I agree with Anonymous about this... Do you?

[jeff47]

21. Unfortunately, his motivation was edited after the fact.

The assertion that Manning leaked the information because he wanted to reveal "bad" activities by the US was added after-the-fact. His statements at the time of the leak do not support this assertion.

It also suffers from Manning not actually leaking anything that reveals "bad" activity. Even the "collateral murder" video matched the official, and already public, investigation. We just now have video matching the same story. If his intent was to reveal "bad" activities, he would presumably have leaked some.

but the information he let us see was already known by every foreign government with even a minimal spy service

That's not something we can actually say.

For example, Manning leaked a lot of information about the optics systems in Apache helicopters by leaking the "collateral murder" video. I have no idea what, if anything, is classified about those optics, but it's an example that shows he leaked more than just the content on the pages.

Plus there's the whole thing of our sources getting executed and reluctance of any future sources, but hey, that's a small price for having no effect on our imperial wars.

Oh, what, the government officially said they couldn't show harm? Well, take a nanosecond to think about it - the harm would be classified! So of course they "can't show" any harm to the public.

As for the length of his imprisonment so far, that's the doing of his defense team. He waived his speedy trial right in order to give his team more time to prepare.