well love it or hate it wiki leaks has sure given us all a lot of talk about over the last few years with its explosive revelations ahead we'll count down the top ten things we now know because of the whistle blowing web site. and speaking of wiki leaks today is the second anniversary of the largest intelligence leak in american history so what have we learned from the so-called cable gate and also what's to come of founder julian assange on details coming up. plus it is day two of the pretrial hearings for accused wiki leaks or bradley manning today medical experts will take the stand to testify about his treatment while in custody the latest on his case in just a bit the news starts now. today

is the anniversary of an event that has been hugely significant both on historic and political levels revealing more than mere information two years ago today wiki leaks released a cable gate let's go to our to use adriano said oh to explain. hey there adriano breakdown i mean we have certainly learned so much from this website i mean we have been as you just said before cable gate as it's commonly know did shed some light on some information that some governments all over the world would have rather kept in the dark so we here at r.t. decided to put together a list of some information you might not have figured out how to not been for wiki leaks so take a look. number ten corrupt corruption in egypt one of the first major revelations came as no surprise to many international observers systemic corruption was

a mainstay in the mubarak regime the government routinely took selective actions against journalists and bloggers who held negative opinions of mubarak cables also uncovered the strained relationship between the u.s. and egypt. number nine syria gate one of the latest releases featured documents relating to syria among the revelations were ties between italian industrial giant finmeccanica which supplied fifteen million interception prove communications used by military police number eight palestine willing to play ball in an attempt to streamline the peace process wiki leaks cables revealed just how much the palestinian authority was willing to concede surprisingly the palestinian authority was willing to give up land in exchange for an end to further settlement building revelation angered some palestinian hardliners but ultimately showed israel's all or nothing attitude at the negotiating table. and the same one of the six joining us on has been in the ecuadorian embassy for nearly six months in london this

despite being granted asylum in ecuador. the british response to the asylum threat to overrun the embassy and forcibly take a while their rhetoric has cooled down and the confrontation demonstrated something about the british mindset despite international law and that being at their side authorities in the u.k. don't really value embassy raids number six violence in mexico the war on drugs has long been a difficult problem to tackle especially because cartels in mexico have a foothold among police army and the mexican government wiki leaks released a u.s. cable concern that narco money and firepower would play an outsized role in the two thousand and nine miscible gubernatorial and state elections in mexico for the first time the mexican people saw the u.s. as critical judgment of its leaders and their corruption and the cables ultimately influence the election number five guantanamo president obama has yet to keep his promise to close guantanamo bay and wiki leaks revealed that most of the so-called

dangerous criminals imprisoned are low level foot soldiers or altogether innocent afghans and pakistanis are in the wrong place at the wrong time. number four concerns over karzai the war in afghanistan continues to rage on and while the u.s. continues negotiations with afghan officials over troop presence post twenty fourteen it wasn't that long ago that the u.s. was expressing concern over the country's leader president karzai calling him quote a paranoid and weak individual unfamiliar with the basics of nation building no word yet on whether popular opinion has changed among u.s. officials. number three across the globe the battle over genetically modified foods has been at the ballot box in the u.s. but most voters didn't know that the u.s. embassy in paris suggested back in two thousand and seven that d.c. start a trade war with european union countries that did not support the use of genetically modified crops cables also show that u.s.

diplomats regretted that the pope who allegedly supported the use of g.m. crops had not made his opinion public the number two spot is like us it's never too late to become a spy that's what several us tipple matts found out when under instruction by the state department to collect information on key officials this included everything from basic contact information like business cards and cell phone numbers to credit cards and even fingerprints. and a number one collateral murder by now you've probably seen this video of a us a pow apache helicopter shooting at iraqis like they're in a video game without concern that they're shooting at international journalists this video put wiki leaks on the map and showed the real face of war apathetic teens unaware that they're shooting at real people. well there you have it christine a couple of things you might have not known had not been. so all right pretty significant things part of what will no doubt become important in history when we

