Turkish police raid opposition TV station ahead of election
RT | October 28, 2015
Police in Turkey have stormed the offices of an opposition television station days before the country goes to the polls. The media outlet is linked to an Islamic preacher opposed to President Tayyip Recep Erdogan.
The incident took place outside the offices of Kanalturk and Bugun TV in Istanbul, while footage was broadcast live on Bugun’s website.
There were large scuffles outside the offices, where there was also a heavy police presence. Police seemed to be using pepper spray against those trying to block their path through the gate and into the building.
After a struggle, dozens of police eventually made their way through the crowd and into the building. A water cannon on the street was also used to keep demonstrators away.
The media groups are owned by Koza Ipek Holding, which has links to the Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, who is a political foe of the current Turkish President Erdogan. Gulen lives in self-imposed exile in the United States.
On Tuesday, the authorities took over the management of 22 companies that were owned by Koza Ipek, Reuters reports.
Gulen was once an ally of Erdogan, but the two fell out after police and prosecutors seen as sympathetic to the preacher opened a corruption investigation against the inner circle of the Turkish president, then prime minister, in 2013. This is believed to have resulted in the crackdown against Gulen.
Gulen is facing charges of running a “parallel” structure within state institutions that was looking to topple Erdogan. Prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence of up to 34 years for Gulen.
Open Grave: Western Media Memory Hole Pre-Dug for Turkey
By Peter Lee | China Matters | October 26, 2015
Turkey would seem to have every element that makes the heart of an idealistic Western journo go pitty-pat:
Democracy under attack, journalists getting detained and beaten up, fascism on the march, moderate, middle-class protesters getting shredded by Islamic suicide bombers with alleged government connivance, rampant skullduggery in the run-up to a crucial election on November 1, Turkish government backing ISIL and murdering Kurds in northern Iraq, the overall horror presided over by a sinister supervillain from a palace with the size and aesthetic of an Atlantic City casino…
… add to that brave, eloquent and, most importantly, English-speaking local journalists desperate to get the word out.
Whaddya get today with a Google search for Turkey?
Turkey ‘shoot out with ISIS’ leaves police and suspects dead via the Beeb, with the Guardian, Reuters, ABC News & USA Today running the same story.
This action, I suspect, was a PR op meant to deflect attention from Turkey’s “soft on ISIL” rep, solidified by the fact that one of the suicide bombers who been able to perpetrate the horror at the Ankara train station thanks to zero security provided by the Turkish police was the member of a “well-known” ISIL cell, “well known” because the cell had also harbored his brother, the suicide bomber who had killed 32 Kurdish activists at Suruc on July 20.
What else did the Western media give us?
A couple stemwinders on Erdogan’s coalition options if the AKP doesn’t win an absolute majority on November 1;
And some joshing about Turkey playing with the idea of postponing daylight savings to avoid confusion on election day.
Inside Turkey, the “slaughter the usual suspects” ISIL story didn’t even make the top 3 at Hurriyet Daily News. Readers continued their love affair with the account of the bizarre musings of a pro-Erdogan pundit in Canada:
A pro-Justice and Development Party (AKP) columnist has claimed that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan would be the ‘caliph,’ or leader of Sunni Muslims in the world, under the much-anticipated presidential system.
Yeni Akit columnist Abdurrahman Dilipak said the rooms of the controversial presidential palace would be reserved for the representatives from nations under the caliphate, adding that Turkey’s caliphate had never been abolished.
“If Tayyip Erdoğan shifts to a presidential system, he will probably assign advisors from the regions under the caliphate and open representative agencies of all Islam Union nations in that 1,005-room [the presidential palace]…
Meanwhile, here’s some stories that showed up on Twitter in the last three days:
On Sept.2 #Turkey‘s @todayszamancom reported on gov’t plans to seize critical media. It happened today http://www.todayszaman.com/anasayfa_govt-plans-to-seize-critical-media-group-ahead-of-election_398081.html …
UNBELIEVABLE: There is not even a court judgement ordering a seizure of major conglomorate that owns TVs & newspaper. Sheer banditry.
The judge at Ankara 5th Penal Court of Peace, a year old court dubbed by #Erdogan as special project, orders seizure of #Turkey media group.
Those tweets courtesy of Abdullah Bozkurt @abdbozkurt , a Zaman journalist. Follow him! Retweet him!
