WND senior staff writer Jerome Corsi |
A Kenyan publicist who helped arrange a news conference for author Jerome Corsi to talk about his investigation into Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama's links inside Kenya says he's being grilled by the Kenyan government over what Corsi discovered.
As WND reported, the news conference never took place because immigration authorities detained Corsi and held him until his scheduled British Airways flight out of Nairobi. WND also reported bribes were paid to "various officials" to make Corsi's departure easier.
Some of Corsi's investigation results, which follow up on questions raised by his book "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," are being reported in another WND article today.
"His life is in danger and his career may be wrecked because he represented me in Kenya," Corsi said of the publicist, Peter Mbae.
Mbae, publisher and managing editor of The Eagle newspaper in Nairobi, confirmed in an e-mail to Corsi he has received "several calls from people who introduced themselves as government officials demanding to know my involvement in Jerry's visit and what he found out."
Mbae said he's received many calls from media members, because nearly four dozen local and foreign journalists who had arrived to cover the press conference "were kept waiting by the government … for six hours without explanation as to why they were holding Corsi."
Corsi and his personal publicist, Tim Bueler, eventually were allowed to board their previously scheduled flight to London. They had been held under armed guard most of the day and deprived of food to the point Bueler was suffering a reaction.
Mbae said, "With Corsi and Tim out of the way, all the media attention turned to me with questions. … I told them [I] am professionally a media coordinator and yes, I booked the hotel because I felt it was important for Corsi to meet the media and the government was wrong to deport him."
Sen. Barack Obama with Raila Odinga |
Corsi wasn't deported, because he already had been scheduled for the flight he took. But he was detained behind a wall of armed soldiers during the remainder of his stay in Kenya so that he could not talk to reporters.
Mbae said the same government officials have warned him not to talk about any of the circumstances of the censored news conference.
Mbae was not the only one to describe as inappropriate the government's intervention in Corsi's news conference about links between Obama and Raila Odinga, an opposition leader who took over the prime minister's office in Kenya after a failed campaign that was followed by tribal violence blamed for hundreds of deaths.
Lucy Oriang of the Daily Nation said in an editorial that the government's action simply proved Kenya remains "the bedrock of intolerance."
"Boo to the person who made that decision," she wrote.
Oriang implied she had not read the book of which she was critical, calling it a "hatchet job, by most accounts."
"But that is no reason to hound the man out of town. The Big Brother mentality went out of the window ages ago," she said.
"The knee-jerk reaction to people, things and situations we do not like will be the undoing of this country. We saw it in January [during the presidential elections]. There is no blood on the floor this time around, but the coordinates are the same," she said.
Kenyan officials made sure Corsi knew he was not welcome to return.
"Don't ever come back. See you in hell," Corsi reported an unidentified official told him as he was delivered to his flight.
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For media wishing to interview Jerry Corsi, please e-mail Tim Bueler.
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