Peg, Assange's motives are clearly in those documents for all to see .. basically according to them he is anti-authoritarian unjust behavior, for openness, and against 'conspiracy' .. his definition of conspiracy being secret dealings in authoritarian government or corporations .. here it is
"The problem this creates for the government conspiracy then becomes the organizational problem it must solve: if the conspiracy must operate in secrecy, how is it to communicate, plan, make decisions, discipline itself, and transform itself to meet new challenges? The answer is: by controlling information flows. After all, if the organization has goals that can be articulated, articulating them openly exposes them to resistance. But at the same time, failing to articulate those goals to itself deprives the organization of its ability to process and advance them. Somewhere in the middle, for the authoritarian conspiracy, is the right balance of authority and conspiracy.
His model for imagining the conspiracy, then, is not at all the cliché that people mean when they sneer at someone for being a “conspiracy theorist.” After all, most the “conspiracies” we’re familiar with are pure fantasies, and because the “Elders of Zion” or James Bond’s SPECTRE have never existed, their nonexistence becomes a cudgel for beating on people that would ever use the term or the concept. For Assange, by contrast, a conspiracy is something fairly banal, simply any network of associates who act in concert by hiding their concerted association from outsiders, an authority that proceeds by preventing its activities from being visible enough to provoke counter-reaction. It might be something as dramatic as a loose coalition of conspirators working to start a war with Iraq/n, or it might simply be the banal, everyday deceptions and conspiracies of normal diplomatic procedure.
He illustrates this theoretical model by the analogy of a board with nails hammered into it and then tied together with twine:"
"So, here’s his moral calculus: “We are an organization that tries to make the world more civil and act against abusive organizations that are pushing it in the opposite direction.”"
It seems he has tried to tread a line, so as not to act illegally, and has only, as far as i know released redacted versions as the others did.
who certainly didn't cut service to the Bush administration, or to the Israeli government, or to how many other organization which have acted illegally .. when in fact so far as i know wikileaks has not.