I think I'd like Chelsea personally, and I'm sorry for all that she has had to go through. But what is it, exactly, that we are supposed to be remembering and talking about here?
She systematically exfiltrated a lot of information which exposed several lies that the U.S. government was telling its citizens and the rest of the world. This information can be divided into four groups: Cablegate, Guantanamo Bay, the Iraq War, and the Afghan War.
The US government was telling U.S. citizens that the people who were stuck in Guantanamo Bay were very dangerous terrorists who would likely be responsible for the deaths of civilians if they were released, but could not be processed via normal US law for unknown reasons either. In fact they were largely being held not because of the danger they posed to society, but the intelligence that they could provide the US. Collateral damage included two British nationals and a journalist. It also made it clear that this intelligence was largely extracted via torture.
The US government had downplayed civilian deaths in Iraq, arguing that it wasn't a huge issue and that most of our killing was very reliable and well-targeted. The current estimates of civilian deaths are closer to 2:1, that's 2 civilians killed for each insurgent killed. I am not misspeaking when I say that: the current estimate is that the majority of deaths were civilian casualties. (One particular hot-button video showed two front-line reporters with cameras gunned down from a helicopter even after they'd apparently shown themselves to be not a threat; the video however lacks two pieces of context which somewhat ameliorate one's outrage: that one of the people they were with did have a rocket-propelled grenade, and that there was a lot of fighting in that region anyways: it was a preventable overstep rather than the murder that was claimed in the video description.)
The US government in Iraq indicated that they take reasonable precautions to prevent things like torture, prisoner degradation, and other abuse of force; these documents revealed that this was not quite correct: while the US government was certainly making efforts to keep its own nose clean in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, it often turned its back on similar awful practices happening at the behest of both the Iraqi police and the US mercenary corporations that it contracted, allowing them to go on with little objection and little indication to the rest of the world that these things were happening. In fact it was not just tacitly accepted, in many cases it was encouraged: US forces turned over thousands of prisoners to the Iraqi police, even though they knew that this was likely to cause them to be tortured and abused. It was damning that US forces ousted Saddam Hussein nominally for being awful to his own people (after we got into the war because he was nominally pursuing nuclear and biological weapons, which it turned out he wasn't), but then bolstered a follow-up regime which was just as awful to its own people.
A related disclosure of Afghan war documents revealed as I recall both the brutality of the Taliban and also surprised us by telling us that there was a good chance our nominal ally in rooting them out (Pakistan), was colluding with the Taliban behind the scenes. It was also a scandal for Canadians, who told their people that certain Canadian soldiers had died in a firefight with the Taliban when those documents appeared to document their dying because the US had accidentally dropped a bomb on them. For the US it was mostly scandalous because we'd understood that we were winning the war in Afghanistan; the results of these documents were much more bleak.
Finally Cablegate shocked the world because it revealed what US diplomatic informants were really saying. For example, US informants revealed a close connection between Putin and Berlusconi, and that Al Qaeda was getting its funding from Saudi Arabia, and that Qatar was a virtual safe haven for terrorists, and that Bashar al-Assad was systematically telling the US with his right hand that he wasn't arming Hezbollah while arming them with his left, and that the Yemeni government was systematically claiming responsibility for US counterterrorist operations in Yemen so that we wouldn't know that that was a front in the War on Terror. Other things emerged, e.g. the US was trading visits by President Obama for other people taking Guantanamo Bay prisoners off our hands; and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was embarrassed because he had privately called the then-heads of Iraq and Pakistan awful people; there were some other embarrassments in Cablegate too.
For her disclosure of these things, Chelsea (who at the time was nominally cisgendered and named Bradley) was detained and treated indecently to widespread criticism, and was finally convicted of every charge but the most severe, being sentenced for the remaining 21 crimes to 35 years in jail. This is despite the fact that her disclosure (in combination with WikiLeaks) was carefully redacted to protect vulnerable people, she won several awards around the globe for revealing the information that she did, and her disclosure ultimately caused the Arab Spring which was generally seen as a good thing for the US and democracy. It is hoped that Obama might commute her sentence at the end of his presidency, but that's a pretty slim hope; he has not publicly expressed any sympathy for her.
I really wish we could elevate quality of our discourse about government whistle-blowers. It is very far from clear that Manning (or Snowden, for that matter) was treated "highly unfairly." This could make for an interesting conclusion to a well-thought-our argument, but it makes a pretty dubious premise.
