I think the thing I was most surprised about is that the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs were the very first thing Manning had uploaded to WikiLeaks, and this happened far before Manning had been given the order to determine what other anti-Maliki literature was being drummed up by the FP 15.

I had always had the impression that Manning had been generally dissatisfied by American geopolitics but that the FP 15 order had been the last straw for him and that he'd started divulging information to WikiLeaks all at once.

It wasn't like that at all. He released the Iraq/Afghanistan actions database way before any of that. Before he saw the "Collateral Murder" video. Before the FP 15. Even before he punched a soldier in the face (around 8 May 2010, which was his "altercation").

WTF. He was essentially a WikiLeaks mole working on the inside... even though he made clear that no one from WikiLeaks pressured him into divulging information he also freely admits that some of the information he went out of the way to find, was simply because it was a matter of discussion in the WikiLeaks IRC/Jabber chat.

He freely admits releasing documents that he felt could possibly harm the U.S. as well: "Of the documents release[d], the cables were the only one I was not absolutely certain couldn’t harm the United States."

And why did he release these cables if they were the only documents that were risky? "I believed exposing this information might make some within the Department of State and other government entities unhappy."

He also talked about reading quotes after WWI, about how "the world would be a better place if states would avoid making secret pacts and deals with and against each other." Certainly true! However he seemed to have missed the history lesson from WWII, where the U.K. and the U.S. both enjoyed significant military advantages thanks to their signals intelligence and codebreaking feats.

If Manning were as smart an intelligence analyst as he claims to be then he should know full well that information which is unclassified individually may still be a risk to national security (and therefore classified) if released as an aggregate.

The U.S. did this to the Japanese several before the Battle of Midway; for instance an increase in message traffic from the Japanese Naval base at Truk was a clue to the intelligence analysts at Station Hypo at Pearl Harbor that the Japanese fleet was prepping for a major operation, even though they couldn't break the code. (A good book to read regarding this is Ian Toll's "Pacific Crucible").

I suppose at least I can't say he was doing this to get back at the Army per se, since he'd done everything before they reduced him in rate. But conversely, much of what he leaked was not "war crimes" at all, but merely stuff to "start a debate".

I'm not really sure what to think about all of it. It seems to me that based on his very half-hearted attempts to go to the media that he was intending all along to go to WikiLeaks (whether consciously or not), and that the reasoning for it was not about specific things at all (at least the initial leaks).

I wish he would have talked about why he felt the need to brag to Lamo about it. Maybe that (talking to Lamo) was brought on by his stress from his punishment from the Army, it would almost be doubly ironic if the way he unmasked himself ultimately came about from his own fist hitting the face of another soldier.