Here’s some interesting items I tweeted courtesy of Today’s Zaman (follow me! retweet me! @chinahand):
RTÜK may cancel contracts with stream providers over censorship http://www.todayszaman.com/national_rtuk-may-cancel-contracts-with-stream-providers-over-censorship_402290.html …
Only 25 percent believe ISIL responsible for Ankara bombings, survey reveals http://www.todayszaman.com/national_only-25-percent-believe-isil-responsible-for-ankara-bombings-survey-reveals_402175.html …
ISIL members housed in state-owned guesthouses, CHP deputy claims http://www.todayszaman.com/national_isil-members-housed-in-state-owned-guesthouses-chp-deputy-claims_402368.html …
CHP has secret Oslo documents that Kılıçdaroğlu claimed to have seen http://www.todayszaman.com/national_chp-has-secret-oslo-documents-that-kilicdaroglu-claimed-to-have-seen_402377.html … (this concerns rumors of a secret deal between Erdogan and Kurdish militants)
Bombs sent to ISIL by truck being exploded in Turkey now, says former deputy http://www.todayszaman.com/national_bombs-sent-to-isil-by-truck-being-exploded-in-turkey-now-says-former-deputy_402387.html …
And that’s in addition to the big bang/disappointing squib…
CHP deputies: gov’t rejects probe into Turkey’s role in Syrian chemical attack
http://www.todayszaman.com/diplomacy_turkey-says-new-wave-of-syrian-refugees-will-head-for-europe_402329.html …
That’s the allegation by opposition lawmakers that they have a dossier documenting Turkey’s organization of the notorious 2014 sarin gas attack at Ghouta, Syria, as a false flag operation, organized with the purpose of drawing the US into direct military action against Assad.
The US was ready to go to war over this incident, in which 1300 people died. That’s four times as many people as died in the MH17 shootdown. Even applying the “brown on the ground” casualty discount rate vs. air travelers, many of whom if not all were Western and middle class, the US intervention angle—and the corroboration the report apparently provides to Seymour Hersh’s story —would seem to make it newsworthy.
But zip in the United States. CounterPunch ran my story, basically a stub post blockquoting the Today’s Zaman report; five days later it’s still the top hit when you google “Turkey Syria Sarin”.
There are a multitude of excuses for not running with the various stories concerning Erdogan/AKP/deep state work coming out of Turkey.
The stories are coming out courtesy of the CHP, an opposition party hoping for a big day on November 1 that will force the AKP to abandon single-party rule and enter a coalition with it; and they are running in Today’s Zaman, which is associated with the Gulen movement, once a BFF and now arch-enemy of Erdogan. So there’s that whole election/grudge/bias/mudflinging angle.
But that’s a story in itself. The AKP refused to enter into a coalition with the CHP after the last general election, in July 2015, preferring a hung parliament and betting on the possibility that “somehow” it would reverse its slide into unpopularity in order to do better on November 1 and preserve its one-party rule. “Somehow” looks a lot like a terror/repression/suppression campaign against the AKP’s opponents, including bombing of opposition demonstrations, burning down opposition political offices, beating up of journalists, censoring and shutdown of undesirable media outlets…
Even if journos have decided to ignore their liberal bleeding heart leanings and get in touch with their cynical realpolitik side, there are still good Turkey stories out there to be covered.
There’s that story about Turkish consulates showering fake travel documents on Uyghurs to travel to Turkey, and maybe on to Syria to live in and fight from a rumored Uyghur militant colony near Idlib in Syria. Zero interest; fortunately for posterity, I blogged the stuffing out of that one.
There’s another interesting story line, about the refugee crisis, the biggest, most heartwrenchingesque thing going, from Hurriyet Daily News, the other big prestige Turkish daily with an English edition and international reach:
The “promises” relate to the long-stalled accession negotiations between the EU and Turkey. The think tank expert says:
We have had a sudden revitalization in the process, and this is linked to the Syrian crisis and the influx of refugees to the EU…A new effort had to be made; some sweeteners had to be offered to Turkey. So we have some proposals from the EU to convince Turkey of a more cooperative approach.”
The “sweetener” discussions opened with an offer of Euro 3 billion from the EU.
Read any exploration in the Western press of the interesting possibility that there might be more to the outflow of refugees than a seemingly spontaneous hive-mind conclusion that there’s no going back to Syria—and the sudden incapacity of Turkey’s relief and border control apparatus might have something to do with Turkey’s demand for a haven/No Fly Zone for the in northern Syria for refugees and/or militants looking for some rest and recuperation… or else?
Didn’t think so.
Well, Today’s Zaman had this:
Turkey says new wave of Syrian refugees will head for Europe
It contains the quote, “Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said Turkey should not be expected to turn itself into a ‘concentration camp’ for refugees,” and goes on to say:
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday there were “strong indications” a new wave of migration was starting from Aleppo and renewed calls for a “safe zone” in Syria to protect civilians, an idea that has won little international backing.
Kinda screams “refugee flows as TK weapon” doesn’t it? But *crickets*
As I said on Twitter, somebody is doing their job on Turkish news, and doing it well.
Too bad “somebody” is not “journalists”, instead it’s a collective term for diplos and lobbyists inside and outside Turkey doing their best to keep a lid on the story of a US ally, European neighbor, and NATO member whose democracy is threatening to come apart at the seams.
I will resist stepping into the rhetorical minefield of “Is Turkey worse than China.” But I am willing to say “Western reporting on Turkey is worse than Western reporting on China.”
Moscow demands US-led coalition in Syria ‘prove or deny’ allegations Russia is ‘bombing civilians’
RT | October 27, 2015
The Russian Ministry of Defense has summoned military attaches of NATO countries and Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, asking the officials to clarify their countries’ allegations that Russian airstrikes in Syria have hit civilian targets.
