Which side is the FBI on? It’s getting harder and harder to tell these days. The Russian Collusion hoax, the Jan. 6 “insurrection” hoax, and all the rest are abundant testimony to the fact that the bureau is intensely corrupt and partisan, and may be beyond redemption altogether. But the rot goes deeper still. An American Christian missionary who was held hostage by Islamic jihadis in Niger for over six years has now charged that the FBI actually withheld information from his wife and failed to give her adequate help in her efforts to get him freed. After all, the feds had far more important things to think about, such as framing the president of the United States for crimes he didn’t commit.
The Associated Press reported that Jeff Woodke was taken captive on Oct. 14, 2016, in Abalak, Niger, in a jihad raid in which two guards were killed. He was “seized, dragged by the wrist, his body scraping against the ground, and tossed into a truck that drove toward the border with Mali.” Then followed “more than six years of captivity, a period in which he says he was beaten, locked in chains for hours a day and pressured repeatedly to convert to Islam.” But surely the FBI was working all through this period to get Woodke freed and safely back home, right? Not exactly.
In fact, Jeff Woodke and his wife Els contend that the feds were actively counterproductive. It was bad enough that Woodke was being held captive; making matters even worse was a long series of “frustrating interactions with the U.S. government back home.” The Woodkes “say they believe FBI officials withheld information about negotiations with the captors and provided what they felt was inadequate help and guidance about raising money for a ransom.” Knowing what we know now about the FBI, that isn’t in the least surprising. We don’t know why the feds dragged their feet on helping the Woodkes, but it’s easy to surmise that they were indeed distracted with other matters that they considered to be more important, and so deeply committed to a policy of appeasement of Islamic jihadis that they were uninterested in pressuring them to release a hostage.
A few weeks before Woodke was finally released, Els Woodke had a Zoom call with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. It did not go well. Els Woodke recounted, “I said, if it was you that had been kidnapped, you would be free in a week because your wife is free to take from your money and buy you free. So because you are rich, you can pay the ransom. But a poor person is never able to do that.” Paying ransoms to jihadis is unwise in general, as it only encourages them to take more hostages and thus enjoy more paydays. Nonetheless, making it a rich man’s game and offering Els Woodke no other way to get Jeff Woodke free was impossibly callous on the part of the FBI. One would have thought that it would have been devoted to the well-being of American citizens. One would have thought wrong.
Woodke was finally freed last March, and he doesn’t sugarcoat how tough the ordeal was. “It was hell,” he says, adding: “I think the hardest part was knowing that my family, if they were alive, they were suffering too.” He recounted that he even began to think that it was “better for me to be dead than continue putting them through suffering. And that feeling grew and grew and grew. The last year I was there, I was asking them to kill me.” All the while, the FBI was offering no significant help to his distraught wife.
Related: Americans Assume the Jihad Is Over. In Africa, It’s Bloodier and More Aggressive Than Ever.
Yet now, of course, the feds claim that they labored “tirelessly” to get Woodke back and intoned piously, “We are committed to continuing to support Jeff and his family.” Sure you are.
Woodke now says, “We’re not things, we’re not bargaining chips, we’re not cases — we’re people. We don’t want to sit under trees in chains. Our families don’t want to have to suffer.” Of course. But when the august operatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation are spending all their time fabricating a case that they hope will bring down a duly elected president of the United States, they don’t have time for such trifling matters as a Christian missionary being held hostage by Islamic jihadis. Priorities, priorities.