look back thanks our two producer adrienne it was sad. well let's talk more now a little bit about the legacy of wiki leaks and in particular the case surrounding its founder julian assange we are nearing six months that assad has been holed up in the ecuadorian embassy in london if he sets foot outside he will be arrested and sent to sweden for questioning related to sexual assault allegations as anjan his supporters fear he would then be extradited to the united states and charged with espionage and for this reason ecuador has granted him political asylum but still as of now he has no way to safely get there to talk more about some of the most far reaching consequences of cable gate correspondent laura smith joined me earlier today from london. so two years ago on the twenty eighth of november two thousand and ten cable gave really got into the swing of things the first two hundred twenty cables were published by media partners of wiki leaks in spain and germany and

france the u.k. and of course the u.s. and what we've seen since then huge consequences both internationally and the wiki leaks as a corporation and so people within that corporation so we're going to talk about this in a little bit more detail i know but there's been huge consequences in terms of the arab spring cable guy is really credited with being a catalyst for the arab spring also since cable gave wiki leaks as a corporation and many people will say that this is not a coincidence has come under increasing pressure quite shortly following cable gates its experience denial of service is service attacks on it as it was also blockaded by a lot of payment method so pay pal credit card companies denied wiki leaks that it says and so couldn't therefore receive any donations and that's a legal battle that's still going on of course there have been consequences for

broadly manning who may or may not be the original source of the documents he's in pretrial detention in the united states as we speak and of course today an assault himself the head of wiki leaks has been designated officially by the u.s. as an enemy of the united states along with wiki leaks so really huge consequences all around yeah and one of those that you mentioned i think is an important one which is that it in many ways this was a catalyst to the arab spring games was the civic example things that came out of wiki leaks that really played a role in these protests that have really reshaped the politics of the middle east and north africa. that's why it's important to note that judy and i phones always says that it wasn't wiki leaks that that provided the catalyst for the arab spring it was the people in the arab world and in fact during a speech to the u.n. he gave recently he was very critical of president obama who he says takes credit for the arab spring himself but i suppose the most kids own poor ailie is

tunisia where of course the uprisings began with this self-immolation of a man who was protesting against the fact that he literally couldn't afford to live ten days before that event wiki leaks released a cable that showed that the president's daughter and her husband or did ice cream to be delivered to them from some tree pay so while it was going on the ordinary people into his it couldn't afford to live and that many examples of that all over the arab world which really led to people thinking we're not going to put up with this anymore we have to get rid of these people you mention the speech that julian assange just gave to the united nations i'm pretty sure that was the last time really that we have heard from him i want to play a quick part of that speech and then we'll talk about it. the u.s. is ministration it in trying to arrange. a national regime of

secrecy and national regime discussion regime where any government employee reviewing sensitive information to a media organization can be sentenced to day life imprisonment or it's been and journalists from the media organization. so is silence really pointing out once again some of the flaws the differences between the us policies and their actions laura you have personally interviewed julian assange what are your thoughts on his state of mind his wellbeing after being stuck in this embassy for more than five months now pressed i'd just like to tell you that i was in the ecuadorian embassy the night that julian essence gave his speech to the un and i can tell you that he made that speech in his sulks he's probably the only man who's ever given a speech to the un and just in just his stocking feet but i guess as you say you know there's no real reason for him to put his shoes on because he's not going anywhere he has been holed up in the ecuadorian embassy for almost six months now

and additionally it's almost two years since the european arrest warrant was first issued for him and since he's been holed up in various locations whenever i os kamal remember of his team what he's doing well he's been in that they always say well he's working he was all the time and it's true that information has kept on coming out issued by wiki leaks and he is he is very proud of that but having said that his health is failing as any of all as would if we were inside for that length of time just the lack of i think i'm particularly now that the winter has come on here in the u.k. people are saying that his vision is suffering slightly that his state of mind has become much more much more pessimistic if you like and i think that i've seen not over the course of the two years that we've been following this story but still he keeps on working and still you know he keeps up the pressure on the government and the ecuadorian embassy has been very instrumental in doing that too while he's been

