Yes, this is the obvious conclusion here. Assange is a dishonest megalomaniac. Snowden is a high school dropout. And Manning is a troubled gay. The leaks be damned.
The leakers have put themselves in positions of enormous power and responsibility. They are deciding which documents the public gets to see. There are potential positive benefits to this but there are also significant risks (for instance, the release of the diplomatic cables and US military logs which included the names of people who talked to American officials could easily put those people at risk). Given the positions of power that Assange, Snowden, Manning, et. al. are putting themselves in, I think that it is completely reasonable to ask questions about their character as it directly relates to whether we trust them to decide what the public gets to know.
I don't understand what you mean by 'whether we trust them to decide what the public gets to know.' That's a question we're supposed to be asking the governments who have withheld this information, not the whistle blowers. Shifting the focus of these leaks to whether or not the whistle blowers should be hung or not is a great way to deflect focus from the actual things that were leaked. You'd think that a threat to the 4th amendment would register higher on people's radar, but the human interest piece is compelling.
Whether the information should have been leaked or not is an interesting question, but ultimately a 'what if' scenario. The important question is what we do with this information. Or, if you're the government, how to get the people to not care.
> the release of the diplomatic cables and US military logs which included the names of people who talked to American officials could easily put those people at risk.
That speculated risk is one which no one has been able to connect to a single actually death or injury. Its not like government PR would not love to bring proof of the dangers of leaks.
The reason why no actually body has been found, is that the included names was mistakes made by the people in the field who mistakably put some in the low security reports. Normally, such names are only added to high level security reports, which mean that the number of names in the low level reports where quite few/limited, and possible already evacuated long before the reports were made public.
High level security reports was sorted out by Wikileaks/leaker before publishing.
