We're not talking about "company policy" here, we're talking about U.S. law, and the international military concept in general.
Among the many other elements that go into signing away a few years of your life on a DD-2, is that you do in fact swear or affirm that you will use official channels where available, especially in the context of divulging information relative to the security of the 300+ million other citizens you've sworn to defend.
He didn't even bother to try, and this was only some scant years after Pfc. Justin Watt proved it could be done.
Please don't compare your Initech Employee Handbook to life and death conflict as if they're exactly equivalent.
According to Kohlberg's theory of moral development, recognizing rule of law as the authority is only the fourth of six stages. Manning's actions and stated intentions are consistent with the fifth or sixth stages.
One could take the position that his stated intentions were lies and that he was actually acting consistent with the second stage (self-interest). But all we can do there is speculate unproductively.
In any case, law seems like a silly standard to base a moral argument on, and there is no shortage of obviously dumb laws, in addition to outright malicious laws.
This misses the important fact that, as pointed out by mpyne, soldiers do indeed swear specifically to uphold certain rules. The law is not always just, but if you mostly-voluntarily swear to uphold it you'd better have good reasons to go back on your promise.
Those 300+ million citizens he swore to defend deserve the truth and there is no law which justifies them not knowing it. We've lost too much to find so little:
Among the many other elements that go into signing away a few years of your life on a DD-2, is that you do in fact swear or affirm that you will use official channels where available, especially in the context of divulging information relative to the security of the 300+ million other citizens you've sworn to defend.
He didn't even bother to try, and this was only some scant years after Pfc. Justin Watt proved it could be done.
Please don't compare your Initech Employee Handbook to life and death conflict as if they're exactly equivalent.