As you may recall, last spring Vlad broke the story of the video of a shipment of weapons to Turkmen fighters in Syria that was intercepted on its way out of Turkey. The significance of the video was that it revealed the assistance of the Turkish intelligence services in getting these weapons to the jihad groups in Syria.
The video was recorded and published by Turkish newspaper called Cumhuriyet. Its editors were immediately warned by Sultan President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that they would pay a serious price for their actions.
Mr. Erdogan seems to have finally made good on his promises: the editors of Cumhuriyet have been arrested, and the paper’s accounts are being audited for irregularities. The following news report from RT provides details:
Below is a related article on the same topic from Sputnik News:
Turkish Newspaper Faces Sudden Tax Inspection After Arrest of Two Reporters
MOSCOW (Sputnik) – On November 26, an Istanbul court ordered the arrest of the Cumhuriyet’s editor-in-chief, Can Dundar, and the newspaper’s Ankara bureau chief, Erdem Gul, over the publication of an article detailing how trucks owned and operated by Turkish intelligence were carrying weapons bound for Syria.
“Two and a half years have passed since Cumhuriyet newspaper’s 2010 accounts were fully inspected, now they again want to inspect the audited accounts for 2010,” Atalay said on Twitter on Monday.
A photocopy of the previous tax inspection report was attached to the tweet.
The Cumhuriyet May 29 article showed footage of trucks operated by Turkish intelligence carrying what the newspaper claimed were weapons and ammunition to Syrian opposition groups fighting President Bashar Assad.
Ankara denied accusations of assisting a Syrian opposition, claiming that the vehicles were delivering aid to Syrian Turkmens.
The arrest of the journalists raised an international outcry over freedom of the press in Turkey. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European and International Federations of Journalists have called on Ankara to drop all charges against the two journalists and release them immediately.
Hat tips: For the video, Vlad Tepes; for the article, C. Cantoni.
Erdogan is a dictator and tyrant but he is zero-bama’s partner in the Arab Spring garbage and fellow member of the Muslim brotherhood. Unless overthrown by his own people he is in till the NWO/USA/NATO tires of him.
The brutality of the Turkish police really preclude the country from decent world “society” but when has that caused NATO/NWO or the USA to reject a country from their retinue if that country still does their bidding /dirty tricks/mayhem???
The USA must lose interest ( NO MONEY TO MADE) in a place or they need another DOLT to run the place to make it appear more “democratic” before a creature like Erdogan is replaced.
CUE theme from x-files…. the TRUTH is out there……
Woah, corroboration? Given the current diplomatic tension between Russia and Turkey, the Russian goverment propaganda outlets RT and sputnik should not be taken at face value on anything that happens in Turkey (or Ukraine, or the US, or Syria for that matter). At best they are eager to report bad news, most likely they will spin as negatively as is excusable, but at worst they will publish utterly shameless bs (‘desinformaciya’).
This story originated with the opposition press in Turkey, that is, the outlets that Erdogan is now trying to silence. The Russians are publicizing the information because it’s in their interest to do so, but they’re not making it up.
Vlad and I have been following this story since the beginning. None of the sources were Russian back then.
Did you happen to catch Putin address to the government of the Federation?
He speaks like a statesman.
Obama speaks like a billy goat of obstruction, BLAH! uh ! Bleet!! bleet!! work place violence! uh.. bleet! victims brought it on themselves! uh.. blah! religion of peace…blah! gun control … uh.. bleet!
While you may not have been aware of this, many of us were, I was warning people about Turkey under Edrogan in 2008. Yes the Russians are using this, but the issue is Edrogan.
Turkey broke NATO engagement rules with its shooting down of the Russian jet, NATO is a defensive organisation and they are supposed to warn them multiple times and see them as a threat to their own airspace, this was so far outside of NATO rules of engagement it was stupid, initially I was not fully aware of the NATO ROE for avionic incursions, but once I read them I realised that Turkey could not get backing from NATO in any sense as they carried out what can only be deemed to be an aggressive act and would be covered by NATO should the Russians had reacted.
Though with an enemy like Obama in the White house, no one could be sure just how must respect would have been given to NATO treaty obligations…
Yesterday RT France announced the name of the muslim terrorist in San Bernardino while or MSM in the USA was BLEETING ON all to look out for WHITE MALES!
I think if you want propaganda look no further than the zero-bama PRESSITUTES in the USA.
In all fairness, the first description–provided by a survivor–was that “three white males” had come into the workplace. Given the way in which the assailants were dressed, the only parts of their bodies visible were most likely their hands. Not much to go on. Looking at the face shot of Syed Farouq/Farook publicized today, his skin color looks very similar to mine–and all of my ancestors, so far as I know, were north European/British.
Talk about being served Thanksgiving “Turkey”!
How far does Turkey/Erdogan have to go before the Western world (and NATO in particular) sits up and takes a good hard look at the “alliance” with Turkey? And takes appropriate action.
1. ISIS could not survive without Turkish complicity in facilitating oil exports and jihadist transit routes. Yet this seems to be ignored.
