We changed Kenya’s 2007 election results, boasts WikiLeaks founder

New York, Saturday

WikiLeaks’ founder and defenders are pointing to the whistleblowing website’s actions concerning Kenya as proof of its positive role in the world.

Australian Julian Assange, the orchestrator of the slow release of thousands of confidential US diplomatic messages, said in an interview on Friday with London’s Guardian newspaper that WikiLeaks has been having a global impact since 2007 “when it changed the result of the Kenyan General Election.”

Assange has previously claimed that WikiLeaks’ release of the Kroll report on official corruption in Kenya brought about the defeat at the polls of all the politicians named in that leaked document.

Some commentators are also recalling that in 2009, Amnesty International gave Assange a media award for WikiLeaks’ publication of “The Cry of Blood: Extra-Judicial Killings and Disappearances.”

That report by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, which had not previously been available in Kenya, documented the deaths or disappearances of some 500 young Kenyans in a police crackdown.

“The material was important,” Assange told journalism.co.uk in an interview in 2009. “It was difficult to get Western press attention to it. We ran it on our front page for a week. Most journalists didn’t care about it. Even regular (WikiLeaks) readers didn’t care about it.”

But the story was eventually picked up by London’s Sunday Times. And the commission’s findings were largely corroborated by Philip Alston, a special United Nations investigator.

But whatever contributions Assange may have made to the rule of law in Kenya, he is now under fierce attack from the US government and from some media sources as well for releasing State Department documents. Assange’s more extreme critics have called for him to be prosecuted for treason or even assassinated.

Likening Assange to a terrorist, conservative American politician Sarah Palin has asked why the US government has not pursued him “with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders?”

Mike Huckabee, who sought the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2008, says Assange should be executed if found guilty of treason.

Some journalists have denounced Assange’s activities, arguing that WikiLeaks is trafficking in stolen material and is thus not protected by press-freedom guarantees.

But a few of the world’s most respected news organisations are closely cooperating with WikiLeaks in publishing the diplomatic cables.

The five media outlets that have obtained the full cache of more than 250,000 documents are choosing which ones are being released and in what form.

“They are releasing the documents we selected,” Le Monde managing editor Sylvie Kauffmann says in regard to WikiLeaks.