Why would you put army in quotes? It's really an army, so that doesn't make sense.
Chelsea Manning was a confused person when she released the documents. She felt isolated from the people around her and searched for inclusion elsewhere. She developed a friendly relationship with Wikileaks personnel, and sent them hundreds of thousands of random documents. Later, she sent the helicopter video and hundreds of thousands more random documents.
That's not a principled stand against what the military is doing. That's a person unhappy with where they are lashing out and in the process occasionally hitting the mark.
The military subsequently mistreated her, and she should never have been in the position to do this in the first place. She ended up telling people that she was the one who leaked all the documents, when she didn't have to say anything at all. That doesn't make her a crusader or hero.
Snowden, on the other hand, was valued and paid well, and sacrificed that. He specifically targeted information that he believed was unconscionable and unconstitutional, and was careful about who he trusted with it and what he released. He had a well-articulated and thought-through purpose and has effected change through it.
'army' to highlight the the massive problems really wasn't all the army's doing. Elected politicians, unelected public servants, media informing the public spectacularly badly and so on really can't be laid at the door of the armed forces. Whatever the armed forces did wrong they should have to answer for individually and in terms of institutional reform (as we all should in all our walks of life) but not those wrongs they really had no power to put right.
Can we please keep repeating that Manning was inspired to do what he believed to be the right thing by Elie Wiesel and specifically referenced this video:
http://vimeo.com/5081720
in his irc discussions with Adrian Lamo that got him arrested and jailed. Manning was looking at people being rounded up for their scholarly political views. That's a fact, not conjecture. It has a wow factor. If you aren't willing to accept being a part of that as he wasn't and believe that the institution you love is in dire need of serious reform, what can you do? What will you do?
Criticizing Manning or Snowden or Greenwald or Poitras or Drake or for that matter Assange but spending no energy at all on the required institutional reforms or being critical of the evil that does kill unjustly and unnecessarily doesn't seem like a particularly courageous answer. Reform is hard, PR much easier if you're in power and can get away with that. I don't think they can or will because now the dust settles people can be a bit more confident who had done the wrong thing.
"We tortured some folk..." Gotta start somewhere.
It's not about doing it in an orderly way, it's about doing it on purpose.
If I'm upset and download a bunch of documents onto a flash drive and send it to a person that is nice to me, and it just so happens that in amongst the hundreds of thousands of miscellaneous documents is some scrap of evidence of wrongdoing, it doesn't make me a hero for doing it.
If on the other hand I find that evidence and expose it purposefully because I have principles, that's another story.
Intent has meaning when you're defending a person's actions.
