Maybe I'm an asshole, but the "put lives at risk" line seems like nationalistic swill. Even if it risked American combatants, why should that justify hiding the deaths of possibly fifteen thousand Iraqi civilians?
Most of the military intelligence Soldiers I deployed with brought their own personal laptops.
You really underestimate how much free alone time is available to you when you are deployed. Remember that Manning was also kind of a black sheep at the time. Spending hours alone on a laptop would not have been seen as out of the ordinary at all.
Even with the route she took, it was only a matter of months for her to make a mistake that got her arrested. Giving it to wikileaks reduced her anxiety, going through it likely would have ramped it up. Additionally, needing to keep a local copy of the data is a huge risk.
I don't think the war diary stuff made much of an impact, or the apache video. The diplomatic traffic OTOH was the spark into the tinder of the middle east autocracies that set off the so-called Arab Spring.
Besides, we saw ~10 people blown away in that one video. That's a fair number of eggs you'd get to break by leaking before even being at parity with that one instance, let alone all the others.
So to paraphrase "they did nothing wrong and even if they did it would have been okay".
First, they clearly shot civilians trying to take other civilians to the hospital by essentially inventing weapons they didn't and couldn't have seen. Secondly, in most countries when you get the responsibility to fly something like an attack helicopter, which takes a fairly long time to learn, you tend to have to be better than some random soldier. The "war is hell" excuse isn't really viable with the attitudes displayed in the video. But if you're trying to say that these are the kind of actions we should expect when the US invades a country then I guess we are in agreement.
Don't fall for a logical fallacy, and try to view the situatiom from the lens of the information that they actually had, not the hindsight.
(from the transcript [0])
05:30 There's one guy moving down there but he's uh, he's wounded. ... 06:01 He's getting up. 06:02 Maybe he has a weapon down in his hand? 06:04 No, I haven't seen one yet. ... 06:33 Come on, buddy. 06:38 All you gotta do is pick up a weapon. ... 06:54 This is Two-Six roger. I'll pop flares [drop flares]. We also have one individual moving. We're looking for weapons. If we see a weapon, we're gonna engage. ... 07:18 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly uh picking up bodies and weapons. .... 07:36 Picking up the wounded? 07:38 Yeah, we're trying to get permission to engage. ... 07:59 Roger. We have a black SUV-uh Bongo truck [van] picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.
There's nothing unclear here or anything to be misunderstood. If they had seen weapons they would have engaged already instead of asking for permission. It's just that the crew of the helicopter really wants to shoot them and that they, the US military nor the US public don't really give a shit if they are civilian as long as they can get away with it, which they can.
[0] https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/en/transcript.html
Had this been reviewed properly, yes. A "Mistakes Happen" stamp could probably be used. But by hiding it and lying about it, they turned it into something we can't ignore.
Also, I don't think the pilots are blameless. If they ever hit civilian court that transcript would hang them.