Chelsea Manning was court-martialed. Military personnel, very reasonably, have a different set of rights and duties than a normal citizen. We can have a conversation about certain punishments or mechanisms and whether they're humane, but an even more basic feature of our system than whether X case was correct or Y punishment is just, is the fact that we can and we do have lively, 24/7 conversations about this stuff. And they do actually change! Usually for the better! We've made immense progress on many of these issues over the last 200 years.

An edge case in one system having some vague similarities to the base case in another system indicates that they are dramatically different, not similar.

This distinction all seemed pretty academic to me too until I actually went to one of these theocratic countries - one way more liberal than Iran - and asked a local for their thoughts on [local authority figure]. The reaction was absolutely chilling. They didn't go into a rant about all the horrible abuses of power and how evil this leader is, how another country has it better, etc. They instead clammed up, looked around, and ended the conversation immediately.

No, "convicted leaker of state secrets got treated poorly" does not in any way substantiate "we see the same sort of railroading."