If you go down this rabbit hole you either come out as a conspiracy theorist or acknowledge that we need broad levels of transparency in government and the corporate world.

Even if it started as an honest attempt to show up secrecy, so many former Wikileaks workers have jumped ship that a completely new direction might have been taken.

It's also possible, and looking probable that the low level Army private was used as a scapegoat. Perhaps this is all a battle for turf among espionage agencies in the US government.

I have no idea, but if you're exposing money and power it is tough to not become about money and power yourself. When they were new, though, I thought their organization made sense given the technology of the day - they were exploiting data from private networks within which there was fairly broad access internally, and there's a very simple outward vector there through whistle-blowers and disgruntled employees. Wikileaks then took that data and through what was effectively a marketing department attempted to expose a broad section of the public to said data.

If, apparently, 3 million military personnel had access to this data, and it is deemed damaging by the government, then this is all to me no more than a demonstration of (very common) non-existent network security on the social side.

you are the media you consume.