“Today we invited military attaches from the US, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the NATO bloc to ask them to give official validation to their statements, or make a rebuttal,” Defense Ministry deputy head Anatoly Antonov said on Tuesday.
It particularly touches upon Western media’s “outrageous accusations” that the Russian Air Force has allegedly bombed hospitals in Syria, the military official said.
Information attacks on Moscow’s anti-terror efforts in the region have intensified recently, Antonov said, adding that the Russian military is “blamed not only for conducting airstrikes on the ‘moderate opposition,’ but also on civilian buildings, such as hospitals, mosques and schools.”
The MoD official stressed that such blame is put upon Russia not only by the media, but also officials and politicians from a number of Western states, including US Secretary of State John Kerry, US Department of Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, and the UK’s Defense Secretary Michael Fallon.
Allegations will be considered “stove-piping” should Russia not receive proof in the next following days, Antonov said, adding that the Defense Ministry “closely monitors and analyzes such statements.”
The MoD deputy head once again called on foreign military officials to join efforts in fighting Islamic State, saying that a wider international coalition should be immediately formed to defeat terrorists in the region.
“We are still waiting… for cooperation in defining concrete targets to be bombed in order to annihilate ISIS bases, or [providing] coordinates of facilities that should not be targeted by the Russian Air Force,” Antonov said.
Reports of a field hospital in northwestern Syria destroyed by Russian airstrikes, killing civilians, emerged last week, based on information provided by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Russian Foreign Ministry has disputed the media reports, having questioned the credentials of the source, which is based in Britain, has no direct access to the ground in Syria, and is run by one man.
READ MORE:
Kremlin dismisses HRW accusations that Russian strikes killed civilians in Syria
Drones in Turkey, missiles in Iran & ground op in Syria: More MSM bombs for Russia amid ISIS fight
Turkish teen arrested outside an Internet Café for ‘insulting’ Erdogan
Press TV – October 22, 2015
A Turkish teenager has been arrested by police forces for allegedly “insulting” the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reports say.
The Cihan News Agency said on Thursday that the teenager identified as U. E. was detained outside an Internet Café on Wednesday night.
The 15-year-old is expected to be brought before court later in the day, which will determine whether he will be charged or fined.
Details regarding the accusations brought against him have not been released.
It is illegal to insult the country’s president under Turkish law, and those found guilty of doing so are at risk of facing up to four years in prison. The law has led to the arrest and prosecution of a number of journalists, activists, intellectuals, students and even celebrities.
Last month, a 16-year-old Turkish youth was handed a suspended 11-month jail sentence for calling Erdogan a thief during a student protest last December.
Earlier, Bülent Keneş, the editor-in-chief of the Turkish English-language newspaper Today’s Zaman, was handed down a suspended jail term of 21 months by a court in the capital, Ankara, for insulting Erdogan in a message posted on Twitter.
Tolga Tanış, a US-based journalist, was also detained in June over suspicions that he insulted Erdogan in a book he had authored.
Rights groups and free speech advocates have criticized the government for suing people over expressing their opinions, describing it as a means of aggressive muzzling of dissent in Turkey.
Erdogan, a former premier who ascended to presidency last year, has faced growing popular dissatisfaction over what critics say is his growing autocratic manner.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: Terrorist Unleashed
By James Petras | October 20, 2015
The October 12, 2015 terror bombing in Ankara, resulting in the death of 127 trade unionists, peace activists, Kurdish advocates and progressives, has been attributed either to the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan regime or to ISIS terrorists.
The Erdoğan regime’s ‘hypothesis’ is that ISIS or the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) was responsible for the terrorist attack, a position echoed by all of the NATO governments and dutifully repeated by all of the Western mass media. Their most recent claim is that a Turkish member of ISIS carried out the massacre – in a ‘copy-cat action’ after his brother, blamed by the Turkish government for an earlier bombing which left 33 young pro-Kurdish activists dead in July in Suruc, on the Syrian border.
The alternative hypothesis, voiced by the majority of the Turkish opposition, is that the Erdoğan regime was directly or indirectly involved in organizing the terrorist attack or allowing it to happen.
In testing each hypothesis it is necessary to examine which of the two best accounts for the facts leading up to the killing and who benefits from the mayhem.
Our approach is to examine those behind various acts of violence preceding, accompanying and following the massacre in Ankara. We will examine the politics of both the victims and the Erdoğan regime, and their conception of political governance, especially in light of the forthcoming November 2015 national elections.
Antecedents to the Ankara Terror Bombing
Over the past several years the Erdoğan regime has been engaged in a violent crackdown of civil society activity. In 2013, massive police action broke-up a major social protest in the center of Istanbul, killing 8 demonstrators and injuring 8,500 environmental and civil society activists defending Taksim Gezi Park from government-linked ‘developers’. In May 2014, over 300 Turkish coal miners in Soma were killed in an underground explosion in a mine owned by an Erdoğan supporter. Subsequent demonstrations were brutally suppressed by the state. The formerly state-owned mine had been privatized by Erdoğan in 2005 – many questioned the legality of the sale to regime cronies.
