Julian Assange tells 46-nation gathering in Europe why Washington must not be let trample on others' independence and sovereignty.

As the world teeters on the verge of a massive war in the Middle East that could turn into World War Three, it is hard to even notice other important events.

What seems to overshadow everything else is the hideous spectacle of Israel and the collective West co-perpetrating a genocide in Gaza while also producing multiple attacks and massacres in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, as well as issuing ceaseless threats to do even worse if the victims dare fight back. When Gaza is being exterminated and Beirut is burning, why would people turn to look, for instance, at sleepy Strasbourg?

And yet, on October 1, that's where a quietly historic event took place, namely the first major public appearance of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, publisher, and outstanding investigative journalist, after his release in June from some 14 years of vicious American-British persecution and incarceration, some of which, according to UN special rapporteur Nils Melzer and the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, amounts to torture.

Though he is now free, Assange has not, it is important to note, received justice and most likely never will: A victim of outrageous abuses of state power, the crimes against him have not even been acknowledged by their perpetrators. Instead, to escape further persecution he was forced through a plea deal to pretend to recognize his own non-existent guilt. As he put it in Strasbourg - clearly with ironic reference to the title of a famous Soviet dissident's memoir - he "chose freedom over unrealizable justice."

Justice for him "is now precluded" in the future, too, because Washington has written into the plea deal that he "cannot file a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even a freedom of information act request" in the US. So much, again, for the rule of law in the "rules-based order": Perverted to the last moment and beyond. This extremely murky outcome also means, again in Assange's own words, that he is "not free today because the system worked," but because he pleaded guilty to, in effect, journalism, which is, of course, simply not a crime.

The occasion for Assange's statement and short Q&A session in Strasbourg was a deceptively small-scale hearing at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE, a 46-nation organization not to be confused with the EU). Organized by PACE's Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, the hearing preceded a full debate that addressed a detailed report on Assange's treatment and its "chilling effects on human rights." That debate took place on October 2. Its key result was PACE's official confirmation that Assange was a political prisoner. Despite Washington's blatant abuse of the 1917 Espionage Act to persecute him, everyone not completely brainwashed by US propaganda has, of course, long known that much.

And not just any political prisoner: All political prisoners suffer unjustly and deserve support. But, due to the worldwide reverberations of his persecution by the US, the rogue hegemon of the West, history will look back on Julian Assange as the single most important political prisoner of the first post-Cold War decades, without a grain of hyperbole. The issues at stake were and remain of global importance and will shape the future of humanity, for better or worse:

Freedom of expression; the role of free, unimpeded media in holding the powerful to account; their increasingly aggressive efforts to shut down such challenges, especially across borders; the lack of protection for individuals targeted by powerful states that manipulate or disobey their own laws; and, last but not least, the enormous abuses suffered by ordinary people, especially in the Global South, at the hands of a West that wages wars of aggression and torture campaigns and now is co-perpetrating genocide.

That was one reason the meeting in Strasbourg was so important. The other is the fact that Assange's fate is connected to the horrors that are currently being inflicted on the Middle East. For it was Assange's revelations of decades of crimes committed by the US and its Western followers in the Middle East (broadly understood) that most of all led to his ordeal.

While he also came under Russiagate/Russia Rage fire for exposing Democratic Party corruption and manipulations during the 2016 elections which Hillary Clinton still cannot believe she lost, that was not the key issue. And Assange has obviously not somehow functioned as a Russian agent. Indeed, in Strasbourg he bent over backwards repeatedly to falsely imply equivalence between the systematic mass murder by Israel of (mostly) Palestinian journalists and the killing of their counterparts from both sides in the Ukraine war.

What really started tripping up WikiLeaks was their exemplary investigative work on US atrocities during the fundamentally illegal war of aggression in Iraq. That painted a first big American target on Assange's back in 2010. In that year, WikiLeaks released the by-now famous video Collateral Murder that provided clear evidence of war crimes committed in 2007 by a merrily murderous (and chatty!) crew of American gunship pilots. More revelations, including about what in effect were death squads run by the US and their auxiliaries during the US-NATO war in Afghanistan, as well as US 'rendition' programs - that is, kidnapping, black sites, and torture, including in Europe - followed.

There was only one other WikiLeaks exploit that rivaled its exposure of the very dirty realities of the so-called Great War on Terror (and its sequels) in enraging the US: the "Vault 7" documents, released in 2017, that, in Assange's own summary in Strasbourg "revealed the CIA's vast production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains, its subversion of antivirus software, cars, smart TVs and iPhones."

After that, and under the same Donald Trump who may well be the next US president and flaunts his friendship with X owner Elon Musk, who pretends to promote "free speech," the US pulled out all the stops. As Assange explained during the Q&A in Strasbourg this week, WikiLeaks had angered the national security state, "one of the constitutive powers" of the real political system in the US. In response, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo "launched a campaign of retribution" that included not only Assange's brutalization by isolation and incarceration but also "plans to kidnap and to assassinate him" inside the embassy of another state (Ecuador) in another country (the UK). "Theft, hacking attacks, and the planting of false information" were used against Assange's associates and WikiLeaks staff. In a particularly vile and creepy episode, his wife and infant son were in the Americans' sights as well. Instructions were given to obtain DNA from his baby son's diaper.

It is obvious that Assange was compelled to strike a plea deal that perverted justice. Yet, one fact is too often overlooked because we have become used to it: With myriad crimes committed against those invaded and occupied in the Middle East, those spied upon and manipulated everywhere, and those trying to expose these abuses, not a single perpetrator has ever been prosecuted or even investigated, as the PACE report stresses. If the impunity of genocidal apartheid Israel on its current rampage through the Middle East puzzles you, keep in mind that the West as a whole has a much larger, long-standing culture of impunity.

This legal nihilism can be creative. After 2017, to go after Assange, some of the finest minds of US jurisprudence invented a whole new and completely perverse theory. In Assange's concise summary, according to this piece of skullduggery, "only US citizens have free speech rights; Europeans and other nationalities do not have free speech rights." At the same time, the US "Espionage Act still applies to them regardless of where they are. So, Europeans in Europe must obey US secrecy law with no defenses at all," that is even less than what American citizens are formally granted under their first amendment rights. An American in Paris (note the Gene Kelly allusion this time), Assange pointed out, "can talk about what the US government is up to - perhaps. But for a Frenchman in Paris, to do so is a crime without any defense and he may be extradited just like me."

The ongoing case of Julian Assange is about many crucial things. But if I had to pick only one as the single most important question, it would be this almost comically arrogant and crude US overreach. Not because it is such an obvious slap in the face to every other state in the world; that's just the American establishment's way. They really can't, it seems, help themselves.

What makes this the decisive issue is something else: Whatever perversions and abuses American leaders will come up with, they will affect either only the US, as they should, or all of us, as they often do now. In other words, the US does not have healthy boundaries. It will always overstep, as long as it feels strong enough. Or that others are weak enough. The first, strategic step toward at least limiting and containing American abuses is for other countries to preserve or reclaim their sovereignty. In that regard, it is sadly ironic that Assange spoke in the EU before a European institution. Because, notwithstanding PACE's best efforts, Western Europe is the part of the world least likely to regain sovereignty. Others, however, have never lost it or are well on their way to reasserting it.
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