he's been in custody for more than a thousand days now bradley manning tells his story the army private believed guilty to giving classified info to wiki leaks but now denies helping the enemy a report from manning's day on the witness stand straight ahead. there's millions of americans remain out of work wall street is again living the good life in fact wall street bonuses for exactly eight percent as the u.s. economy struggles r.t.l. looks inside the profits of the big banks and wall street coming up. and they are one of the largest banks in the u.s. but did bank of america hire security firms to monitor and hack activists hackers an activist a group associated with anonymous says that they did well dive into the story in a few minutes.

it's thursday february twenty eighth five pm here in washington d.c. i'm liz wall and you're watching or to. begin today with significant new developments in the case against bradley manning the young man accused of the biggest breach of classified documents in u.s. history pleaded guilty to ten of the twenty two charges against him he pleaded not guilty to aiding the enemy the most serious charge today the alleged whistleblower spoke on the stand and read aloud a thirty five page statement where he defended his actions he said in his testimony today quote i believe the public release of these cables would not damage the u.s. however i did agree that the cables might be embarrassing for more on the new details are producer andrew blake was at the hearing today and joined us earlier from fort meade i asked what these pleas mean for the case. well it all comes down to whether or not the government actually wants to accept his plea if the government says ok p.f.c. manning we will take your plea of guilty on ten different counts and not guilty on

the twelve others he could face a maximum sentence of twenty years behind bars now there's another chance that the government could accept a plea but at the same time decide to continue prosecuting him under the charge of aiding the enemy now if that's the case that is a charge that does does carry life in prison now the government could elect to actually execute manning if they can convict him of aiding the enemy but they already said that they would not do that so far from from what we heard today manning did it make guilt to everything for the first time ever actually for the first time after a thousand days actually stood before a court and said i did this then the other thing i did it all with weiqi leaks and they have all of the shame that i supply to them so that the government could use that. time to actually sentence manning for his eventual court martial or it could say ok you know what we accept your plea we'll see you in twenty years but what's going to happen today is the judge is going to continue asking manning about the

different charges from there she's not going to actually make a decision today but of eventually we're going to see if this case will move to a court martial or not so this could extend for a while actually the court martial would begin in june in a schedule for around twelve weeks but might not make it that far the government just accept this plea right and you know one another interesting thing that happened today manning took the stand and i understand it was a lengthy testimony thirty five pages he read tell us about his testimony today. you know he actually went through pretty much everything he was accused of doing he said look here's this collateral murder video this is how i uploaded it and this is why here are hundreds of thousands of state department diplomatic cables i uploaded them and this is why and manning wanted to pretty much explain his intent in releasing the information for me that he wouldn't actually be able to do during the court martial so by submitting his plea he actually pleaded guilty to these things and explain why and

a lot of it really had to do with him saying that he just became depressed with what he was seeing overseas the actions that he was seeing a hold of all deployed in iraq just made him uncomfortable and when he started investigating and started going through the state department cables and started looking up the collateral murder video for example he said these are things that give a much more clearer picture of what's actually happening in the world would benefit by knowing he's all right and i also heard that manning actually mentioned brought up the press a sickly the washington post the new york times and reuters what did he say about possibly taking it there before taking it to julian assange just wiki leaks. well you know it's no secret that the government is using this case to get closer to wiki leaks that is incredibly obvious and throughout manning's testimony today and you know even right now in the courthouse in front of me colonel denise lind is quizzing him grilling him about his relationship with wiki leaks so when when

manning first began and as testimony this morning or this afternoon what he told them was you know he was familiar with wiki leaks but he didn't go to that organization first the first thing that he did when he had an tiriel that he wanted the were told to see was t. called up the washington post and talk to them for around five minutes on the phone and said look i have some things i think you would like to see manning said he believes they didn't take him seriously and you never heard back from them from there he called the new york times and he left a detail message with multiple ways for them to contact him and that instance manning said he was also not met with the response so of then eventually he figured wiki leaks was the best organization to go to when you said it's into makes sense so you might as well give it a try. uploading piece after piece of material over the course of a few months and just a point here is that during the pretrial motion hearings last month one of the government's prosecutors actually said that you know if manning had supplied these materials to the new york times the new york times would be charged with aiding the enemy so that's

