he's been in custody for more than a thousand days now bradley manning tells his story the army private pleads guilty to giving classified info to wiki leaks but denies helping the enemy a report from manning's day on the witness stand straight ahead. and as millions of americans are made out of work wall street is that is again living the good life in fact bonuses for wall street executives are up 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 hackers an activist group associated with anonymous says they did will dive into the story in a few minutes. it's thursday february twenty eighth eight pm here in washington d.c.

i'm liz wall and you're watching. live again today with significant new details in the case of 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 and that is the most serious charge against him 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 of the new details our 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 now 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 told 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 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 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 they 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 every thing 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 so 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 that 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 to 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 all right and i also heard that manning actually mentioned brought up the press and secondly 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 the colonel denise lind is quizzing him grilling him about his relationship with wiki leaks so when when manning first began and his 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 that 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 and he said it's into makes sense so he might just give it a try. uploading a piece after piece of material over the course of a believe 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 this is 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 essential he 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 don't seem too concerned with it right now though actually as we speak he's being asked about why when we get leaks in particular what kind of relationship he had with julian assange other associates of wiki leaks and but on his part and he has said he does not know who we ever talked to at the organization that he came from milieu with their anti-secrecy view points and how the organization kind of just existed in a way that no one could wipe but their finger on that was ours he left reducer andrew blake. a former cia agent turned whistleblower john kiriakou heads to prison today kiriakou was the first government official to confirm the cia uses

waterboarding and other techniques as interrogation tactics he was charged with leaking classified information to journalists and today he will check into the federal correctional institution and the rattle pennsylvania to start his thirty month sentence he was at his sendoff party we bring you that now along with his appearances here at r.t. . in december two thousand and seven i seventy 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 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 tells us 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 help someone in the future to stand up to the justice department did stand up to these infringements 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 to 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. we 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 you. 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'm 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. and as john kiriakou had

surprise and many on the outside remain willing to fight on his behalf and we will continue to bring you those stories right here on our. own not a 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 this chart 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 and the economy plummets into a recession but you can see in two thousand and twelve the banks are almost back to the record profits they had before the recession raking in a hundred and forty one billion dollars also at a record high wall street bonuses they're expected reportedly expected to rise eight percent to twenty billion dollars well this is 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 best 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 specially if you have ben bernanke he at 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 yeah 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 a 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 are thriving 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 meantime they're getting rich 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's gain is main street's pain 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's no inflation there's a 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 contract 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 you know good times are in the banks are good times in washington d.c. because that's where all 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 thinking of main street in washington d.c. we reported yesterday how massachusetts senator elizabeth warren she was drilling ben bernanke over it too big to fail pointing out that the big banks get eighty three billion dollars a year in taxpayer subsidies so could 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 wasn't even being honest was 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 the depositors are still going to get bailed out this secured creditors are still going to get bailed out 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 there 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 have to bail me out whereas if the government didn't have that guarantee i never would have put my money in harm's way in the first voice yeah certainly didn't get any clear answers from mr bernanke

yesterday or 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 round them 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 and that was peter schiff president of euro pacific capital. well while they're raking in the profits they're also battling off hackers paranoia 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 tax systems that's a close eye on hacker forums and social media sites so how revealing is the data and has of america taken their spying too far to bring us more on what we can make of this i was joined earlier by r.t. producer bob english. like peter schiff was just saying it's a good time to be a banker unless you're 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. and when you say a tremendous amount of stuff we're talking fourteen gigabytes if you digital world that is a lot of information on what exactly did it contain first it contains i guess rather innocuous stuff like details on corporate executive pay is 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 on themselves and i'm always wondering with those trials are races aren't you get bank of america one of us. but 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's privacy concerns well apparently they haven't gone too far in terms of protecting 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 aggregated sense but they could also be using personal information in various ways. so i mean is this something that bank of america customer should be concerned about or is this something about you know what if i had an if i'm not a hacker i'm not a hacktivist as you can call that doesn't really concern me what do you think i

think that here's one scenario let's say that i have a bad experience at 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 we have any barely scratched the surface of what is in there is there any indication of what exactly they are looking for like any keywords or or anything in particular that they were looking for sure it's 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 and 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 of this is that bank of america is probably vastly overpaid for this data that it's collected on people right and.

it shows that a law and it's a lot of data but not all of it is is useful are really point to anything suspicious exactly and that's the thing so when you have these situations and i'd like to get 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 as vast treasure trove of data just be openly accessible someplace and that in itself is another security concern right it calls into question to actually gather the group wanted to make it clear that this was not a hack that this was kind of something that they had tamed not so i guess you know when you think hacking you think that's there's kind of you know that you have al you have to value password 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 data nowadays and there was another and incidents with stratfor a security consulting firm and anonymous had for them and so this data is just out there and it's ready for people to take and unfortunately what happens when bank of america customer data could that be exploited the same way we don't know at this point 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 on 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 soap image so if bank of america is doing it the other big banks are doing it big corporations are doing it and there's a lot of privacy concerns are interesting thanks for that bob that was our producer bob english now it's the rise and fall of the big tech players first taking a look at apple not too long ago the company was seen as untouchable and as a symbol of innovation but now apple's stock prices are falling and some aren't as

impressed with the technology it's been putting out twitter on the other hand has been pegged to be valued at around ten billion dollars the wall street journal report reports that twitter users increased forty percent in two thousand and twelve and when it comes to the cyber world of search engines and e-mail the lead players could also be shaking up to discuss these issues i was joined earlier by adrian jeffries reporter at the verge i first asked her about twitter's ten billion dollar valuation and whether tech companies are still inflated after the 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 justifying 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. 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 are 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 reporter at the verge. well here at r.a.t were always keeping a close eye on that revolving door between wall street and washington we're talking about people leaving their government jobs and then taking lucrative positions in the private sector where they can put their connections to good use just a few examples starting with dick cheney the former vice president has had a long history working for the government he's also had a profitable career as head of halliburton jag stewart held several positions in the clinton administration but later went on to a career in finance married at will baker also a seasoned government official after voting for the comcast n.b.c. merger she took a job at comcast and we are going to add a new name to that list now amy over ten she worked for fannie mae and was counsel to delaware democratic senator tom carper she is now

a lobbyist for goldman sachs overton is probably not a name that you know some that go through that revolving door more known than others but should we be more aware of those that leave washington to work for wall street we will certainly be keeping a close eye. well it's no secret that money plays a role in politics and with record campaign spending in a post citizens united era some people say the influence is corrupting the system learn music and business tycoon use the word gangsta in describing the government here's russell simmons the business magnate that founded the hip hop label def jam and clothing line phat farm he's also the c.e.o. and founder of rush communications here's what he told reuters. that is against the government not so bad what do you mean by that not as gangsters a government in what respect with 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 means was 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 for more on the stories we cover you can always check out our you tube channel you tube dot com slash r t america we post everything online there in full also check out our website our t.v. dot com slash usa and you can follow me on twitter as wall for now have a great night.