Prior to and after these violent police actions against civilian demonstrators, thousands of officials and public figures were arrested, fired, and investigated by the Erdoğan regime for allegedly being supporters of a legal Islamic social organization – the so-called Gülen movement.
Hundreds of journalists, human rights activists, publishers and other media workers were arrested, fired, and blacklisted at the behest of the Erdoğan regime, for criticizing high level corruption in the Erdoğan cabinet.
The Erdoğan regime escalated its domestic repression of the secular opposition in order to concentrate power in the hands of an Islamist cult-ruler. This was particularly the case after the government deepened its support of thousands of foreign jihadi extremists and mercenaries streaming into Turkey on their way to the Syrian jihad.
From the beginning of the armed uprising in Syria, Turkey became the main training ground, arms depot and entry-point for armed Islamist terrorists (AIT) entering Syria. The Erdoğan regime directed the AIT to attack, dispossess and destroy the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds whose fighters had liberated a significant section of northern Syria and Iraq and served as an ‘example of self-government’ for Turkish Kurds.
The Erdoğan regime has joined the brutal Saudi monarchy in financing and arming AIT groups and especially training them in urban terror warfare against the secular government in Damascus and the Shiite regime in Baghdad. They specialized in bombing populated sites occupied by Erdogan’s enemies or the Saudi targets especially secular Kurds, leftists, trade unionists and Shiites allied with Iran.
The Erdogan regime’s intervention in Syria was motivated by its desire to expand Turkish influence (neo-Ottomanism) and to destroy the successful Kurdish autonomous government and movement in Northern Syria and Iraq.
To those ends, Erdoğan combined four policies:
(1) He vastly expanded Turkish support for and recruitment of Islamic terrorists from around the world, including Libya and Chechnya.
(2) He facilitated their entry into Syria, and encouraged them to attack villages and towns in the ethnic Kurdish regions.
(3) He broke off peace negotiations with the PKK and re-launched a full-scale war against the militant Kurds.
(4) He organized a covert terrorist campaign against the legal, secular, pro-Kurdish electoral party, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP).
The Erdoğan regime sought to consolidate dictatorial powers to pursue and deepen its ‘Islamization’ of Turkish society and to project his version of Turkish hegemony over Syria and the Kurdish regions inside and outside Turkey. To accomplish these ambitious and far reaching goals, Erdoğan needed to purge his Administration of any rival power centers.
He started with the jailing and expulsion of secular, nationalist Kemalist military figures. He continued with a purge of his former supporters in the Gülen organization.
Failing to gain a majority in national elections because of the growth of the HDP, he proceeded with a systematic terror campaign: organizing street mobs made up of his followers in the ‘Justice and Development Party’, who burned and wrecked HDP offices and beat up activists. Erdoğan’s terror campaign culminated with the July 2015 bombing of a leftist youth meeting in Suruc whose activists were aiding Syrian Kurdish refugees and the beleaguered fighters resisting Islamist terrorists in Korbani, a large Syrian town across the border controlled by the Erdoğan-backed ISIS. Over 33 activists were murdered and 104 were wounded. Two Turkish covert intelligence officers or ‘policemen’, who knew in advance of the bombing, were captured, interrogated and executed by the PKK. This retaliation for what was widely believed to be a state-sponsored massacre provided Erdoğan with a pretext to re-launch his war on the Kurds. Erdoğan immediately declared war on both the armed and unarmed Kurdish movements.
The Erdoğan regime trotted out the claim that the Suruç terrorist attack was committed by ISIS suicide bombers, ignoring the regime’s ties to ISIS. He announced a large-scale investigation. In fact it was a perfunctory round up and release of suspects of no consequence.
If ISIS was involved in this and the Ankara massacres, it did so at the command and direction of Turkish Intelligence under orders of President Erdoğan.
The Suruç Massacre: A Dress Rehearsal for Ankara
Suruç was a ‘dress rehearsal’ for Erdoğan’s terrorist attack in Ankara, three months later.
Once again the main target was the Kurdish opposition electoral party (the HDP) as well as the major progressive trade unions, professional associations, and anti-war activists.
Once again Erdoğan blamed ISIS, without acknowledging his ties to ISIS. Certain facts point to Turkish state complicity:
1) Why were the bombs placed in the midst of the unarmed demonstrators and not next to the police and intelligence headquarters within a block of the carnage?
2) Why did Erdoğan’s police attack and prevent emergency medical assistance to the demonstrators in the immediate aftermath of the bombing?
3) Why did he block popular leaders, independent investigators and representatives from targeted groups from examining the bombing site?
4) Why did Erdoğan immediately reject a cease-fire offer from the PKK and launch a vast military operation while promoting rabidly chauvinistic street demonstrators against Kurds engaged in legal political campaigning?
5) Why did the police attack mourners at the subsequent funerals?
Who Benefited from the Terror Attacks?
The terror attacks benefited Erdoğan’s immediate and long-range strategic political goals – and no one else!