a really really dangerous precedent here you know had had the new york times answer their phone or had the washington post actually took this young man really twenty one or twenty two at the time and they actually taken him seriously and followed up on what he told them they could have published material that would have closed down the two biggest publications in the entire western world so this is going to have a really really really major implications so actually knowing that you know we can weeks wasn't his first choice and the government didn't seem too concerned with it right now though actually as we speak he's being asked about why you would want to we keep leaks in particular what kind of relationship he had with julian assange other associates of wiki leaks and but his part and he has said he does not know who we ever talked to at the organization so he came from really are with their anti-secrecy viewpoints and how their organization kind of just existed in a way that no one could wipe but their finger on. the web producer andrew blake. a former cia agent turned whistleblower john kerry aku heads to prison today kiriakou

was the first government official to confirm the cia uses waterboarding and other techniques as interrogation tactics and he was charged with leaking classified information to journalists today he will check into that the federal correctional institution loretta pennsylvania to start his thirty month sentence r.t. was at a party we bring you that now along with his appearances at r.t. . in december two thousand and seven i said on a.b.c. news that the cia was torturing prisoners and that torture was an official u.s. government policy that went all the way up to the president as time has passed and has as september eleventh has has you know has moved farther and farther back into history i think i've changed my mind and i think that waterboarding is probably

something that we should be in the business of doing why do you say that now because we're americans and we're better than that the next day the president said . and i still smile when i think about this the president said i don't know this man i don't know this man's motivation i don't know why this man would throw me under the bus but i did i threw the president under the bus here somebody who speaks out with courage to those who speaks the truth to power i admitted to confirming the name of a former colleague to a journalist who was looking for former cia officers to interview for a book. plain and simple and i mean they were going to get him on something. having lunch with the new york times reporter and talking about torture is not espionage it's just having lunch and talking about torture it was the government it was the justice department that tried to turn that lunch into something illegal and something ugly and it wasn't i have believed from the very first day that this was

not a case about leaking this was a case about torture waterboarding and sleep deprivation and cold cell with ice water being thrown on you or putting you into in a dog cage and keeping him there for days at a time not only did i not profit from this this broke me. and. there was no benefit to me in any conceivable way of blowing the whistle i only suffered from it the one thing that i wanted most of all was for my children to be proud of me and i know that morally i did the right thing and my children are proud of me and that's the most important thing if they think that this conviction is going to shut me up they don't know me at all i'm not seeing any indication that things are going to get better for whistleblowers or for activists i just hope that there's enough outrage out there once i go to prison that that helps someone in the future to stand up to the justice department to stand up to these infringements on our

civil liberties i wear my conviction as a badge of honor but it's also important to say for the record that what you were convicted of is because of your conviction in the truth. so to be convicted for the truth is the true badge of honor the tendency i think is to feel alone when you're being prosecuted and the whole weight of the government is coming down on your shoulders we're going to make sure. that he knows you don't forget somebody who stands up for justice he has the strength and the courage to speak truth to power and it's only that strength and courage that will allow him to persist and i commend. for standing up and telling the truth we should care because of what it says about us a civilized people doesn't torture anybody period it's going to sound a little sappy but i've feeling a lot of love at the moment i know in my heart that years from now people are going to look back and they're going to know that we were on the right side of history we

were the ones who were right the government was wrong. as john kerry had to prison many on the outside remain willing to fight on his behalf and will continue telling those stories right here on our t.v. . now back to wall street where there is apparently a big comeback as the economy struggles to rebound from the recession two thousand and twelve turned out to be the second best year for bank profits and this chart here really puts it into perspective you can see bank profits steadily increase until it hits a record high in two thousand and eight and that's when it all literally goes downhill when the economy plummets into a recession but you see in two thousand and twelve the banks are almost back to the record profits they had before the recession raking in one hundred forty one billion dollars so also at a record high wall street bonuses they reportedly expected to rise eight percent to twenty billion dollars well this is all wonderful for wall street but what about

