TL;DR: I do think some of what Assange did was morally wrong, but not nearly as much as what he's legally guilty of. I feel that way because the way the US government weilds the information classification system makes it far too blunt a tool.

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Thank you for rereading and acknowledging. The then-current troop operations information is a great example of sensitive information that shouldn't be public for obvious reasons. (Although I don't want to tug at that thread too hard because it leads to opinions on the validity of the war in the first place. It's complicated. ;-)

That's a well-reasoned view of the specific thing that was done wrong. However, our government doesn't seem to want to draw the line there. There was a lot of other stuff in that dump. Some of it was embarrassing. Much of it was banal. But the US government doesn't want to make that distinction. It was classified information, whether that made sense in every case or not.

I can't say with any certainty, but I doubt the troop operations information was intentionally released. If, hypothetically speaking, all the other information in the dump was declassified, I don't think Manning and Assange would have wanted to release information that would endanger lives.

I think they were just overzealous and didn't have the time or want to take the time to comb through it all first. Look how long it took journalists to do it.

So if they were being specifically prosecuted for the troop ops info, that would be one thing in my book. It's quite another thing to be accused of high treason for disseminating embarrassing things and things that are only considered sensitive because that's the default classification.