Yes, Manning et al. attempted to do a public service and got punished for it. That seems messed up. And it may be that the information they released is important enough that we all have a right to know it. (I think this is more plausible with Snowden than Manning, but both may have a claim here.) But there really are also serious questions about whether it is OK for an individual person to make the decision for all of us about what needs to be released and what does not, even if we like the outcome in a particular case.
What is the answer here? Should we really just decide not to prosecute government and military personnel who reveal sensitive government information (which is indisputably a crime) just because we think the release was valuable? Who makes this decision? What if DOJ or the president like that the leak happened, but the people do not? Are the people well enough informed to make this decision? What about the issue of deterrence? Even if everyone agrees that a leak was worthwhile, is it really a good idea to empower others, whose judgment may not be so good, to do the same thing?
In a democracy, the voters, via their representatives, decide what's legal for the government to do. So if the government does things that are illegal and hidden, then I'd say anyone has the authority to reveal it. That authority was granted by the voters who made the activity illegal.
If the government's activity is legal, on the other hand, then it's harder to make a case. A whistleblower may still decide to reveal it as a matter of civil disobedience, but at that point he's trying to change the minds of the voters, rather than enforce their expressed wishes. He should expect more legal jeopardy, though if he succeeds in changing people's minds, then a pardon would be appropriate.
If our legal system doesn't make a distinction between revealing legal and illegal secrets, then I'd say our system is inconsistent.
This is a pretty good answer, but I think there are at least two problems with it:
* It is often (though not always) quite hard to tell whether something the government is doing is or is not illegal even for well trained lawyers. Manning, Snowden, et al. are not lawyers.
* The information released by Manning, Snowden, et al. was dramatically broader in scope that what would have been required merely to reveal illegal activity. Most of it, especially in Manning's case, does not reveal any illegal activity at all.
Sure, it's a judgement call and whistleblowers have to do the best they can. If they make the wrong decision they're in the second category, so they have to decide if it's worth the risk. If they reveal the secrets to lawyers they're still breaking the law.
I agree that from what I've seen, Manning is on the civil disobedience side. I wish he had changed voters minds more than he apparently did.
Snowden had evidence of clearly illegal activity. There was a lot more mixed in, but it wasn't practical to separate it. Secret abuse of power is dangerous enough that I think that should be acceptable.
If we don't have practical protection for whistleblowers, we might as well not bother putting limits on government power at all. Based on what's happened to whistleblowers who went through official channels, it's clear that that approach doesn't work at all, and I don't know why anyone should expect it to work.
If you want to open these sorts of questions you'll quickly run into the fact that there are a bunch of different judicial opinions out there. I recommend the following link:
It is the preface and introduction to Peter Suber's book The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: Nine New Opinions; as the introduction discusses, the original Case, posted online here:
...was published by Lon Fuller in 1949 and contains a statement of facts in a (fictional!) case where a bunch of explorers get trapped for many days, ultimately eat one among their number, and are tried for murder and found guilty, sentenced to be hanged: this case is the final appeal of their sentence to the Supreme Court. In general people are sympathetic to the explorers, who faced death had they not acted.
This statement-of-facts is followed by the opinions of 5 court judges, who come to very different conclusions with very different reasonings. For example the chief justice says "Well, it's my job to apply the law as correctly as I can -- not to evaluate whether hanging these people for doing what they needed to do to survive is important. They broke the law, the law says that the punishment in this case is hanging, therefore I must rule that they should be hanged. Whose job is it to make sure that these laws are good to these people? Well, that's what we have lawmakers and an executive branch for. I'm going to sentence these people to death and hope that the President commutes their sentence." In response the second opinion says, "Seriously? That's a cop-out. Obviously if our hearts are saying that these people shouldn't be hanged, then that's not justice and they shouldn't be hanged, and in this case it's because there's a deeper Law from Nature which takes priority over our lawbooks." And so forth.
Then Pete Suber's book offers 9 more opinions, and there are even a few more in some other law reviews. Gives you a large question of how we should be balancing all of these different interests.
Literally anyone leaking classified information would be regarded as a hero whistleblower. At what point are you betraying your country and leaking secrets to enemies?
"I feel morally obligated to blow the whistle on this new secret superweapon the US is developing. So many lives could be at risk in the future. Here are all of the plans on how to create it, my work is done."
Forgotten what?
I think I'd like Chelsea personally, and I'm sorry for all that she has had to go through. But what is it, exactly, that we are supposed to be remembering and talking about here?