Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much more serious trouble could Manning get into? I'm not trying to be argumentative. It's a serious question. He had a very high security rating, and was dumping highly classified documents -- the work of tens of thousands of man hours and billions of dollars of intelligence -- on to the web. What's the next step past that? EDIT: wrong guy -- changed name to be what I meant and not what I typed
Accidentally publishing a document that creates a serious operational crisis, thus putting him in military prison for the rest of his life.
Aside from the "accidentally" part, I don't know know could you prove that a particular document created an operational problem without knowing everything other people have to make decisions with and how they made them. I think with this standard of "worse" it's an extremely difficult thing to know with any certainty.
With the size of the information he dumped, I don't know how anybody would be able to walk back which operational problems he caused where. That's how intelligence works -- lots of little pieces making a case one way or another. Do we really want to have a trial that cross-references all TSSCI operations with the information in his leaks?
I understand that if there were operation X in which we knew enough about how it crashed that we could show it was a result of his action -- that might make a better legal case. But the amount of damage he's done isn't directly measurable like that. It's not like knocking over a liquor store. He didn't do less or more damage because it's more or less easily demonstrable. And I'm still trying to figure out how doing something accidentally -- without intent to harm -- is worse than doing something intentionally.