Lies of the Times

Today’s Zaman carries a disgraceful story on TUBITAK’s newest report on the “Sledgehammer” CDs, which gets the facts of the report wrong, and purposefully so.  It is simply not true that TUBITAK has authenticated the CDs.

The facts are these:

1. The new TUBITAK report explicitly accepts the argument we have made from day one, namely that the metadata on the CDs (dates and user information on the files) could have been manipulated.
2. The report says that as long as the manipulation was undertaken in an internally consistent manner, it would be impossible to uncover with the kind of metadata analysis TUBITAK has undertaken.
3. The claim that TUBITAK has authenticated the CDs rests entirely on TUBITAK’s statement that the metadata appear to be internally inconsistent. In other words, whomever fabricated the CDs made no obvious errors.
4. TUBITAK restricted its analysis to the metadata, and did not comment on any of the evidence contained in the files that points to fabrication – neither those discussed in the military prosecutor’s report, nor those we have listed here.

In short, TUBITAK’s newest report has most definitely NOT authenticated the CDs, and it has given plenty of reason to believe otherwise.  Taking the report together with other evidence, which TUBITAK has not considered, the case that the documents are fabricated is stronger than ever.

It is argued by some that the Fethullah Gulen network, which publishes Today’s Zaman, is a humanistic movement reconciled with democracy and the rule of law.  If true, it is difficult to see how the movement could condone such obvious slander and distortion.

Then again, Zaman has been a consistent source of disinformation on the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer cases. (See here for an example—in Turkish unfortunately.)