Wow!  A wall of words.  Good thoughts though. Our government cannot force extradition, it can only request it and such a request is made through a legal process outlined in a treaty.  Most, but not all countries have extrad  ffa  ition treaties between them that establish the provisions and circumstances for the extradition process. You are correct in saying that it is not illegal to publish stolen information in this country.  The Supreme Court ruled as such back in when Daniel Ellsberg did just about the same thing as Bradley Manning except that Ellsberg was not in the military when he passed copies of the report to the NYT.  He was a government contractor who had access to the highly-classified study of the US involvement in the Vietnam war by the RAND Corporation.  Much like the Wikileaks materials that Manning provided, the study was a bombshell that was embarrassing to the government and contradicted decades of the government's account of the Vietnam war. The SCOTUS ruled the NYT was protected by the 1st Amendment in publishing the 'Pentagon Papers' given to them by Ellsberg.    Ellsberg, however, was charged with espionage and other accompanying crimes and had it not been for a bungled government burglary of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, Ellsberg very well may have found himself in prison or executed for espionage. Manning was rightfully prosecuted in a court-martial proceeding and should have faced the death penalty for his actions.  Some of the shit the senior military officers decide today prove that there were ample sympathetic ears for Manning to address his concerns to but instead, contacted Assange and transferred hundreds of thousands of pages of compromising and embarrassing military and diplomatic communications.  A lot of it embarrassed the State Department more than the DOD.  His 35-year prison sentence was later commuted by Obama after serving about 4 years - far less time than Assange has been in asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy and now a British prison.    Yet even with all this precedence, Assange still faces a US extradition order that he is fighting.  It's why I believe POTUS should quash the extradition order and drop all charges if Assange agreed to testify openly and completely and cooperate with a DOJ investigation into the 'hacking' of the DNC server.