the rest of the country earlier i was joined by peter schiff president of euro pacific capital noting that this has been the second best year for wall street i asked him if this is a great sign for the economy as a whole. well you know it's good to be a banker especially if you have been born akki as the federal reserve the fed's policy is to try to revive the economy by inflating the markets that's great if you're a banker because you benefit on several fronts the markets are more vibrant so you can make more money speculating but also it's cheaper to borrow and that's a lot of the source of the speculation so the banks are doing really well under this environment but the u.s. economy is not doing well at all in fact people think that there is a recovery going on it's not the economy is actually getting sicker as a result of the current fed policy i mean it doesn't seem to add up the financial industry takes home. a third of all corporate profits what does this mean for the

average citizen and how dangerous is it for the economy to be in the hands of the banks essential well it's very dangerous that the government through monetary and fiscal policy is funneling such a large percentage of our resources into the financial sector and it's not just a financial sector look at government you know it pays to be in government look at the salaries of the bureaucrats in the lobbyists in washington d.c. so the bankers and the bureaucrats under this phony economy but average americans working on main street are not working because they can't get jobs because the resources necessary to employ them are in washington d.c. or in new york city it's not doing well and eventually of course this whole phony economy that the fed has created is going to come collapsing down and in the long run the bankers are going to lose money hopefully we don't have another round of bailouts but in the mean. as the economy suffers. getting

rich by that we mean wall street bonuses rise to twenty billion dollars most recently at a time that the economy is shrinking peter how does that add up. well it doesn't add up and i think wall street again is main street spain and people think the economy is expanding look at that we just got the g.d.p. numbers the revised fourth quarter and it showed a slight expansion one tenth of one percent but that's only because the government assumes that there is no inflation there they want us to believe that inflation is at about one and a half percent inflation in my opinion is at least five percent if not quite a bit more but even if inflation is only three percent that means the u.s. economy is contracting and which makes a lot of sense to me i mean the reason that it doesn't feel like a recovery for most people is because it's not it's still a recession but it's certainly good times in the banks or good times in washington d.c. because that's where our money is going if you're wondering why it's so hard to make

ends meet on main street is because some bureaucrat is eating your lunch and this is the king of main street in washington d.c. we reported yesterday how massachusetts senator elizabeth warren she was grilling ben bernanke too big to fail pointing out that the big banks get eighty three billion dollars a year in taxpayer subsidies the big banks even survive without the taxpayers propping them up. well many of them would have already failed so the answer is no but you know ben bernanke he wasn't even being honest with senator warren of course he's not honest with anybody but on that particular issue he was disingenuous at best because when she is talking about that subsidy and it's hard to quantify exactly what it is but ben bernanke he acted as if the subsidy was there for the stockholders of the banks it's not the subsidy makes it easier for the banks to borrow money it makes it easier for the banks to attract depositors' who want to put their money in an institution that's too big to fail and if you've got more

money than the f.d.i.c maximums you want to make sure you're in a bank that's going to get bailed out you don't want to take your chances on a smaller bank and so that does give the big banks an unfair advantage to attract customers and to borrow money and even if the banks fail the depositors are still going to get bailed out this secured creditors are still going to get baldauf and ben bernanke you know was oblivious to that he focused on the stockholders but that's not where the subsidy is most important is with attracting capital through lenders and through depositors and it is an unfair advantage personally i keep a lot of my money in bank of america even though i believe that they're insolvent and if it wasn't for those too big to fail i would have a dive of my money there but now the problem is a much sounder smaller institution doesn't get my business and now when bank of america potentially fails the taxpayers are going to bail me out whereas if the. i never would have put my money in harm's way in the first voice. certainly didn't

get any clear answers from mr burnet. convincing answers but you know the argument that you do here is that shutting down these big banks would be disastrous to the economy and that these guys that have these banks are the only ones with the special knowledge to run of and that's why their bonuses are justified as is that all a fair argument. spoken like a banker of course it's going to be bad for the people involved and yeah i mean in the short run we're going to have to swallow our medicine we're going to have to admit to a lot of serious problems that right now were papering under over but you know it's not like you know what's good for the wall street banks is good for america. that was peter schiff president of euro pacific capital and while they're raking in the profits they're also battling off hackers paranoia a group tied to the hacktivist group anonymous claims it has released fourteen gigabytes of data that shows a bank of america was investing in spying on hackers they claim the bank employed

