Ellsberg has been saying that things were in fact better back then. He was arrested, released on bail, and spent the next couple years able to tell his story to the media. Manning was arrested and kept in solitary for almost four years before his trial, isolated from the outside world.
Ellsberg was a civilian, employed by the RAND Corporation [1] when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, which was a political report commissioned by a politician (Secretary of Defense McNamara). [2]
Manning was serving in active military duty when he leaked actual military data (albeit historical). There is a huge difference there. When you do something like that in the military, you get court-martialed, which is a different set of rules than civilian court. I do think that 4 years of solitary confinement is beyond excessive, but the military has to court-martial him. I'm guessing it's all spelled out in the military handbook, and I don't think anyone would have expectations otherwise.
