International Human Rights Lawyer Emmanuel Ogebe has written to a coalition of 75 American journalism professors who recently wrote a group letter seeking a review of what has been described as a dubious New York Times story regarding Israeli terror hostages. In his letter to the professors in honour of the 2024 World Press Freedom Day on May 3, Ogebe urged them to similarly intervene regarding the unacceptable contradictions between US publications on the Chibok terror hostages.

Entitled, WORLD PRESS FREEDOM DAY 2023: SAVE THE US FROM JUNK JOURNALISM IN THE CASE OF NIGERIA’S TERROR HOSTAGES TOO, the letter was routed through professors Robert McChesney, Victor Pickard, Maggy Zanger and Diane Winston. It reads:

I was deeply gratified to read the group letter of 75 journalism professors including yourselves calling on the New York Times to review a suspect story it published regarding abuse of October 7 terror hostages.

As we mark world press freedom day, the ban of Al Jazeera in Israel and a restrictive media bill in Georgia are foreboding but the rescue of heroic journalist Segun Olatunji in Nigeria is heartwarming.

Permit a brief recap:

“Mr Olatunji, the editor of FirstNews, was abducted from his home in Lagos, South-west, on 15 March. Hours later he was blindfolded and flown into Abuja on a military aircraft.

But the military authorities denied Mr Olatunji’s abduction until Wednesday evening when they admitted detaining the journalist.

When confronted by three journalists associations in Nigeria, the Chief of Defence Staff, Christopher Musa, a general, and the Chief of Defence Intelligence, Emmanuel Undiandeye, a major general, “lied that the journalist was not in their custody.”

“The journalist (Mr Olatunji) was being detained and tortured by the Defence Intelligence Agency in Abuja,” the Secretary of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, Iyobosa Uwugiaren, who read the joint press statement said on Thursday…

They described the military’s action as “vicious, uncivilised and criminal.”

“The action is alien to Nigeria’s democratic space…

“If officers in a military institution like the DIA could hack a journalist’s telephone, mishandle his wife, abduct him, detain him secretly for 14 days and disobey senior officials of the federal government, then our democracy cannot be said to be safe,” Mr Uwugiaren said.

He noted that the military’s action was an attack on press freedom in Nigeria.” Nigerian journalist abducted by military regains freedom after 14 days

This is a stark example of the existential threat journalists face doing their duty in society and how fellow journalists saved one from the excesses of state retaliation.

Your Intervention in the NYT saga therefore is most welcome because although American journalism doesn’t face threats similar to those of courageous journalists like Olatunji, they risk even more insidious – falling victim to unchecked power, wealth and influence. Who watches the watchman?

It is in this context that I draw to your urgent attention an equally troubling journalistic conundrum that has recently come to light that is stunningly similar to the one you wrote about:

- It’s erroneous reporting about female terror hostages abroad

- It was undercut by prior and additional reporting

- It undermines journalistic credibility

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 rescue claim in the book “The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA” by Liza Mundy (Crown Books, October 2023) which 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.”

We have a logical absurdity where journalists with the Wall Street Journal New York say that American intelligence failed to rescue a single Chibok girl while a journalist formerly of the Washington Post also published a book like them making money while claiming just the opposite – that US intelligence rescued 30 Chibok schoolgirls!

Several prior media reports including WSJ have identified the local lawyer and journalist pivotal in facilitating the release of 21 and 82 girls in 2016 and 2017 respectively and not 30 at any point whatsoever as claimed by Liza Mundy’s Molly.

In the interest of full disclosure, 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 but 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

49. 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.

50. 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.

51. 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 of Chibok girls ever, they pointedly credited both the Swiss government and the Red Cross as institutional interlocutors not America’s CIA.

As much as I consider them deeply unprofessional and unethical to the point of suing them, I do not think that they would go so far as to lie about the CIA’s role in rescuing Chibok girls. I can understand lying against me a black human rights lawyer on behalf of Nigeria’s military intelligence because they are no Segun Olatunjis but surely they would draw the line on betraying America just to sell a few books?

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.

This is why your assistance in writing to both the publishers of the Wall Street Journal, Bring Back Our Girls and the Sisterhood to fact-check and review the news articles and the book to resolve this tragic irreconcilable inconsistency is necessary. Of course, if your journalism students could help investigate to prove one account over the other, that would be invaluable too.

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 women 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 on 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 this past decade.

By far the most cruel effect of the false assertion in the book to my mind is the impression given to the world that America rescued some of the girls and some didn’t want to come back. Case closed. But the very fact that Lydia Simon fled to safety 10 years and two days after means there are 90 more Chibok girls waiting for real rather than imaginary rescues.

In conclusion, I urge upon your consciousness two worrisome spectacles:

- 90 schoolgirls captive for a decade in African forests ad American journalists profit off books claiming US rescues/non-rescues. This is a modern remake of Nero’s inspiration a Rome burns…

A young human rights lawyer who was abducted by the military and tortured for months before exile abroad where decades later American journalists would publish the dirty dossier of the military intelligence attacking him by proxy

This is why I ask your urgent intervention against the Weaponization, commercialization and normalization of falsehood in mainstream journalism. “IN A TIME OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH IS A REVOLUTIONARY ACT.” ~ GEORGE ORWELL

Thank you for your time and please share this with your colleagues.

Sincerely,

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