Again with the mischaracterizations! You should stop that.
I feel someone who had no knowledge or suspicion of wrongdoing and no intention to just reveal wrongdoing does not count as a whistleblower. Pretty simple.
From "Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of the 12 July 2007 aerial weapons team or AW team video", a statement by Manning to the US Army:
The video depicted several individuals being engaged by an aerial weapons team. At first I did not consider the video very special, as I have viewed countless other war porn type videos depicting combat. However, the recording of audio comments by the aerial weapons team crew and the second engagement in the video of an unarmed bongo truck troubled me.
As Showman and a few other analysts and officers in the T-SCIF commented on the video and debated whether the crew violated the rules of engagement or ROE in the second engagement, I shied away from this debate, instead conducting some research on the event. I wanted to learn what happened and whether there was any background to the events of the day that the event occurred, 12 July 2007.
Using Google I searched for the event by its date by its general location. I found several new accounts involving two Reuters employees who were killed during the aerial weapon team engagement. Another story explained that Reuters had requested for a copy of the video under the Freedom of Information Act or FOIA. Reuters wanted to view the video in order to understand what had happened and to improve their safety practices in combat zones. A spokesperson for Reuters was quoted saying that the video might help avoid the reoccurrence of the tragedy and believed there was a compelling need for the immediate release of the video.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/01/bradley-mannin...
I can accept that the whistleblower label isn't completely incorrect, but the problem is that people use it in place of leaker in an effort to establish moral justification for all his leaks. He wasn't kept in prison for 7 years because he was a whistleblower, it was because he was a leaker. But he was also a whistleblower.
Whistleblowers in the US government can and do go to prison, regardless of whether they're responsible about it or not. I think clemency in this case (shortening the sentence for disclosure of the cables to 7 years) is the least the President could have done.
Please use "she," by the way. Chelsea's gender and correct pronoun are some of the most well-known in the world by now. Nobody can claim ignorance anymore.
And yeah I generally just avoid using the pronoun or use she when forced to. But the article you linked had pictures of "him" at the bottom and so using he was unconscious.
Intelligence analyst, no knowledge or suspicion... uhhhh what?