2. Turkey is consciously facilitating the deluge of “Syrian” “refugees” into Europe via Greek islands a short canoe paddle from the Turkish coastline or overland through Bulgaria and Greece. And the Chancellor of one of the world’s biggest economies and most advanced societies, Ms Merkel, goes cap in hand like some pathetic supplicant to importune the odious Erdogan to help stem the flood tide. Good luck with that approach Angela! Maybe if you offered Erdogan a soft 100B euro loan that would work. Not. Erdogan would take your money as a gift, promise everything and do nothing. Apart from build another gargantuan palace for himself and dole out some baksheesh to chosen cronies.
3. Turkey shoots down Russian aircraft which stray over a finger of Turkish airspace for 4-5 seconds and Russia is expected to stay its hand and not retaliate at all lest it incur the miliwrath of NATO? And the shooting down of Russian aircraft was in breach of NATO’s Rules of Engagement – thanks for that information DaffersD – in any case.
4. Erdogan publicly proclaims his Islamist ambitions and agenda: “Our minarets are our missiles, our mosques are our …” etc and brazenly interferes in the internal politics of Germany by dictating how “German” Turks should vote!
5. Erdogan orchestrates Gaza “aid/relief” flotillas to poke Israel in the eye and then bleat about any measured Israeli response.
6. Turkey continues to illegally occupy northern Cyprus after invading it not long after I was born. And ships Turkish “settlers” to northern Cyprus to consolidate its demographic hold on such territory, in flagrant breach of international law.
7. Turkey continues to thwart the formation of a secular independent Kurdish state in northern former Iraq. And the West continues to indulge it in this conceit.
8. Turkey still pretends there was no genocide of the Armenians.
I do feel some compassion for the secular, educated Turks (none of whom, I’m vehemently assured by an Iranian Jewish friend who did his tertiary education in Turkey and recently attended a 45th annual re-union there, would vote for Erdogan in a pink fit), but a Russian-engineered regime change in Turkey, to a military dictatorship a la 1960’s and 1970’s, seems like a marvelous idea to me. It wouldn’t be a perfect solution, far from it, (and it wouldn’t alter points 6,7 or 8 above), but it would be a great deal better than the current regime.
It’s not just journalists that Erdogan has had arrested. Following the original incident in January 2014 he’s arrested prosecutors and gendarmerie commanders as well as individual members of the gendarmerie.
Here’s a recent article on the arrest of the officers:
http://www.todayszaman.com/national_witness-testimony-against-officers-in-arms-laden-trucks-case-is-unreliable_406047.html
And here’s one of the original articles from the time the shipments were intercepted:
http://www.todayszaman.com/latest-news_turkish-gendarmerie-stops-seven-syria-bound-trucks-finds-weapons-and-ammunition_336990.html
Today’s Zaman used to support Erdogan until he accused its founder, Fethullah Gulen (the shadowy leader of a wide-ranging Islamic and social movement – who lives in Pennsylvania), of attempting to overthrow the government. Since then this media outlet has become more openly critical of Erdogan and his AK Party. It won’t be long before it too feels Erdogan’s wrath.
Here is the link to the story, and map of the oil shipments:
http://freedomoutpost.com/2015/12/obamas-isis-oil-scandal-deepens-as-russia-produces-stunning-photographic-evidence/
This is another proof of democracy being impossible in a Muslim state. Turkey has been sometimes presented as an example of Muslim democracy. But, in reality, it has always been an authoritarian – at times, perhaps, totalitarian – state. An Islamic monarchy under the Sultans, a secular and rabidly nationalist dicatorship under Kemal Ataturk and his successors. As soon as the secular military lost control and democratic elections were held, the country started sliding towards an Islamic republic.
It is only natural. What we now call ‘democracy’ is a post-Christian phenomenon. It has no roots in Islamic faith, culture or values. It is not universal.
This is a very important truth. No ‘democratic opposition’ is likely to hold power in a Muslim nation. Even if some people with genuinely democratic (in the modern Western sense of the word) aspirations do take power there, they will never be supported by the people and will have either to adopt an authoritarian style of government or to lose power (and, often, their lives).
Thus, when Western powers begin to help supposedly democratic forces in a Muslim country, it inevitably leads to bloodshed, impoverishment and often to a total collapse of the country in question. Iraq, Libya and, now, Syria are the most graphic examples. But also in Egypt and Afghanistan all Western attempts to build a “democracy” produced nothing but trouble.
It cannot be repeated too often: a Muslim democracy is a chimera. Muslim nations exist in three forms: Islamic dictatorship, secular dictatorship and bloody mess. Which would you prefer? I vote for secular dictatorship (as long as it is reasonably tolerant of religious minorities). Western political leaders seem to have a weakness for bloody mess.
This is precisely why the West has traditionally supported secular dictatorships in the Muslim world, Mubarak in Egypt for example, because the only other options are disastrous. Then along came a bunch of nincompoops to replace the hard-heads in Western foreign ministries and, hey presto, we have the “Arab Spring” and all the wonderful results it has brought. Never thought I’d miss Hafez Assad being in power.