[bostonpete]

I don't purport to be an expert on either of these cases, but my impression as a casual observer was that Mannings leak was just a massive dump of classified documents without any attempt to be selective about which information needed to come to light.

Any sizable dump of classified documents is likely to have some damning pieces in there but that doesn't necessarily justify blindly leaking massive amounts of documents. I think Manning would have gotten a more favorable response by more people if he had been just a bit selective in what he leaked.

Again, I don't have deep knowledge on either of these cases compared to some around here so I'll concede that maybe I'm wrong on some of my facts...?