1: Government employees who expose misconduct should not be punished more severely than those who engage in misconduct.
Among the more blatant injustices of the Manning case is that Manning was prosecuted more intensely, and punished far more harshly, than other soldiers (and their superiors) who authorized and engaged in war crimes, including the torture of prisoners and the killing of civilians. A justice system that “looks forward rather than backward” with respect to grave human rights abuses, while extending no mercy to those who break secrecy rules in good faith, will have serious legitimacy problems, and rightly so.

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3. The government should have to demonstrate that the leaked information had been properly withheld form the public.
Rampant overclassification of information about critically important government activities is a chronic and widely recognized problem. Against that backdrop, criminal liability for leakers can’t rest exclusively on a classification decision made by an intelligence community bureaucrat; a judge and jury must be able to consider whether the information had been withheld from the public for legitimate security reasons.

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5. The government should be consistent in its enforcement of criminal laws against leaking.
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Even while the Obama administration has brought an unprecedented number of leak prosecutions, it has simultaneously provided favored reporters with vast amounts of classified information for the production of news reports and books that further its preferred narrative. [font size=3]When the government chooses to prosecute only disfavored leaks, while systematically failing to pursue many hundreds of leaks that advance its interests, it loses even more legitimacy.[/font]

Now apply these principles to Manning’s leaks. Isn’t it clear that a sentence of 35 years is manifestly excessive? It’s beyond serious debate that Manning’s disclosures included information of enormous public significance. The world’s leading newspapers, which received the documents, could have returned them to the government; instead, they published them on their front pages, exposing previously concealed evidence of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. efforts to quash European criminal investigations into CIA rendition and torture, U.S. involvement in drone strikes in Yemen, and many other matters of global concern. And, notwithstanding accusations from government officials that Manning had “blood on his hands” as a result of the disclosures, the government’s evidence did not match its rhetoric; [font size=3] it conceded during the trial that it could not link a single death to Manning’s disclosures.[/font]

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http://www.politico.com//story/2013/08/bradley-manning-was-no-criminal-95820.html