While this news offers cause for celebration, his persecution provides a solemn reminder of how the powerful will usurp our rights to advance their interests. 

Western governments, led by the US Security State, abrogated the pillars of our justice system to punish Assange for exposing their crimes. Even the guilty plea reflects their brazen censorship. 

Assange will plead guilty to "conspiracy to disseminate national defense information." Without the dissemination of classified information, journalism would officially become nothing more than a mouthpiece for the American Intelligence Community. Assange's plea could just as readily describe Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers, long hailed as a North Star of American journalism.

But while mainstream media increasingly dithers to the US Security State (groups like the Washington Post repeatedly advocated for the jailing of the WikiLeaks publisher), Assange remained resolute in his pursuit of informational freedom. And that is why his opponents overturned every standard of Western justice to punish him.

The freedoms enshrined in our First Amendment, including freedom of speech and of the press, became subordinate to neoconservatives' insatiable thirst for war and unrelenting intolerance for dissent. Due process of law withered away as Assange spent over a decade in confinement despite not being convicted of any crime other than a misdemeanor for skipping bail. 

Attorney-client privilege was deemed inapplicable as the CIA spied on Assange's communications with his lawyers. As CIA Director, Mike Pompeo plotted kidnapping and assassinating the WikiLeaks founder for publishing documents that exposed that the Intelligence Community used taxpayer funds to install bugs in Americans' Samsung television sets to invade their privacy. 

"Assange is not persecuted for his own crimes, but for the crimes of the powerful," writes Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and author of The Trial of Julian Assange.

In 2010, WikiLeaks released "Collateral Murder," a 38-minute video of American soldiers killing a dozen Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists. The recording remains available online, showing two Apache helicopter pilots unleashing fire on the men below as if it were a videogame.