President Jammeh Recalls Washington Intelligence Attaché, Threatens to Send UK&US Envoys Packing

By EBRIMA G. SANKAREH, Editor-In-Chief

Unassailable sources from The Gambia’s Foreign Ministry say Mr. Ousman Taal, Gambia’s Intelligence Attaché to the United States, has been recalled following a direct request by Head of State Yahya Jammeh. Says our most competent and most dependable source in the President’s office, Kissy Kissy Mansa, President Jammeh has a bone to pick with Taal and wants him in Banjul immediately. Reveals Kissy, “a presidential directive late last week, had instructed the External Affairs Director of the National Intelligence Agency, one Ousman Sowe, to liaise with the Foreign Ministry for Taal’s immediate return to The Gambia following damning allegations that the officer was associating himself with opposition and dissident elements that are at war with the Jammeh regime.”  Says Mansa, President Jammeh in a terse statement to the NIA, had warned of very serious consequences if they failed to recall Tall in which, he allegedly invoked his often-ominous six feet deep burial of potential victims. Reveals Kissy, “following the President’s directive and threatening remarks, Foreign Affairs has since written a letter of recall and if Taal has not received it yet, rest assured that he would receive it before closing hours today-Friday.” 

However, according to our NIA source in Banjul, Kungkiling Tamala, Taal’s problems stem from some dubious and utterly fictitious E-Mails sent by some jealous Embassy officials purportedly written by Taal to smear the reputation of the ill-fated Consulate that has witnessed an unprecedented change of diplomats ever since the coup that propelled dictator Jammeh to power on July, 22, 1994. Jammeh’s own uncle, the erratic and temperamental John P.Bojang who once prescribed nivaquine as a medical metaphor to curb corruption, was one time US Ambassador but he too could not avoid the political temperature that pervades the corridors of the Gambian Embassy in Washington. Barely two months ago, Tamsir Jallow was recalled, less than a year after his predecessor Dodou Bammy Jagne and now what we have, is an Ambassador protempore in the person of Abdourahman Cole whose ‘shameful silence’ over pertinent human rights issues has elicited the commentary of Illinois’ Senior Senator Dick Durbin. Like the rest, Cole too, is a square peg in a round whole struggling daily like a dog trying to bite its own tale in an Embassy in deep crisis where everybody is at war with everybody; a classical Hobbesian dilemma.