Turkey

see dic erdogan

turks fighting syrian army to keep refugees from coming?! idlib 3/20

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an 525

President Donald Trump's critics, both left and right, often use the word "unprecedented" to describe his actions. No previous president in U.S. history — not even Richard Nixon — contemplated deporting U.S. citizens to foreign prisons or took aggressive action against law firms for having clients he didn't like.

They typically mean "unprecedented" in the United States, not unprecedented elsewhere.

In an article published by The Atlantic on May 14, Andrew O'Donohue — a political scientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts — warns that Trump is employing a legal strategy used by despots in other countries.

"Donald Trump’s attacks on the courts lack recent precedent in the United States," O'Donohue explains, "but they follow a clear pattern seen in backsliding democracies around the world. In many countries, when political leaders challenge the courts, the end result isn't merely a win in a single policy dispute. These attacks have a deeper, more destructive effect: They systematically weaken the courts as a check on the executive's power — opening the door for governments to abuse that power to target opponents and endanger democracy."

IFrame Content

The Harvard political science expert continues, "This fight takes place both inside and, importantly, outside the courtroom, in the arena of the public’s opinion. Even though citizens generally agree that governments should obey court orders, several would-be authoritarians — such as those in Turkey, Mexico, and El Salvador — have managed to defy the courts, while keeping the public on their side.

O'Donohue describes the "pattern" he has "studied" in "democratic backsliding globally" as "court-baiting."

"To understand this dynamic, consider a textbook example from Turkey," O'Donohue writes. "When Turkey’s long-serving leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, first rose to power in 2003, he initially faced powerful constraints from the judiciary. Whereas Erdoğan's party was religiously conservative, Turkey's courts were staunchly secular and issued dozens of decisions during Erdoğan’s first term to limit the government's sway over historically secular state institutions. To take down the judiciary, Erdoğan used the court-baiting playbook."

O'Donohue continues, "He proposed a constitutional amendment perfectly designed to galvanize public support — and trigger a showdown with the judiciary. In Turkey, the courts had repeatedly upheld a ban that prevented Muslim women from wearing the Islamic headscarf at universities in the name of upholding the constitution’s strict commitment to secularism."

Trump, O'Donohue argues, is using the "court-baiting playbook" in a similar fashion to Erdoğan in Turkey — and the goal is an "erosion of checks and balances."

"The experiences of other democracies offer a warning: Court-baiting starts by expanding executive power on a popular issue," O'Donohue writes, "but it can end with an unconstrained executive who destroys the cherished institutions of a free society."

*Andrew O'Donohue's full article for The Atlantic is available at this link (subscription required).

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-corruption-2648564184/

it's been a long, difficult week in Trumpworld with all of the incriminating reports of corruption surrounding President Donald Trump and his administration. With Election Day less than five days away, Trump is likely feeling the pressure as the opposing forces work over time to state their case and prove that he is unfit for the office of the presidency.

Many of the stories raise more questions about Trump's leadership and the hidden agendas of his White House officials and other members of his administration.

Here's a breakdown of the stories circulating this week:

1. Trump, Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the Turkish Bank A new report by the New York Times has uncovered details about Trump and U.S. Attorney Bill Barr questionable handling of possible violations of U.S. sanctions involving billions of dollars worth of gold and cash that was funneled to Iran.

When Geoffrey S. Berman, a top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, traveled to the White House to speak with Barr and some of his top administrative officials about the criminal investigation into the state-owned Turkish bank, Halkbank, Barr suggested that the bank be allowed to avoid indictment by paying only a fine and admitting that some wrong was done. Barr's sentiments also echoed Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's words as he had reportedly asked Trump repeatedly to stop the investigation. Trump's presumed eagerness to please Erdogan has also raised questions about where the president truly stands. For Berman, Barr's request raised red flags and questions about whether or not Barr was colluding with foreign operatives.

"This is completely wrong," Berman later told lawyers in the U.S. Department of Justice, according to people who received intel about the proposal and Barr's reaction. "You don't grant immunity to individuals unless you are getting something from them — and we wouldn't be here."

This report is yet another cloud over Trump and his administration regarding where their loyalty lies.

2. Pompeo Family Email ScandalU.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was caught in the middle of an email scandal when it was revealed that he and his wife, Susan Pompeo had conducted official White House business using personal email addresses. Now, the couple is being investigated by both Congress and the State Department's inspector generals for "potential misuse of government resources." On multiple occasions, Susan Pompeo is said to have regularly utilized her personal email address for business matters, according to email correspondence.

"The emails show that Susan Pompeo routinely gives instructions to State Department officials from her personal email address about everything from travel plans and restaurant reservations to the elite Madison Dinners," according to NBC News.

Below is an example of the types of messages Susan Pompeo sent to a State Department official. The message captures a conversation between her and a State Department official whose name was redacted from the record.

"The dryer isn't hooked up... I think you told me someone was coming to fix that?" Susan Pompeo said via text message to a State Department official. "Ma'am – On it, I was told it was fixed. Let me get you an answer," the official responded by email hours later.

3. Rick Perry's Dirty DealingA new report centers on former United States Secretary of Energy Rick Perry and his involvement in an attempted scheme to help some of his friends profit off a massive gas deal. Although Perry has denied the allegations, there are multiple details that highlight Perry's ties to Ukraine, according to Pro Republica.

During a six-month investigation, reporters from Time magazine, WNYC and ProPublica discovered that "Perry and his staff at the Energy Department worked to advance energy deals that were potentially worth billions of dollars to Perry's friends and political donors."