First and foremost, they killed activists from the HDP party, anti-war leftists and trade unionists. The violent government attacks against the HDP in the aftermath of the massacre has increased Erdoğan’s chances of securing the electoral majority that he needs in order to change the Turkish constitution so he can assume dictatorial powers.
Secondly, it was aimed at (1) reducing the ties between the Turkish and Syrian Kurds; (2) breaking the ties between progressive Turkish trade unions, secular professionals, peace activists and the Kurdish Democratic Party; (3) mobilizing the right-wing ultra-nationalist Turkish street mobs to attack and destroy the electoral offices of the HDP; (4) intimidating pro-democracy activists and progressives and silencing dissent to Erdoğan’s domestic power grab and intervention in Syria.
To the question of who is responsible for serial violent attacks on civil society organizations, opposition political parties, and purges and arrests of independent officials in the lead-up to the terror attack? The answer is Erdoğan.
Who was behind the campaign of violence and bombing in Kurdish neighborhoods in Istanbul and elsewhere leading up to the Suruç and Ankara terrorist attacks? The answer is Erdoğan.
Conclusion
We originally counter-posed two hypotheses regarding the terrorist attack in Ankara: The Erdoğan regime’s hypothesis that ISIS – as a force independent of the Turkish government – or even the PKK were responsible for brutally killing key activists in Turkish and Kurdish civil organizations; and the opposite hypothesis that the Erdoğan regime was the mastermind.
After reviewing the motives, actions, beneficiaries, and interests of the two hypothetical suspects, the hypothesis, which most elegantly and thoroughly accounts for and makes sense of the facts is that the Erdoğan regime was directly responsible for the planning and organization of the massacres through its intelligence operatives.
A subsidiary hypothesis is that the execution – the placing of the bombs – may have been by an ISIS terrorist, but under the control of Erdoğan’s police apparatus.
“Someone Killed Jacky”
Evidence Contradicts Presumed Motive for “Suicide”
Jacqueline Anne Sutton. Photo credit: Facebook
Who.What.Why. | October 20, 2015
Family, friends and colleagues of veteran British journalist and activist Jacky Sutton (age 50) demand a full investigation into her mysterious hanging death at an airport in Istanbul Sunday morning. Many of them reject the notion that she could have committed suicide, as was initially reported by the Turkish media, citing Turkish authorities.
The official story was that Sutton had missed a connecting flight to Iraq, and was distraught because she could not afford to purchase a new ticket. She then supposedly went to a bathroom and hung herself with her shoelaces.
However, an Italian source reported that Sutton had €2,300 ($2,600) in her pocket when she died, much more than the short flight to Iraq would have cost.
Sutton recently took over as Iraq Chief of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) and had been on the way to Iraq from London. She was to replace Ammar Al Shahbander, who was killed in Baghdad by an Islamic State bomb in May.
While Turkish media unequivocally stated that her death was a suicide, those who knew Sutton were skeptical of that claim right away.
“The circumstances of her death are unclear, and we are trying to establish the facts,” IWPR said in a statement.
The group did not say outright that it ruled out suicide as a cause of death, but noted that “Jacky was returning to Iraq full of plans for innovative new work, including projects to counter violent extremism that threatens a country to which she was so committed.”
Others who knew Sutton did not mince words.
“What I’m sure about, the kind of person that Jacky was, it’s impossible she would have killed herself, impossible,” Mazin Elias, an Iraqi journalist who worked with Sutton, told MailOnline. “I’m really sad and sorry what happened, but if someone tells me ‘she killed herself,’ I tell him: ‘No, that’s wrong, someone killed Jacky’.”
Sutton’s brother Ian cited the “odd circumstances” of her death and friend and colleague Christian Bleuer tweeted that Sutton was the “Toughest woman u could meet. Turkish police say she committed suicide cuz she missed her flight?” Bleuer also wrote: “I’m not into conspiracies, but if the Turks say a security camera at Istanbul-Ataturk was ‘malfunctioning’ then Jacky Sutton was murdered.”
While it certainly would have been in Turkey’s interest to make this an open-and-shut suicide case, the evidence suggests that the initial story doesn’t hold water and a thorough investigation is warranted.
The Killing of Serena Shim & the ‘Suicide’ of Former BBC Journalist Jackie Sutton…
The Burning Blogger of Bedlam | October 20, 2015
Exactly a year ago – on October 19th, 2014 – the journalist Serena Shim was killed after reporting from Kobani in Syria as a war correspondent. Her death was almost certainly the work of the Turkish intelligence community.
It’s a rather remarkable, and depressing, ‘coincidence’ that just as I was sitting down to put together a post in tribute to her, I’ve just come across news that another journalist and activist, Jacky Sutton, has just been found dead in Turkey – exactly a year to the date of Serena Shim’s suspicious death.
