The lawyer for Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of government files to WikiLeaks, is offering to plead guilty on several charges.
The attorney, David Coombs, said in a blog on Thursday: “Manning is not pleading guilty to the specifications as charged by the government,” but “is attempting to accept responsibility for offenses that are encapsulated within, or are a subset of, the charged offenses.”
He stressed that Manning, whom WikiLeaks never disclosed as the source of the documents that the website posted in 2010, is not entering a plea “as part of an agreement or deal.”
Manning, 24, has been accused of disclosing some 250,000 diplomatic cables and 500,000 intelligence reports on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he served as an analyst. WikiLeaks published many of the documents in 2010.
Manning has been in military custody since 2010, after hacker Adrian Lamo identified him and turned him over.
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