First: I basically agree. The media and the commentators are spinning the coverage out of control. Your original post makes an excellent point about how rhetoric is used, and I don't disagree.

(For those of you who don't care about technical points of legal reasoning, there's no reason to go on further. That should be most of you. If you're hesitating, then just move on.)

Second: The Assange case (by this, I mean a putative American espionage-related case) has not yet started, let alone exhausted its hypothetical appeals. The questions at issue are whatever issues that may be raised by any of the trial lawyers, any appellate lawyers that there may be, any issues raised by "friends of the court" that any of the relevant courts choose to recognize, and any issues that any of the relevant courts choose to address on their own.

This could potentially include a lot of issues.

Many of those issues may seem really, really stoooopid at first glance. But the judiciary has the authority to make them effective. The judiciary does do this type of thing all the time. If you asked me, personally, I'd say the first amendment did not contain any such thing as a "reporters' privilege" when ratified. But my merely personal opinion doesn't matter. What matters is what lawyers can convince a judge of. That judge then issues a new opinion, "interpreting" the prior precedents. Next, other lawyers, and other judges "interpret" the law in light that opinion, and so on, ad infinitum.

This is the nature of the law that governs all of us who live in a common-law (English-based) system. I understand that analogous mechanisms apply under the Roman-based systems.