The emotional problems of loneliness and alienation Manning confronted are hardly atypical for a perceptive 20-year-old, particularly one with a long-estranged father dealing with issues of sexual orientation and gender identity who, after being raised in a tiny evangelical community in Oklahoma, finds himself deployed to Baghdad as part of the U.S. Army’s brutal war in Iraq (the one who ends up looking truly psychologically unstable in this article — and, as usual, deeply dishonest — is government informant Adrian Lamo; see below).  What Fishman’s article actually does is bolster the previous view of Manning’s alleged leaks as motivated by noble and understandable horror at what the U.S. was doing in Iraq specifically and that region generally, and a resulting desire to take action to shed light on what he was seeing and to do what he could to stop it.

The highly edited chat logs purportedly between Manning and Lamo and previously published by long-time Lamo associate Kevin Poulsen of Wired already made clear why Manning — if the chat logs are to be believed — leaked these videos and documents.  In those chat logs, Manning described his growing realization of the evil of the the war in Iraq of which he was a part; he specifically recounted that his discovery that Iraqi “insurgents” rounded up and arrested by U.S. forces were actually guilty of nothing was explicitly ignored; and he explained that the documents he is alleged to have leaked revealed systematic deceit, illegality and exploitation on the part of the U.S. Government and its allied governments, and that only disclosure and transparency could trigger urgently needed reforms.  As Manning put it in those purported chats with Lamo when asked what he hoped to achieve:

hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms – if not, than [sic] we’re doomed – as a species – i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens – the reaction to the [Collateral Murder] video gave me immense hope; CNN’s iReport was overwhelmed; Twitter exploded – people who saw, knew there was something wrong . . . Washington Post sat on the video… David Finkel acquired a copy while embedded out here. . . . – i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.

The objectives Manning described there have, in a very short time, already been vindicated: the Baghdad video was viewed by tens of millions of people around the world, and even the anti-WikiLeaks Executive Editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, has credited the release of the diplomatic cables allegedly leaked by Manning as playing a substantial role in triggering the revolts across the Middle East against mostly U.S.-supported despots.  Beyond that, so much of what we have learned about the world’s most powerful factions over the last year has come from these leaks.  Those results, by themselves, mean Manning — if he is the alleged leaker — has done at least as much, if not more, to advance the causes of transparency, accountability, and freedom across the world than any single living individual.

The New York article adds more details to Manning’s noble motives.  Like millions of people, Manning concluded that the war in Iraq, far from being a magnanimous endeavor to help the Iraqi people, was in fact an inhumane, monstrous act of aggression that indiscriminately killed huge numbers of innocent people; but unlike those millions of war critics, Manning decided to take action rather than remain passive:

For Manning, nothing was okay. In ­October 2009, he arrived at Forward ­Operating Base Hammer, a dusty back­water 40 miles from Baghdad. . . . Usually, there was a large central TV screen where an analyst could watch the war play in endless loop. You could zoom in on the raw footage from helicopters or even helmet cams. At times it felt like watching nonstop snuff films. . . .

An intel analyst sat at his work station and targeted the enemy, reducing a human being to a few salient points. Then he made a quick decision based on imperfect information: kill, capture, exploit, source. Any illusions Manning had about saving lives quickly vanished. At one point, he went to a superior with what he believed to be a mistake. The Iraqi ­Federal Police had rounded up innocent people, he said. Get back to work, he was told. . . .

He told the counselor about a targeting mission gone bad in Basra. “Two groups of locals were converging in this one area. Manning was trying to figure out why they were meeting,” the counselor told me. On Manning’s information, the Army moved swiftly, ­dispatching a unit to hunt them down. Manning had thought all went well, until a superior explained the outcome. “Ultimately, some guy loosely connected to the group got killed,” the counselor said. To the counselor, it was clear: Manning felt that there was blood on his hands. “He was very, very distressed.”

About that time, Manning later ­explained, “everything started slipping.” Manning, it turned out, wasn’t built for this kind of war. “i was a *part* of something … i was actively involved in something that i was completely against.” The job wore down lots of soldiers. Some survived by becoming desensitized — the blood and death goes right past them. Manning took it personally. According to the government, it was in November 2009, the same month that he reached out to the gender counselor, that ­Manning began to work with WikiLeaks’ ­Julian ­Assange, “a candidate for the most dangerous man in the world,” as Daniel ­Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon papers, later put it.