Bradley Manning offers partial guilty plea to military court

Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army soldier accused of providing WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of classified documents, has offered to plead guilty. Sort of.

During a pre-trial hearing in military court today, Manning's attorney, David Coombs, proposed a partial guilty plea covering a subset of the slew of criminal charges that the U.S. Army has lodged against him.

"Manning is attempting to accept responsibility for offenses that are encapsulated within, or are a subset of, the charged offenses," Coombs wrote on his blog this evening. "The court will consider whether this is a permissible plea."

Coombs stressed that Manning's offer has to be accepted by the court -- it's not final until it is -- and is not part of any "an agreement or deal" with prosecutors.

Manning's court-martial is set to begin in February 2013. Last year, the military slapped him with 22 charges, including alleging that Manning caused "to be published on the Internet intelligence belonging to the United States government."

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