Former BBC journalist, Jacky Sutton (aged 50) is reported to have been found dead in a toilet in Istanbul’s main airport. The British journalist (pictured below), who had been working as Iraq director for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), was in Turkey en route to Irbil in Northern Iraq. Turkish sources have allegedly suggested that she has killed herself after missing a flight connection – a rather poor, even insulting, suggestion, which colleagues of Ms Sutton are dismissing. In her role as acting Iraq head of the (London-based) IWPR, Jackie Sutton’s role has been to support local journalism in countries affected by war and crisis. As The Guardian notes, the organisation’s previous Iraq director, Ammar Al Shahbander, was killed in a car-bomb in Baghdad on 2nd May this year. It is claimed the British woman’s body has been found hanging from boot laces.
Sudipto Mukerjee, a director with the UN Development Programme, has said, according to The Independent; “Very difficult to believe that my colleague in Iraq, staffer and seasoned traveller Jacky Sutton committed suicide.” Ms Sutton had, among other things, previously worked for the BBC World Service, reporting from Africa, the Middle East and London.
As I said, this latest suspicious death in Turkey comes on the precise one-year anniversary of the equally suspicious death of Serena Shim, who was killed in a car ‘accident’ on the Turkey-Syria border in 2014, and again illustrates both the dangers faced by truth-seeking journalists and the extent to which a corrupt Turkish state stands in need of investigation by international authorities.
Serena Shim (October 10th 1985 – October 19th 2014) was an American-Lebanese journalist. The car ‘accident’ in which she was killed hadn’t taken place inside the dangerous war-zone she had been reporting from, but had occurred on her way back to ‘safety’. It is also highly significant that Shim had very clearly expressed her concerns for her safety just prior to the ‘accident’.
Shim had described her harassment by security forces as particularly unusual, noting that she had dealt with police and intelligence services before in various different countries, but that the Turkish activity was a targeted response to something very specific. She had said her own instinct was that Turkish security people were tracking her not because of her reporting in Kobani but on account of possible matters of far greater, more damaging, information she might’ve exposed concerning a concerted geo-political conspiracy.
On October 17th last year, just two days before her death, Shim had told Press TV that the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MİT) had accused her of “spying”. She stated it was “probably due to some of the stories she had covered” about Turkey’s role in the Islamic State terror group and particularly in regard to the militants in Kobani. It was Shim who had reported on ISIL militants being smuggled across the Turkish border into Syria in trucks deceptively bearing the symbols of NGOs like the World Food Organisation. The 29 year-old Shim had even said on air that she was “a bit frightened” by the danger posed to her by Turkey’s MİT.
She died on October 19th 2014, having been on the way back to her hotel. She had been returning to Suruç with her cousin Judy Irish in a rental car which then collided with a heavy vehicle (a cement mixer, according to Turkish media). Supposedly, Shim died in the crash while her cousin Judy Irish was injured and taken to Suruç State Hospital. According to the Turkish Doğan News Agency, the driver of the heavy vehicle was subsequently arrested. Shim’s employer at the time, Press TV, disputed this, alleging that both driver and vehicle had “disappeared”.
There was also the curious report that Shim and Irish were for some reason taken to different hospitals after the crash.
Shim’s sister appears to have been in no doubt that the journalist was murdered for various reasons. “She caught them bringing in ISIS high-ranked members into Syria from Turkey into camps, which are supposed to be Syrian refugee camps,” Fatmeh Shima said. “I think it was planned and plotted. There’s no pictures of Sassy in the car. There is not one scratch on my sister’s body. They took them to two different hospitals. Why? Why were there Army men on the ground, why weren’t there police?”
Serena Shim’s sister complained that the family received inconsistent reports about the specifics surrounding her death. “There are so many different stories. The first story was that Serena’s car was hit by a heavy vehicle who proceeded to keep on driving,” Fatemeh Shim told RT, also complaining about Turkish authorities’ inability to find the vehicle or the driver.
Fox News also quoted Shim’s mother as saying that the scene looked “staged” and that her death wasn’t an accident.
Her tragic death came just two days after a video interview in which she claimed Turkish intelligence agents had threatened her after her report on the ISIL extremist jihadists being smuggled into Syria from Turkey.
In her own words; ‘I am a bit worried because… Turkey has been labeled by Reporters Without Borders as the largest prison for journalists, so I am a bit frightened about what they might use against me.’ She continues, ‘We were some of the first people on the ground, if not the first people to give that story of those Takfiri militants going in through the Turkish border. It was very apparent that they were Takfiri militants by their beards and by the clothes that they wore and they were going in there with NGO trucks and I just find it very odd, they went to several local residents here and asked about me. The other reports that I had done were about at the time, the so called Free Syrian Army going in, and catching these Takfiri militants and getting the passport stamps and getting firsthand information that they were actually inside while Turkey was still hiding them.’
‘I think this has a lot to do with it and I think they want to know why I’m back,’ Serena Shim said. ‘I’ve been stopped by them before, but not necessarily to this level, just by police basically. But for the intelligence to actually look for me, that’s rather odd, so I think that they’re trying to get the word out to journalists to be careful so much as to what they say…’
Within two days of this report, Serena Shim was dead.
No independent investigation has been conducted by the United States over her death, despite her US citizenship.