in he's completed a number of projects he has made a program of full of notably where he's interviewed a huge range of people one town in prison is the first president of the new tune is the that we just talked about he also interviewed before he went to. the ecuadorian embassy the ecuadorian president which is believed to have been the first contact that he made with him and he's also written a book which is being released this week a book called cypherpunks which is based on one of the interviews that he did for that show so you know his his health might not be all but one would hope he is still keeping the pressure on and keeping on doing his work laura just one more question for you and it's an overall sort of broad question about the evolution of wiki leaks as an organization i know was for a while a widely used source but now we rarely hear much about it what's your take here on the timeline of how everything's happened. well i think since cable gate has been

very hard the wiki leaks as an organization as i say acknowledges still walking and just last month wiki leaks started releasing one hundred classified and secret documents about the treatment of prisoners in u.s. detention facility say guantanamo background places like that and they there's a very important documents but they have had a lot of problems today and i felt as had his personal programs that we've already talked about there's been this blockade of funding by pay pal and must a call it's still going on through the courts in fact one day outside the high court here in london i saw a supposed to hand julian assange awarded cash for wiki leaks funding and him tucking it into his breast pocket and ready for a while that there was absolutely no other way that wiki leaks could receive funding to that's been incredibly difficult for them and also he off to in the wake of cable gate the organization fell out with a lot of media partners most notably the guardian and the new york times to that

also made publication of anything in the widest sort of mainstream media very difficult for the organization but they all they all still carrying all over the beleaguered i think a lot of people forget to how much information that we do know now from the last decade or so actually did come from wiki leaks itself joining us in our london bureau and thanks as always our to correspondent laura smith. well it's hard to talk about the lasting effects of wiki leaks without also talking about private first class of bradley manning manning is accused of leaking many of those classified cables to wiki leaks now even though he was arrested two and a half years ago manning is just now having his pretrial hearing despite a military law that says a court martial should come within one hundred twenty days of being detained now i first manning was held for about three months in kuwait then transferred in july of two thousand and ten to the marine corps base at quantico in virginia where he remained for eight months reportedly spending most of that time in solitary

confinement twenty three hours a day and forced to strip naked at night he was then moved to fort leavenworth and his pretrial hearing has been taking place under intense secrecy with activists and journalists fighting to get more access one of those journalists is our own web writer andrew blake who joined me earlier in the studio i asked him to begin by taking us inside the courtroom on fort meade where he spent most of the day yesterday. yesterday was just the first day in the latest round of pretrial motion hearings of course like you said it's been. one hundred thirty days i think at this point since he was first picked up and of course the trial should have started within one hundred twenty or so but here we are marshall should have been scheduled until february and are going to go there and if it wraps up in march when it's supposed to will be at around eight thousand by then so this week that the hearings that we're having this week are really important because they are going to focus on what bradley experienced while he was at quantico in northern virginia so that's where it's kept around eight or nine months and that's where for upwards of twenty

three hours a day they took away his clothes they made him sit in a six foot by eight foot room and subject him to conditions that the that the u.n. said were pretty much on par with torture so we're expected to actually hear manning speak this week to talk about the things that we've only heard through his attorney in the months since so this can be really important to actually humanize this case and actually hear from the man himself what it was like being because i'm not mistaken i mean we have not heard anything from him since he's been arrested no not now from the occasional yes ma'am in court and aside from that we haven't really heard anything were you able to see and or when you were in court were you able to understand how bradley manning was doing his mood you know there was concern for a long time that it was affecting his mental health i mean i can only begin to try to start to imagine what it must be like to be him especially after hearing testimony yesterday david coombs manning's defense attorney was grilling believe his name is colonel dan choi who is

a commanding officer at quantico brig where manning was stuck for nine months and we learned a lot about the mismanagement at quantico and a lot about how it seems like a living hell for private manning and based off that what i've heard in the media to my own reporting i really didn't expect to be face to face with a person who looks like a healthy young to. any four year old military private but sure enough private manning was standing right next to me for a while and i didn't even recognize him because. i have no idea what it must be like to actually be inside of his person and have gone through years of this at this point but i didn't recognize him because he was actually smiling and actually seemed cheerful and actually seemed to be in a somewhat healthy place at this point and then sure enough only to an extent a little happy to be surrounded by people and also to finally finally get this get moving there was actually a packed courthouse yesterday the amount of supporters from the public that were