security firms to monitor hackers and activists paranoia says the documents show a company called tech systems kept a close eye on hacker forums and social media sites so how revealing is the data bank of america taken their spying to far far different is our bob english has more hi there bob they're looking to make up this well peter schiff was just saying it's a good time to be a banker unless you're a bank of america because some very unsatisfying information for them was released today and it's a tremendous amount of stuff to sift through so that's kind of what's going on right now. when you say tremendous amount of stuff we're talking fourteen gigabytes the digital world that is a lot of information what exactly did it contain first it contains i guess rather innocuous stuff like details on corporate executive pays two hundred thousand of them worldwide but also it shows how bank of america is trolling

internet sites like facebook and twitter social media chat rooms and they're trying to collect information that would tell them i guess the public sentiment on themselves always wondering who those trolls are aces are to get bank of america is one of us. does the information obtained by these activist group does it suggest that bank of america has gone too far i mean have we kind of gotten into an area where there is privacy concerns well apparently they haven't gone too far in terms of protecting their or their databases because they were just hacked into rather easily but i think that's probably not what you mean yes they're collecting information on the public and maybe it's in an egg. good sense but they could also be using personal information in various ways. so i mean is this something that bank of america customers should be concerned about or is this something about you know what if i had an if i'm not a hacker if i'm not activists as it's called doesn't really concern me what do you

think i think here's one scenario let's say that i have a bad experience a bank of america and i put on my facebook page or twitter bank of america sucks and then i go out to take a loan can that information be used to make that loan decision i don't know but bank of america has a tremendous amount of data now that it's gotten from these sites and that in itself might be concerning to the public right and there's a lot of information we don't even know the swe haven't even really scratched the surface of what is in there is there any indication of what exactly they're looking for like any keywords or or anything in particular that they were looking for sure it's pretty interesting they have thousands of keywords and there's a specialized software that was actually created for bank of america to sift through this stuff in the source code was actually posted in this release too but some of these key words are like hey sexy lady hey joe summer in kingston so it looks a little bit sloppy and that's another aspect to this is that bank of america is probably vastly overpaid for this debt of it's collected on people right.

it's shows that the law is it's a lot of data but not all of it is is useful are really points to anything suspicious exactly and that's the thing so when you have these situations. i like to go back to actually where it was released which was it was found in an open server in tel aviv and the significance of that is why would this information this vast treasure trove of data just be openly accessible someplace and that in itself is another security concern right calls into question actually yeah that the group wanted to make it clear that this was not a hack that this was. it's something that they have tamed not so. i guess you know it was when you think hacking you think that's there is kind of you know that you have now will you have to ferret house words you have to hack through it but this was just sitting there and unfortunately that's kind of symptomatic of the way

a lot of big companies treat their dead in old days and there was another and incidents with the strat for a security consulting firm and anonymous had them and so this debt is just out there and it's ready for people to take it unfortunately what happens when bank of america you know customer data could that be exploited the same way that we don't know at this point you know it kind of makes you wonder this is just the information that was obtained by this this group that's affiliated with anonymous but how much does it go aside from bank of america do the other big banks do it what companies do it it kind of raises these other questions of course and all the big companies are concerned about their self image so if bank of america is doing it the other big banks are doing it other big corporations are doing it and there's a lot of privacy concerns are interesting thanks for that bob that was our it's your producer bob english. on now to the rise and fall of the big players first taking a look at apple not too long ago the company's was seen as untouchable and as the symbol of innovation but now apple's stock prices are falling and some aren't as

impressed with the technology that it's been putting out twitter on the other hand has been plagued our pegged excuse me to be valued at around ten billion dollars the wall street journal reports that twitter users increased forty percent in two thousand and twelve when it comes to this site the cyber world of search engines and e-mails the lead players could be shaking up to discuss these issues i was joined a short while ago by jeffrey as a reporter at the verge and i first asked her about twitter's ten billion dollar value and whether tech companies are still inflated after that dot com burst. so twitter is getting a lot of attention in a lot of there's a lot of speculation about its valuation right now because they're preparing for an i.p.o. probably next year so there are a lot of investors who are trying to grab a piece of the company before it has its public offering and so that's why we're starting to see these estimates and some of these estimates that seem a little high and the short answer is that no twitter is not worth ten billion or