Serena Shim also wasn’t the first journalist affiliated with Press TV to have been killed. Maya Nasser was shot dead by a sniper while on air delivering a report from Damascus, Syria, in 2012. A statement posted to Nasser’s Facebook page claimed that “armed terrorists” had simply driven up in vehicles and additional snipers shot from the rooftops of nearby buildings.
The 29 year-old Serena Shim was married and had two young children. Her tragic death was almost certainly an unlawful assassination designed firstly to silence her from reporting further on Turkey’s involvement in the rise of ISIL/Daesh, and secondly to act as a violent warning to other journalists to stay away from trying to expose the true nature of the war in Syria and the cynical manufacturing of the ‘Islamic State’ for geo-political purposes. The United States’ lack of interest in pursuing the matter of her death also suggests the US is complicit in that warning too.
In October 2014 Serena Shim herself joined the roll-call of brave journalists over the years who’ve risked – and ultimately sacrificed – their lives for the sake of uncovering the truth. Her bravery is all the more meaningful in the context of how most mainstream, corporate-owned journalism has been either reluctant or unwilling to dig deeper beyond the superficial surface of the ‘ISIS’ story and report more honestly about the origins of the crisis.
Certainly at the time of her death this time last year, mainstream journalists were almost entirely conforming to the approved corporate/political script, even if more meaningful journalism has started to gradually emerge in isolated spurts between then and now. But Shim was one of the few who was risking life and limb in dangerous territory to report on what was really going on. And she paid with her life.
____________________
Reporters Without Borders has labelled Turkey the ‘world’s largest prison for journalists’. In the supposedly democratic nation with EU membership aspirations, press freedom is pretty much non-existent. In an atmosphere of intimidation and fear, Turkey imprisons more journalists than any other modern nation; in spite of this tight control of information, people like Serena Shim and others have nevertheless managed to expose Turkey’s criminal role in supporting the Islamic State terror group and sustaining/funding the War in Syria that has killed over a quarter-of-a-million Syrians.
Meanwhile the killing of journalists and activists, either as tragic consequences of reporting from danger zones or by deliberate, targeted assassination, is an ongoing crime all over the world. The highly suspicious death of Jacky Sutton in a Turkish airport, just announced this evening, demonstrates that Serena Shim wasn’t the first and won’t be the last journalist to lose their life in the field, and that she is part of a long line of journalists who’ve been killed for various reasons over the years, including the likes of Max Hastings, Hunter S. Thompson, Garry Webb, Daniel Pearl, Maya Nasser and many others. According to the International Press Institute, 64 journalists have been killed so far in 2015.
This, this, this and this are all examples of the very real, mortal dangers journalists and photo-journalists face when putting themselves on the line for the sake of information or the sake of exposing inconvenient truths.
Change.org is petitioning the United States Department of Justice to investigate Shim’s death; you can add your signature to the petition here. Anonymous also launched #OpSerenaShim in memory of the deceased journalist.
As for this very unlikely explanation given by Turkish sources for the sudden suicide of Jacky Sutton, we will have to wait and see if British authorities push for a better explanation and if an investigation uncovers anything more. In her career, Jacky Sutton hasn’t been a stranger to danger and is not someone at all characterised as having been thin-skinned or emotionally vulnerable. This article here recounts much of her life in her own words.
As for Serena Shim, she was killed doing what American writer Walter Lipmann once called the ‘highest law’ in journalism – working to tell the truth and ‘shame the devil’. It might not be sufficient comfort to her friends, family or children, but it is ultimately the highest possible calling for any journalist.
NATO to Keep Forces in Endless Afghanistan Quagmire
Sputnik – 20.10.2015
Germany, Turkey and Italy will maintain their current troop levels in Afghanistan, NATO officials said on Monday after the United States announced that it will prolong its military presence there.
General Philip Breedlove, NATO’s top commander in Europe, said he had assurances that NATO countries will continue alongside the nearly 10,000 US troops in Afghanistan.
“Several of our largest contributors have already communicated with us that they will remain in their current posture,” Breedlove told Reuters.
Germany, NATO’s top contributor, has around 850 troops in Afghanistan, followed by Italy with 760 and about 500 for Turkey, according to the latest NATO data.
The decision comes after the Taliban’s brief takeover of the strategic northern city of Kunduz, which raised concern about the strength of Afghan state forces.
“We should make any changes on our troop structure based on conditions on the ground, not on schedules,” Breedlove said.
US President Barack Obama had aimed to withdraw all but a small US force before leaving office. But now he will instead maintain the current force of 9,800 through most of 2016 before starting to trim numbers 2017.
Unlike the United States, NATO has never set an end date to its “Resolute Support” training mission in Afghanistan, which now stands at 6,000 troops from some 40 countries.
US-led NATO invaded Afghanistan in 2001 shortly after the 9/11 attacks, ousting the Taliban government from Kabul.
Erdogan and the Ankara Bombing
By Graham E. Fuller | Consortium News | October 14, 2015
“Hüngür Hüngür Ağlıyorum” is a refrain from a old Turkish folksong — “Bitterly I weep.” It commemorates a bloody turning point at Sakarya against Greek invaders back in 1921. But the words couldn’t more readily apply now to the unprecedented and outrageous bombing attacks in Ankara last week against marchers in a demonstration for peace that has cost the lives of some 100 people. Will that tragedy bring the country to its senses?