there had filled up the whole public section and had to go into the media overflow area so people can go to these of these hearings and for me they can go all week and they can hear hopefully from manning himself who is scheduled at this rate they're thinking maybe tomorrow or perhaps friday and of course after browsing bradley manning was first arrested in those reports started coming out that he was actually being held in solitary confinement i know i got the chance to sit down with one minute mendez the un special rapporteur on torture and at that time he was still sort of investigating what was going on but he did later release a report in which he said you know without mincing his words he said accuse the u.s. government of cruel inhumane and degrading treatment now we talked not just about manning but about some of the prisoners in guantanamo bay and really about the way that the u.s. government views torture i want to play a little bit of what he said. i don't think. these are crimes that

can be swept under the rug and pretend that they didn't happen and if that's. for people who think that that will enhance the reputation of the united states abroad that's exactly the opposite of what will happen in ited states insist on all other countries to live up to their human rights obligations and one of them is to investigate torture so i think this has to happen here as well. so to what extent do you think andrew that bradley manning's case is actually raising awareness about . prisoners who are held in military custody and it we're only really going to see the awareness level go up when the media starts reporting on it but luckily we're actually seeing a lot of media in the court this week perhaps it's because we're actually getting to a pivotal point in a case where we're finding out from private manning himself what's happening but like i said during these testimonies were there grilling colonel choice he from from quantico and reading e-mails from the top brass within the military who were involved with his stationing there you can see that this wasn't necessarily an

isolated incident in fact months earlier there was a u.s. soldier who was detained to quantico who committed suicide and that was one of the reasons allegedly that they were trying to really keep an eye manning even if he wasn't suicidal they wanted to impose every rule that they could at him to make sure that he didn't do anything that could possibly upon himself or one of his reputation it seems like there's a lot of twists and turns in this case what do you think has been the most surprising so far. surprising but the real eye opener here is the gross mismanagement at quantico and probably to a greater extent the entire pentagon when when colonel shaffer was on the stand yesterday it seemed like every time that the defense counsel would present him with a fact something that came from one of his own e-mails or something that came from manning himself he really time and time again didn't know what was going on he said well we went through the chain of command well this person said this and this person said that one point he kept driving home the fact that well i may have the

responsibility to look over private manning but i don't have the authority but then of course to mr mcmahon you manage to tell him well no you do have the authority and got him to admit it himself you know whether there's something about you know in this case about in fact instead of a psychologist. oh yes absolutely instead of a forensic psychiatrist to assess manning's mental health while he was stationed at quantico an issue lee the officers there relied on a dentist for health updates for a problem in. which is something i've heard earlier but. they're growing in the courtroom in the media and yesterday during the proud i mean that's just one example of what seems to be a host of many i think we're going to find out a lot more this week though so all right argue well producer and thanks so much. well still ahead here on r.g.p. on some of the lands in western wyoming wastewater from oil companies is leaving a toxic legacy but an e.p.a. loophole allows all of this to happen and cattle ranchers are banking that while company or breakdown is confluent case just ahead.

well the wind river reservation in central wyoming is home to nearly eight thousand native americans and about a dozen oil and gas fields and a battle is brewing there over what to do with wastewater from some of the oil company sites the region is largely desert wilderness and because it's so dry ranchers have actually fought to keep the toxic water to have a be allowed to flow on the land they depend on it saying there would be no water for the livestock and other animals without it dirty water is better than no water but others argue this water is toxic and would never be allowed to run on non-tribal land and are pressuring the environmental protection agency to close those loopholes that allow it to continuously spew out r.t. correspondent laurie harshness has been following the story closely and has more from our studios in new york so laurie

