My ex-husband's maternal grandparents were German, children of German immigrants who migrated to America around the turn of the 20th Century.
In 1970, my husband was in the military when he received orders to report to a  base in Germany, where he was assigned to an intelligence unit.
He was sent TDY from his base in Germany to Italy to attend Intelligence School.  However, after only three weeks, he unexpectedly received orders to report back to his post in Germany.
Once back, he was quizzed regarding certain individuals who lived in East Berlin, none of whom he knew or even had heard of.   After some two or three hours "grilling", the army officials finally informed him that he was not eligible to receive a "top secret" military clearance  because these people were relatives of his, who still lived in a Communist country under the control of the Soviet Union.  Furthermore, he was forbidden even from traveling to West Berlin so long as he served in the United States Military.
In a matter of just three weeks, the Army knew not only these people's names but also their occupations and their addresses.  I'm assuming they also knew other pertinent data about him as well.
In another instance, I was once called out of my classroom to speak with an FBI agent about one of my former students, who was about to be deployed on a nuclear submarine. The agent asked me all kinds of questions from how patriotic I thought this young man was to how well he got along with his peers.
So, at least to me, it begs the question of how a person, specifically, PFC Bradley Manning, a young man with a troubled past, ever was assigned to an intelligence unit.

People who knew him as a youth stated that he was a "nerd" who was constantly bullied and teased by his peers, even more so after they discovered he has gay.

He had no friends, eventually retreating into the cyber world, where he became an expert hacker. Where was the quality control? If the FBI had done a background check on him as thoroughly as the one they did on my husband and my former student, surely they would have concluded he was not a suitable candidate for an intelligence unit.

The fact that he was gay certainly would not automatically make him hate the world but the horrible abuse to which he was subjected because he was, among other things, a gay teen should have set off some warning signals.

Manning, even kicked out of the house by his father, dropped out of school and eventually joined the army, landing in Kuwait. He did not find acceptance in the military either.

The British newspaper, Guardian, recently printed a conversation Manning had in an online chat with another computer hacker. Manning confided to him that he was overwhelmed with the amount of classified data at his disposal, much of it revealing abuse of innocent people at the hands of the military.

He added that he was determined to show the world just how corrupt and evil the government really was. He also talked of his feelings of loneliness and isolation.