About Bradley Manning, government secrecy, and exposing classified information

[saras]

11. I am, apparently, biased in the opposite direction

First, secrets are inherently suspicious, and should ONLY exist when necessary - a government culture of secrecy is so wrong, and so opposed to American values, that ANYONE uncovering hidden corruption is OBLIGATED to expose it unless it's a current military secret the size of, say, the location and date of the Normandy Invasion.

Nothing in the released documents DESERVED to be secret, therefore none of it SHOULD have been. Simple enough.

And I have a strong bias AGAINST diverting questions of morality and corruption towards the personal characteristics of the messenger - it nearly always turns out that whatever they are, they are ultimately irrelevant and unimportant, except to the messenger and their own personal relationships. But they generally have NO BEARING on the quality or value of the data they release, until such a direct connection is demonstrated (i.e. the data has no importance BEYOND the fact that they were involved in releasing it.)

My world, as a human being on the planet Earth, nominally governed by the United States of America, was vastly improved, on scales from the personal to the national to the global, by the release of these documents. If we reject people like Bradley Manning as a way of getting them out, what alternative do you suggest to the obvious and corrupt failure of our existing institutions to address the secrecy problem and get the documents out when that needs to happen?