‘People affiliated with our organization have already been assassinated,’ Assange claims

[Joanne98]

Update (12/28/2010): Assange may have been referring to two WikiLeaks writers that were assassinated in Kenya last year

In early March 2009, WikiLeaks reported that two of their writers had been killed while doing research in Kenya.

"On Thursday afternoon March 5, Oscar Kamau Kingara, director of the Kenyan based Oscar legal aid Foundation, and its programme coordinator, John Paul Oulo, were shot at close range in their car less than a mile from President Kibaki's residence," a statement from WikiLeaks said.

The Oscar foundation had documented 6,452 "enforced disappearances" by Kenyan police and 1,721 extrajudicial killings.

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=124295

[struggle4progress]

1. ... Not long after Assange claims he was targeted in Kenya, WikiLeaks published a report from the

Kenya National Commission on Human Rights linking the national police to the torture and death of 500 young men suspected of opposition activity. The Kenyan government had buried the report, but after WikiLeaks published it, the Sunday Times of London picked up the story, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Execution called for Kenya's attorney general and police commissioner to be fired. WikiLeaks paid a price for its coup. Two Kenyan human rights activists were assassinated in broad daylight—the result, Assange says, of their links to the leaking of the report. The problem, he says, was not that WikiLeaks failed to protect their identities but that they "weren't acting in an anonymous way" ...
Inside WikiLeaks’ Leak Factory
— By David Kushner
Tue Apr. 6, 2010 11:21 AM PDT
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/04/wikileaks-julian-assange-iraq-video?page=3

... Two weeks ago, Mother Jones got on the whistleblower website's bad side by running David Kushner's profile of its elusive founder, Julian Assange. Since then, Assange has accused us of "gutter journalism," "craven sucking up to the Pentagon" and just yesterday, being an agent of "right-wing reality distortion" ... Assange could be slippery ... He explained that the site only publishes materials of significant public interest that are being officially or legally withheld from the public. That covers much of its leaks, but what about Wesley Snipes' tax returns or fraternity manuals? Or the case of Michaela Wrong, a journalist whose book about corruption in Kenya was posted on WikiLeaks without her permission? ...
The MoJo vs. WikiLeaks Smackdown Continues
— By Dave Gilson
| Mon Apr. 19, 2010 3:30 AM PDT