Balyoz Davası ve Gerçekler

It’s nice to see the New York Times catch up to the reality of the Gulen movement and what it is up to in Turkey.  In a long article, the Times discusses the cases of Ahmet şık, Hanefi Avci, and Zeki Ucok, among others – all victims of Gulenist defamation and bogus court cases. The […]

Zaman’s columnists have raised the act of making up facts as they accuse others of lying to a fine art form.  The latest example comes from Markar Esayan. Esayan accuses Umut Oran, a CHP deputy, of lying in a letter he sent to the European Parliament on the Sledgehammer case: “Oran is trying to deceive […]

Well, we already knew that the documents used by Turkish prosecutors to charge more than 300 officers in the infamous Sledgehammer coup plot trial were bogus.  We now have independent confirmation of the forgery from an American digital forensics team that has dug up new evidence on the forgers’ digital foot tracks.  You can download […]

Paul Krugman has posted a piece by Dani on his New York Times blog that updates the situation with respect to the Sledgehammer trial.  Here is an excerpt: “Erdoğan has recently distanced himself from the Gülenists, in part because of his party’s discomfort with their judicial manipulations. But he has yet to withdraw his support […]

Two important articles were published last week on Turkey, both of them making amply clear that the Sledgehammer case is based on fabricated documents. The first one, a long piece in the New Yorker by Dexter Filkins, doesn’t mince words as to what he calls the “dark side” of Erdogan’s Turkey’. “[Erdogan is conducting] an […]

Gareth Jenkins has a very nice piece on the arrest of İlker Başbuğ, which places this latest move in the context of the ongoing Ergenekon-Sledgehammer prosecutions: “For many, the arrest of Başbuğ on terrorist charges will be regarded not so much as demonstrating that the General staff is no longer untouchable but that the Fethullah […]

This time the Gülenists were caught red-handed. In March 2009, a non-commissioned officer (NCO) serving on an air force base in the central Turkish town of Kayseri confessed to planting forged documents on a military computer, on instructions from his Gülenist mentor.  His detailed account provides a rare glimpse of how Gülenists use their network […]

Pity the mafia that is staging what is probably the most significant political trial in modern Turkey’s history – a show trial in which more than three hundred Turkish military officers stand accused of plotting a military coup back in 2003.  Since early 2010, the mafia has produced three different batches of evidence to put the defendants […]

When questioned recently about a constitutional law professor who was arrested for lecturing at an institute run by the country’s main pro-Kurdish political party, Turkey’s interior minister, Idris Naim Sahin, couldn’t hide his irritation: “I am having a hard time understanding those saying a professor should not be arrested while thousands of other people are […]

Jeff Gibbs is an American who lives in Istanbul. Last month, his father-in-law, a member of the pro-Kurdish BDP party, was arrested in an ongoing crack-down that has landed so far thousands of Kurdish politicians, activists, and sympathizers in jail. His blog entries on the experience offer a first-hand perspective on Turkey’s deteriorating legal and […]