By Emmanuel Ogebe Esq
In a special report during the 10th anniversary of the Chibok schoolgirl kidnappings, America’s top newspaper the Wall Street Journal has compounded the controversy surrounding recent claims that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency rescued 30 of the Nigerian schoolgirls.
In a story entitled “One Sister Fled Boko Haram. The Other Was Trapped. Their Lives Will Never Be the Same” https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/boko-haram-chibok-schoolgirls-10-years-sisters-2206eea0?st=8gqtk5vjey4kett&reflink=article_email_share on April 20, 2024 the WSJ mentioned the US role in the quest of the abducted Nigerian schoolgirls:
“It was an abduction so inconceivable in its scale that it shocked Nigeria, and then, through Twitter, inspired a worldwide hashtag campaign—#BringBackOurGirls—tweeted by celebrities from Oprah Winfrey to the Pope. America sent drones and intelligence officers to look for the girls, although they failed to rescue a single student.”
This dismal disclosure directly discredits the CIA claim in the book “The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA” by Liza Mundy (Crown Books, October 2023) which was reported by People’s Gazette https://x.com/GazetteNGR/status/1759490218929930501 in February 2024
However I had in three recent reports and analysis demonstrated how dubious and doubtful these claims are from facts available to the public and from internal inconsistencies within the publication. https://truthnigeria.com/2024/04/10-reasons-why-the-cia-did-not-rescue-the-schoolgirls-as-new-book-claims/
Although I have sued Wall Street Journal for defamation in view of their willingness to allow themselves to be used by the former Gen. Buhari regime to attack my human rights advocacy, the fact still remains that precisely because their journalists were in bed with Nigeria’s military intelligence as I told the US court, they were positioned to know if the US played a role or not.
My 2019 lawsuit filed at the US District Court stated thus, “Hinshaw practices arm-chair journalism by publishing pitched or planted stories on Nigeria
- Defendant Hinshaw has a penchant for publishing short-turn around stories that are chiefly document downloads from inscrutable single sources. Prior to his publication of the defamatory article, Hinshaw had similarly published a trove of documents purported to be terror communications from Boko Haram. The conduit was ostensibly Jacob Zenn (also gratuitously quoted in the defamatory article). Zenn himself has been accused by fellow academics of strange coziness with Nigerian security services very likely but not acknowledged as the source of the terrorist communications.
- Prior to that, Hinshaw had published a sizzling report about the ransom negotiations that led to the release of the Chibok girls. The story shed light on the murky behind the scenes processes. The information was so detailed that it could only have come from one source – Nigerian intelligence services themselves.
- Unlike the foregoing stories, Hinshaw in this defamatory piece attributed some parts to the Nigerian government although they did not admit that it was a military intelligence dossier from 2015 that had long since been discredited. Given the dubious antecedents of the aforementioned stories, it is increasingly clearer that WSJ and Hinshaw had not unwittingly been spreading propaganda for and on behalf of a foreign government security agency.”
In other words, I had as far back as five years ago said in court filings that Wall Street Journal reporters Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson who wrote the recent article have a suspiciously close relationship to Nigerian military intelligence.
In their exclusive report on the only mass recovery recovery of Chibok girls ever, they pointedly credited both the Swiss government and the Red Cross as institutional interlocutors not America’s CIA.
People’s Gazette reported, “Molly Chambers, a California native who was among the new generation of women who joined the CIA after September 11, 2001, said she was sent to Maiduguri around 2017 to track down late Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau when multinational efforts intensified towards rescuing the schoolgirls abducted from Chibok in 2014, according to a new book by journalist and author Liza Mundy.”
The book itself said, “Her third posting was Nigeria, where in April 2014, 276 female students had been kidnapped from a Christian boarding school in Chibok by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram…Working with the British and French, they hoped to get all the girls in one fell swoop, but some had been married off to fighters and were reluctant or unable to leave their babies, at least not right away. But they did get thirty at one time.”
However several media reports have credited Borno lawyer and journalist Zanna and Salkida for their pivotal roles in facilitating the release of 21 and 82 girls in 2016 and 2017 respectively and not 30 at any point whatsoever. I am personally cognizant of them directly and via intermediaries as well as the UK-based Swiss national.
In addition, I also informed the US court after Wall Street Journal reporters Drew and Joe Parkinson’s book “Bring Back Our Girls” was published, that not only was it a procured pro-Buhari propaganda quid pro quo piece but it actually blamed the USA vicariously for Nigeria’s military operations that killed some Chibok girls in captivity. How are we now to believe that the USA actually rescued 30 Chibok girls when the reverse has been submitted?
It is oddly ironic that in the minefield of western recolonization of narratives of what happened to the girls, there is a battle of claims of credit instead of a battle to reclaim the captives. We have a logical absurdity where American journalists with the top newspaper in the country based in New York just published a story that American intelligence failed to rescue a single Chibok girl while an American journalist formerly of the top paper based in Washington like them also published a book both making money while claiming just the opposite – that US intelligence rescued 30 Chibok schoolgirls!
If the US had the capacity to do this in 2017, they could potentially have recovered more than double that number of girls if not all if Molly’s incredible success rate is to be believed.
This pathetic saga makes mockery not just of western journalism or intelligence but is of grave concern for whoever cares for the safe return of the missing young woman and others like them in our world.
It is in this light we must commend the girls themselves who continue to fight for their freedom 10 years own and the Nigerian military who continue to struggle against unspeakable odds including a country, a government and a world that has been unfair to them.
Emmanuel Ogebe is an International Human Rights Lawyer, Washington DC, USA