The US government became a real turncoat on this matter as they similarly declared war on the whistle blower group and many others. The Wikileaks had just been earlier praised by the US Secretary of State at the time, Hillary Clinton on the afore mentioned effort of whistle blowing. In her remarks she described the Wikileaks as a vision of semi-underground digital publishing – “the samizdat of our day”-that was beginning to champion transparency and challenge the autocratic, corrupt old order of the world. But she also warned that repressive governments would “target the independent thinkers who use the tools”. She had regimes like Iran and North Korea in mind but never her own country the United States. This statement came right after Assange and his group had revealed and published a secret report on the siphoning off hundreds of millions of pounds of government money by Kenya’s former president Daniel Arap Moi and where the funds had been hidden in overseas banks.
At the time when this drama played itself out in public domain, I was on holiday in a number of countries in South East Asia trying to deflate (go a ntsha mowa) my military gratuity after my retirement from Botswana Defence Force. At Hong Kong airport I picked up a book by David Leigh (who is The Guardian’s investigations editor in London) and Luke Harding (who is a Moscow correspondent for The Guardian) which chronicled how the whistle blowing was achieved. Under normal circumstances I am a slow reader but under the prevailing circumstances at the time I found myself finishing the book in the shortest possible time. It’s a good read but I got a little sick at the end of the read because I came to understand deeper the efforts of governments in trying to silence the media in its efforts to fight corruption through all other means including whistle blowing. There was tension in the air everywhere around the world as news channels were talking about Julian Assange and the Wikileaks. Many US right-wing libertarians were calling for his arrest and even his assassination. He clearly had fallen out of favour with the US government and Hillary Clinton had wished she never praised him. But there was no way she could swallow her statement.
