
agent who heard about things, consulted with a lawyer, shared his lawyerized
second-hand information (possible gained through CIA spy activities
against a sitting president) with Congressman Adam Schiff and others, and then
filed it with the ICIG, in order to create a comfortable nest of righteous
urgency. That this “whistle” blew shortly after Bolton, his key staffers,
and a cadre of contractors he had brought into the National Security Council from
JINSA and other neoconservative hangouts should not go unnoticed. Trump’s
many enemies have been insulted, degraded, and have temporarily been deprived
of power and influence… this will not stand!
Assange clearly
doesn’t trust big corporations and big government to always do the right things
or have the interests of their employees, customers or citizens at heart.
He values transparency. If transparency in government is a partisan
position, it certainly isn’t one held by any of the major parties in the US, the
UK, Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia, China or Russia or Iran or India and the
list goes on. Contrasting with the kid-glove treatment and moral
elevation gracing the introduction of our new CIA whistleblower, we see American
Chelsea Manning re-imprisoned, and under new interrogation now that she has
been moved from Alexandria to Leavenworth, based on information pried and
squeezed out of Julian Assange at Belmarsh.
The (deep as well
as overt) state reactions to Assange and the soon-to-be-named CIA White House
“whistleblower” have been so markedly different that we must conclude that one
of the two are not whistleblowers at all. In fact, neither are
whistleblowers. Assange is a publisher and the current belle of the DC
ball is a political tool, one worthy of study, as he could be part and parcel
of a larger inter-agency coup.
Our third category,
an actual whistleblower who sacrifices everything most people hold dear, in the
name of justice or truthfulness, transparency or righteousness, or simply pure
patriotism, is generally treated by the US government with contempt and
charges. In the case of the Australian who created Wikileaks, the USG charges under the Espionage
Act of 1917 that Assange hacked into US
government classified systems to get the data that was later published on
Wikileaks. The case against Assange is mainly about finding out the who,
where, when and how of a whole host of leaks from US and US allied
interests. Hence the need for his private keys, his torture, and his
physical and mental demise long before any extradition hearings.
Assange must not be
tried in a court of law, even the dubious law of the Eastern District Court,
because his “crimes” if any, will be found invalid, or invalidated. He
himself is not a whistleblower, and the charges in the US case against him thus
relate to hacking and “encouraging” an existing whistleblower. Decisions
were made at the highest levels of both US and UK governments that Assange will
be sacrificed in the name of the higher goal of tamping out current leaks,
punishing past leakers, and discouraging future leakers, as well as improving
information and technical security at NSA and other parts of the
USG. Part of this project is recent. Coming arrests and trials of
people who may have violated their employment agreements in sharing classified
information with Wikileaks, will, even if it must use parallel reconstruction as Judge Napolitano explains, will be enough
for a trial. Even kangaroo courts have their standards.
As Caitlyn Johnstone explains in the
current US case, what we are witnessing is beyond a double standard and
indicates CIA readiness to take on a president inclined to restrict it.
Perhaps, hope of hope, Trump was planning to fire its budget hungry and
war-inflamed Director Pompeo? Meanwhile, Trump fails to rein in his IC, and
fails to protect Assange, a man he once admired, if one can believe his
tweeting. Another man who once praised Wikileaks, and now leads England,
was just this week praising Egypt for
its freedom, and silent on Assange. This
summer’s first ever Media Freedom Conference was held in
London not far from Belmarsh, with a several day, 14 page agenda studded with
famous people.
Illustrating the very “deep fake” conundrum they did talk
about at the conference, the agenda contained not a single mention of Wikileaks
or Julian Assange.
This world is not
for freedom lovers, or truth tellers. Run!
Karen Kwiatkowski,
Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF
lieutenant colonel, farmer and aspiring anarcho-capitalist. She ran for
Congress in Virginia's 6th district in 2012.
Copyright © 2019
Karen Kwiatkowski
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