a what's in the water and why is it so bad yet christine if you look at the documents from the e.p.a. this huge list of all of these chemicals with crazy games i'm pronounceable words and warnings about them that sounds really really scary and you know there are some people that are say oh it's not that that bad and then there's others that are you know just dumbfounded by it so i actually spoke to robert jackson who is a professor of environmental science over at duke university to ask him just what exactly the contaminants are in the water there there are there were more carcinogens in the water compounds which has been seen. benzene there were hazardous to your pollutants you mention hydrochloric acid. and she really just walks of things and you don't want the water in to be quite honest you don't want cattle drinking that water in the cattle are then going to be shoulders just as meat. and that's exactly the point is that this water is the drinking water for

cattle on this land they're drinking and they're wading in it and there's a good chance that it's getting into the state that could end up on your plate yeah i mean that's something a lot of people don't think of ok maybe these cattle these cows are not keeling over and dying because of their drinking the water but there's a lot of long term effects of this sort of goes down the food chain so to speak and it is really interesting talk about the process here laurie i mean for those in favor of closing the loopholes to prevent this toxic water do they have any solutions for how these ranchers would get water as we know this is a very dry area yeah no they don't which is surprising and that you know half the battle with any of these environmental atrocities that we hear about you hear that these horrible things are happening and we know we should stop them but then no solutions are proposed as to you know how to still help those people feed their families who are suddenly put out of business or you know what is going

to be the new viable source of energy so you know it's a case that much like any other environmental case where you know we know what's happening is bad but no solutions are put on the table that would take it to the next step to help rectify the situation now this story is not really being covered a wide lead but it has been picked up by a couple media outlets do you think this is something that's being blown up by the media or that there's really something to be concerned about yeah well you know i always wondered the same thing whenever i see any news story i'm going to question it i'm going to wonder if this is just an station alyssum in a way to fill time but you know this case with a laundry list again of really horrible sounding chemicals seem to have a little bit of meat to it so that was another thing that i asked professor jackson . i think this is sensationalism i think this is something that needs to stop we need to figure out how common this is how widespread this practice

since i mean really it's not just there in wyoming as some states in the us allow the disposal of waste water to be sprayed on lands to be used for dust control even to be sent to municipal water treatment plants which are not set up to do that so essentially any practice that allows people to release untreated waste water into the environment around us is a bad idea and should be stopped immediately. affect not only the cattle but ducks and all of the aquatic life not to mention people with. the plate at dinner so there's a lot of people and animals and aquatic life that are going to be affected by this which to me found a very valid reason to stop this practice so only unique story with oil companies and cattle rancher sort of on the same side here but what's what's the bigger takeaway here in your research in this story what's sort of the bigger picture that we should get from this well it's like anything out you know we've got this story

about some atrocity that's been committed and you know you've got the e.p.a. which is a government agency and you've got a lawyer and then you've got native american you know it's got all the players in there and it's very easy to point to big oil it's very easy to point to the e.p.a. but the takeaway for me with this story is like the takeaway for any other story it's up to us to continue this conversation to learn about this stuff to pass on the information and to as consumers and as fittest start demanding by making better choices for ourselves and showing big companies and showing the government with our choices at the grocery store what we expect from them you know when not just buy anything but taking care to buy stuff that we know is good for us so it's about education much like everything else but is there a tribal aspect you're i mean a lot of people are looking at this story and saying this would not happen if it wasn't on tribal land that's absolutely true because if it didn't happen on tribal

land it would fall under the state's law and states have much stricter regulations on this than the e.p.a. does since it is on the reservation the e.p.a. is in control and so it's not a matter of oh it's just a reservation we can screw up it's just a matter of the regulation that's bad role as opposed to regulations that state that it's not a matter of evil it's just. once again a federal agency failing the people that it's supposed to serve well certainly a very interesting story with a lot of layers correspondent laurie hard for us joining us in our studios in new york thanks so much. while for us here that's going to do it for now but for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america you can also check out our web site a lot of stories that we covered and also some that we didn't have a chance to get to that web address is r t dot com slash usa and you should also follow me on twitter if you're not already.