'Bradley Manning deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.'' The opening of Chase Madar's book leaves us in no doubt as to the author's view on his subject: whistleblower Bradley Manning, the man said to have supplied half a million classified documents to WikiLeaks.

For Madar, a New York lawyer, the line is more than a rhetorical flourish. The US awarded the Presidential Medal, the country's highest civilian honour, to most of the principal players behind the Iraq War, including Tony Blair and John Howard. In other words, those who misled the public into a disastrous invasion were decorated - but Manning faces life in jail for revealing the truth about what the conflict entailed.

Disenchantment with war stemmed from politics: Bradley Manning. Credit:AP

In part, The Passion of Bradley Manning can be read as a biography. Manning, a talented but troubled computer geek, enlisted in the army (perhaps because of an unhappy relationship with his father) and, despite struggling as a recruit, somehow ended up an intelligence analyst in Iraq.

In that capacity, he investigated 15 men detained by the Iraqi federal police for printing ''anti-Iraqi literature''. But the material that brought them into Iraq's notorious jails proved, on further inspection, to be merely an expose of Iraqi government corruption, entitled Where did the money go?.