nine billion as some of the estimates out there say right now the company still has the most optimistic estimates have them making a billion dollars and twenty fourteen and so they're they're not close to to justify a ten billion dollars bill valuation today however that's speculation for what people think the company will be worth in the future and i think if you look at it that way it is possible to say that you could justify a value for twitter that was that high for anything one of the. as i mentioned earlier we saw how twitter the use of it is skyrocketing forty percent growth the end of two thousand and twelve there are so twitter how great what are users how do you and i help to make the company what it isn't make it worth the billions that it's about it's predicted right so that's the thing about twitter first of all it's completely free for them to get all their content they have a huge volume of tweets going through every day we all do that for twitter you know without without them having to compensate us and they're able to sell ads against

that and they're coming up with new creative ways to do that they just released a video app that's it's getting very popular called vine and that opens up possibilities for new types of video advertisements and new ways for brands to use the platform. and the other thing about twitter's growth that i didn't see mentioned a lot of stories about it was that twitter still has a long way to go just in the u.s. only about fifteen percent of adults use twitter so there's still a lot of room for the company to get new users here in the u.s. which is a market that advertisers obviously covet and then there's room for them to grow across the world they're at about two hundred million users right now so. abilities for twitter are very it seems like everybody is on facebook from my little cousins to my grandmother not quite very next day or i want to shift gears a little bit now to out because you know. it's the most valuable company in the world of course apple c.e.o. steve jobs is kind of renowned as this. innovator this legend. but now

being had by tim cook. some people are saying that it's not really what is symbolized anymore they're not satisfied with the products that are coming out they're not wowed by by what they've been putting out do you think maybe that apple's reached its pinnacle well i don't think it's so much that people aren't wowed by what apple's coming out i think they did they are seeing their stock price go down a little bit and it's kind of like they're almost a victim of their own success there you know like you mentioned most valuable company in the new york stock exchange surpassed exxon and it's now it's kind of like a well what have you done for me lately the investors a little nervous with the new c.e.o. and they're waiting for the next i pad or the next i phone but i think customers are still pretty happy with what apple is doing the reviews for the i phone five were really good people love that phone the i pad is still unmatched in the tablet market and it's one of the most secretive companies in the tech industry so who

knows what they could be working on next i don't think you can really write them off yet. that was adrian jeffries a reporter at the verge. also no secret that money plays a role in politics and with record campaign spending in a post citizens united arab some people say the influence is corrupting the system one music and business tycoon used the word gangsta in describing the government here as russell simmons the business magnate that founded a hip hop label def jam and the clothing line fat farm he's also the c.e.o. and founder of rush communications here's what he told reuters there was a gangster about government not so bad what do you mean by that not is going straight as a government in what respect to corruption that comes with the legal bribery in our system we know it's legal bribery all the corporations of special interest have unlimited access to our politicians so much so that the politicians represent them instead of the people. the bombing of innocent people. yet the attack on other

governments for their resources. also mendel is responding to critiques about the hip hop culture which is often viewed as vulgar interesting he compares hip hop to the government to put it into perspective and we are going to leave it off there but breaking the set is coming up in thirty minutes here on r t let's check in with abby martin to see what's on today's agenda abbi what's going on there were really gangster showed to. me talking about food safety you know the whole horsemeat scandal of broad as really called into question the food safety of our own food at home how far removed are we really from where food comes from what else is going on with the do you know that we would do filler would pull up and almost a bunch of processed foods i mean this these are the kind of insane things that we're talking about that i think. also bear brown of course someone who just simply disseminated a link of hacked information and is facing

a life in prison that's more time than someone disseminated how to make a nuclear bomb tell keda so we're going to talk about why this person is more of a threat than supplying terrorists nuclear material information that and more talk about the seventy one year anniversary of the japanese internment of american citizens and black marred spot in american history and how pretty much muslim americans today are living in an open air internment camp in the surveillance a grid all of that and more gangsta show coming up next liz brick of a given a gang. that's going to do in front of a farm are the stories we covered check out our you tube channel you tube dot com slash our team america our website our complex u.s.a. and you know that you can always follow me on twitter at liz wall breaking the set is up with the m r n and a half hour we will be right back here at eight pm.