Bradley Manning's motives for leaking info

The guy is facing 20 years in prison on the charges he's pleaded guilty to. This is through a military tribunal. I dunno exactly how that works, but if it's anything like the military commissions in Gitmo then he's going to be fucked. This is on top of fuck knows how long he's been held over the militarys own time limit of how long someone can be held without trial.

What I found most interesting though was the motivations he gave to releasing the information to Wikileaks. Which is what Julian Assange has been saying all along; basically that Manning was the whistle blower who uncovered the atrocities being committed by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Manning’s motivations in leaking, he said, was to “spark a domestic debate of the role of the military and foreign policy in general,” he said, and “cause society to reevaluate the need and even desire to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore their effect on people who live in that environment every day.” Manning said he was in sound mind when he leaked, and so deliberately, regardless of the legal circumstances. 

Remarkably, Manning said he first tried to take his information to the Washington Post, the New York Times and Politico, before contacting WikiLeaks. more

It's also interesting that he tried other media outlets first. Which brings the question, would the US gov have labelled the editor in chief of The Washington Post and The New York Times as "enemies of the state" (as it has with Assange) if they had published the same info as Wikileaks? Would US politicians have said the editors deserve the death penalty for doing so (as they did with Assange)?

With the whole matter of Wikileaks, people seem to forget that it's a news organisation. So what's wrong with a news organisation blowing the whistle on what's really happening? Or are we simply to be dumb sheep and believe everything our gov's tell us? As far as I'm concerned, Manning and Assange are both heroes.

"Information is the currency of democracy" - Thomas Jefferson.