While I much agree with you in principle,i haven't seen any serious evidence that what Manning + Wikileaks revealed caused a lot of harm. Inconvenience, some discomforture and embarrassment sure. The Wikileaks vetting via newspapers was very good. Would i recommend a leak a week? Maybe for an external ombudsman - the Manning treatment, the continual overstating success of the surge, the Pat Tillman hype... our military spends more on self-promotion along with its drone and other suppliers. We don't debate the realpolitik that causes us to support Mubarek - maybe necessary, but then we have to define where necessary ends. Manning or other might have done a lot of harm with shoddy data security - but that huge military hole is another issue - China knows more about us than the American public does.

I feel I obligated myself to respond even though, as you say, it has all been pretty well hashed out.

Your perception of me painting with a broad brush would be closer to correct if you saw me as using more than one color for dividing opponents to my views into separate categories.  In your encompassing terms it would be two different categories, the misguided  and the hypocritical. I wouldn’t have used the word “misguided” though to describe those who think Manning a criminal. “Misguided” shifts the blame too much from the person who is wrong and gives them an excuse that diffuses the affect of their error in favor of the true criminals, the guides, so to speak. Our government has tried very hard to misguide us  about our recent and ongoing wars. We have, in too many cases, been wrong to believe what we have been told. We continue to be wrong every time we give them the benefit of the doubt.
 I’m sure I argued both ideas, being wrong and being hypocritical, at the same time though, so I probably deserve a hit for conflating the two charges and insulting some people unjustly as being hypocrites when,IMHO, they were just wrong, very wrong, very much victims of misguidance. Too often willful complacent victims, IMHO.
 Your second paragraph really surprises me although it is the second time I have heard that line of reasoning here at Dag. It is a complete misreading of the reasons that Mannings case is significant. The reasons to get worked up about this particular case, which you find so hard to do, do not rest on the level of abuse dished out to Manning relative to that of others who have suffered miscarriages of justice. It was being a witness to gross amounts of tremendously worse injustice than anything Manning has faced or will face that pushed him to act. It was, in so many cases, willfully planned, plotted, and enacted miscarriages of justice that obligated him to speak out. It was institutionalized injustice. The injustice included many war crimes which are a special category of wrong. Manning’s leaks should have touched our consciences if there is such a thing, if we have such a thing as a conscience, and if acting in good faith guided by that conscience is worth doing in this worldly realm. I know how preachy that sounds but I am an atheist, I'm entitled  and empowered to do so in this country said to be built on Christian values.
 Positions on this subject all come down to value judgments.
 The pathologies of empire and the national-security state grow from our own pathologies of thought and speech and then reinforce those pathologies in a feedback loop.
 Recall when candidate Obama said "government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal”. Now, during his administration, our government that increasingly targets leakers and whistleblowers from its lower and middle ranks is the same government that leaks constantly from the top. It continues to make clear that leaks are okay, as long as they serve the interests of power. If a rule is selectively enforced it ceases to be a rule and becomes something else—an arbitrary instrument of authority, a weapon of the powerful—but not a rule. Or, if it is an arbitrary ruler-protecting rule codified by the very abusers of that rule against what are effectively becoming their subjects, then certainly it is one meant to be justifiably broken.

Consider the range of stories we’ve seen confirmed by Manning’s leaks. After the White House and the Defense Department reviewed the actual information, they found and stated that the information contained was outdated, already public, or not highly classified. In all that supposedly mundane information we’ve seen American pressure on allies to put counter terrorism policies–both data collection and torture–ahead of democracy. We’ve seen how our troops in Iraq knowingly turned over Iraqis to be tortured. We’ve seen our allies in the Middle East promising to cause democratic elections not to take place. We’ve seen the culture of our leadership, enabled by the culture of our society, institute and enable policies and actions which, among their crimes, are part of turning too many soldiers into the type that makes Fred’s poetic voice correctly say, “I am a soldier, I am dirt”.  

 "Well, it's their fault for bringing kids into a battle," a US pilot can be heard remarking in the July 2007 "Collateral Murder" video after finding that the young children had been critically injured in the attack that murdered their father as he tried to help those still alive after the grizzly attack. An attack that we traveled thousands of miles to take to his hometown, to his children’s hometown, to a place very few of us give a shit about. An attack that our leaders are determined to keep hidden in the fog so as to keep it possible, as well as likely to the point of certainty, to happen again. And again.

“Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal”.

  I would vote for a guy who showed that he would do that rather than convincingly demonstrated that it was bullshit campaign rhetoric.

If Manning had only leaked the video you would be more sympathetic, but would you think him innocent of crime?  He certainly broke the law, the question is whether or not he had sufficient reason to do so. I am of the opinion that what he did was completely justified and should have been very valuable in making a more informed public push our republic towards a better direction. The common citizens of that republic, that is ours if we can keep it, should have taken notice of how we are losing its better nature.

 While I welcome any response, I agree that it has all been hashed out before.