That event is the most horrific outcome yet of the escalating violence and mayhem that is emerging from the current Turkish electoral campaign —one capriciously demanded by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He was dissatisfied with the electoral setbacks of last June’s elections that thwarted his amassing greater powers; hence he mandated new elections so voters could “right their mistake.”
He is operating under the increasingly unrealistic supposition that the new elections on Nov. 1 will somehow reverse his decline and grant him new authority in his arrogant push to create a new super-presidency. The frightening thing is that his electoral gambits have grown increasingly reckless; it now appears as if the president acknowledges almost no limits to the means used to manipulate the electorate into voting for him.
Elections in Turkey are generally a rough contact sport — even though they are open and democratic; vote-rigging is rare. This time however Erdoğan is pulling out all the stops in an ever-rising campaign of the intimidation and silencing of political rivals, including detention of large numbers of journalists and attacks on media that dare to criticize the president.
Worse, Erdoğan is particularly hostile towards the HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party), a relatively new Kurdish-oriented party which has actually gained a considerable following among non-Kurds in Turkey — particularly liberals and youth — who value its broad outreach as a secular socialist party. It was this strong showing by the HDP in the June elections that robbed Erdoğan of his expected majority.
He has had blood in his eye ever since and has chosen to exploit ugly nationalist impulses in the country to discredit — perhaps even find grounds to ban — this party that has been gaining some popularity in Turkey as a fresh new political force. Pro-Erdoğan mobs have visited violence upon the party’s headquarters and members in recent months.
It was HDP elements and other liberal forces who dominated the march for peace last week and were the chief victims of the savage bombings. The HDP party leader has directly accused the president of complicity in the bombing of the marchers. There is, of course, no direct evidence of this as such. Indeed it might be too far a stretch to blame Erdoğan as directly responsible for engineering the events — such an act would of course be criminal in the highest degree.
So far Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has suggested that the “Islamic State” or ISIS is behind the slaughter. No reliable facts have been made public so far, and we may never get a clear answer. What is clearer, however, is that — although proving nothing — Erdoğan probably stood to benefit from this event more than other actors.
After inaugurating a bold, admirable and unprecedented initiative in earlier years to open dialog with the main Kurdish rebel group, he now seems to find greater political benefit in discrediting the HDP, perhaps even hoping to unleash unrest among Turkey’s Kurds with the aim of even banning the HDP — thereby removing a major obstacle to a clear-cut victory in the November elections. But to move to mass bombing would be quite another thing.
Erdoğan may also be banking on the hope that much of the Turkish electorate may now be so unnerved by the increased violence and recent attacks from the rebel PKK group that they just might decide to vote for the president’s party as a bulwark against the forces of Kurdish nationalism and chaos. But such a calculation represents a huge gamble that could produce a severe backlash: the electorate may well — and justifiably — fear that the president himself has become such a deeply polarizing, arrogant, erratic and destabilizing figure that he is even willing to put at risk the future stability of the country — and therefore will call for his defeat.
There are other forces that could also be theoretical beneficiaries of the bombing. Extremists within the right-wing nationalist party MHP are one possibility. And ISIS itself, of course, could well be behind the act, as the government claims. ISIS seeks to drive a wedge between Kurds and Turks and also to “punish” Erdoğan for backing away from his earlier, more tolerant view of ISIS in the struggle against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. And to attack his new willingness to support U.S. attacks against ISIS. Yet ISIS usually claims credit for its terrorist actions; in this case it has not so far done so — for what that’s worth.
Other theories run more heavily to the conspiratorial — that the PKK Kurdish rebels sought to thwart its moderate Kurdish rivals; but the PKK has in fact declared an overall cease-fire, at least until the elections are over. Extreme leftists too (not a serious political force in the country) might seek to sow mayhem to weaken Erdoğan.
But even if Erdoğan’s intimate circle had nothing directly to do with this bombing, there is little doubt that the president has worked to create an atmosphere of xenophobia, fear, instability and anti-Kurdish sentiment that has created an ugly and violent political atmosphere not seen in decades. I worry that he might now even be tempted to create armed confrontation with Russia over Syria as a further distraction — an exceptionally dangerous move.
The major question now is how the Turkish electorate will react to events that seem to be dragging Turkey towards the brink. Will it reject Erdoğan and vote against the AKP in enough numbers to severely curtail his powers and vaulting ambitions in the next parliament? Or will it buy into Erdoğan’s increasingly hollow claims to be the “indispensable leader” who can keep the country on an even keel?
Turkey has before marched up the to political brink in previous years, only to find the electorate ultimately voting wisely to ensure the stability and progress of the country. Here’s hoping their common sense will prevail this time as well. Stakes are high for everybody involved in the region.
Graham E. Fuller is a former senior CIA official, author of numerous books on the Muslim World; his latest book is Breaking Faith: A novel of espionage and an American’s crisis of conscience in Pakistan.
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Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
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- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
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