What he is accused of is well-known and not in dispute. This does not mean he actually did it.
I voted not guilty of treason. Every government needs whistlblowers
What exactly did he blow the whistle on? There isn’t a single unknown fact that’s been released. What he HAS done is demonstrate that our state department can’t keep secrets, and that will haunt our foreign policy for a very long time.
No, the evidence against him is overwhelming and no one seriously believes that he didn’t leak the information.
That’s very different. If he was uncovering malfeasance or war crimes etc, breaking the law to do so is defensible. He wasn’t. He exposed that diplomats act like diplomats. Prosecute him. Not that the actions were treasonous, nor is he a traitor. He did use poor judgement and will probably pay the price.
Going after Wikilleaks is dumb.
On the one hand, I think it’d be bad to render the security laws toothless.
On the other hand, I absolutely want people to act on their conscience when they perceive injustice, and I don’t want people to be horribly intimidated out of doing so by the law.
Therefore I want the penalty to be proportionate. Releasing state secrets should carry a penalty much less severe than, say, deceiving the country into a war. If he were dishonorably discharged and faced a small prison sentence–say, a year–that should be sufficient to keep everyone except those who are really really motivated from following in his footsteps.
Treason is a strong word but IMO is appropriate in this case. That doesn’t mean that I think he should be executed, something that is rarely, if ever, done for treason in the US. Whether he is a US citizen or not, he is in the US military so the law applies to him plus the Army has its own courts and laws. Manning willingly broke those laws.
This is a completely different question from whether what he did was right or wrong. I am convinced he did something that he thought was right and for the good of the nation. He was willing to pay the price, like anyone else who purposely breaks a law in protest. That doesn’t mean we should just ignore the law.