Two of these deals seemed set to benefit Energy Transfer, the Texas company on whose board Perry served immediately before and after his stint in Washington. The biggest was worth an estimated $20 billion, according to U.S. and Ukrainian energy executives involved in negotiating them.

4. Wilbur Ross' Chinese Conflict of InterestLike Perry, Ross found himself at the center of controversy when he failed to separate from his business ties while serving as the U.S. Commerce Secretary. According to ForeignPolicy.com, documents appear to suggest that Ross' potential conflicts of interest surrounding Chinese business are much more evident than previously thought.

Here is a breakdown of the conflicts surrounding Perry, his business ties, and government affiliation.

In Chinese corporate documents obtained by Foreign Policy, Ross is listed as serving on the board of a Chinese joint venture until January 2019—nearly two years into his term as commerce secretary. That joint venture, now called Huaneng Invesco WLR (Beijing) Investment Fund Management Co., is an investment partnership formed in September 2008 between Huaneng Capital Services, the U.S. management company Invesco, and a firm Ross founded, WL Ross & Co. Huaneng Capital Services is an arm of China Huaneng Group, a major state-owned power producer.

As Election Day approaches, more incriminating reports are circulating and raising more questions about the integrity of the Trump administration.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/how-rudy-giuliani-became-the-shadow-secretary-of-state-with-shady-ties-sprawling-far-beyond-ukraine/

no lnx

How Rudy Giuliani became the shadow secretary of state — with shady ties sprawling far beyond Ukraine

President Donald J. Trump recognizes former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani prior to signing H.R. 1327; an act to permanently authorize the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund Monday, July 29, 2019, in the Rose Garden of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

Written by Bob Dreyfuss / TomDispatch March 6, 2020

Imagine, just for the sake of argument, that the president of the United States was an arrogant, information-challenged, would-be autocrat with a soft spot for authoritarian leaders from China, Russia, and North Korea to Egypt (“my favorite dictator”), Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. And then, suppose that very president, while hollowing out the State Department and slamming its diplomats as “Deep State” troublemakers, were to name a voluble wheeler-dealer attorney as his unofficial, freelance White House go-between with shady characters worldwide. Imagine further that the president would do an end run around the professionals of the U.S. intelligence community — more Deep Staters, natch — and rely instead on conspiracy theories trundled back to Washington in that attorney’s briefcase.

Now, one last unimaginable thing, but humor me: accept that the attorney in question went by the name of Rudy Giuliani.

That, of course, is a reasonable description of the state of America in 2020. Three-plus years into Donald Trump’s misshapen presidency, as the “adults” fled the room one by one or were pushed to the exits, the president was left with a rump collection of family loyalists and third-tier yes-people around him.

Rarely, if ever, do mainstream media types take a step back to survey the classic Star Wars bar-like crew of know-nothings, Bible-thumpers, and connivers who’ve been assembled as Trump’s “team” and their breathtaking incompetence and perfidy. Luckily, with Giuliani in the mix, there’s at least one figure so wildly over-the-top that analysts and pundits have heaped scorn or ridicule on his head, and often his alone, as a person so outrageously unfit, so borderline deranged, so nakedly in it for profit that it’s impossible to consider him without marveling at the tragicomedy of it all.

Since 2017, however, Rudy Giuliani has emerged as Trump’s shadow secretary of state with his hands in American foreign policy and politics from Iran to Russia, Turkey to Ukraine and beyond. That means anyone, anywhere in the world, with a few million bucks to proffer and an angle to pursue in Washington can avoid Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Christian-right uber-hawk from Kansas, and sidle up instead to the former U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York and mayor of New York City.

During most of 2019, as is well known to anyone who even casually followed the impeachment proceedings in Congress, Giuliani had a starring role in President Trump’s conspiracy-laden efforts to prove that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election and that Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, were mixed up in something nefarious there. (To those in the reality-based world, of course, it was Russia, not Ukraine that meddled massively in 2016. And the Bidens, it’s clear, did nothing illegal in Kyiv.)

As we shall see, the Trump-Giuliani conspiracy theory about that country originated with and was “fertilized” by three individuals who’d earlier been caught up in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation of the White House: Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security advisor in the White House; Paul Manafort, who chaired Trump’s election campaign; and Manafort’s Ukraine partner and ally, an apparent operative for Russia’s GRU intelligence service, Konstantin Kilimnik. In other words, the Trump-Giuliani Ukraine adventure did indeed get a boost from Vladimir Putin’s secret service and Moscow’s propaganda machine.

You’ll remember, perhaps, or maybe you’ve forgotten, that before Mike Pompeo was secretary of state, before his predecessor Rex (“Rexxon”) Tillerson even took the job, it looked for a while like Giuliani was going to get it. He and Donald Trump had been political friends-with-benefits since the mid-1990s, as evidenced by a cringe-worthy 2000 video of Trump placing his lips unbidden on Giuliani-in-drag’s “breast.” The former mayor had quietly sought to reposition himself as the reincarnation of Roy Cohn, the mob-connected lawyer who had been a mentor to the up-and-coming New York real estate tycoon. (“Where’s my Roy Cohn?”) It’s hardly surprising then that, following Trump’s surprise victory in November 2016, Giuliani began lobbying hard for the secretary of state job. At the same time, he was fervently urging the president-elect not to select never-Trumper Mitt Romney for it. (Giuliani did, however, also endorse John Bolton, Washington’s warmonger-in-chief, for the job.)

Back in 2016, a week or so after the election, a New York Times editorial drily noted that the appointment of Giuliani as secretary of state “would be a dismal and potentially disastrous choice,” that he lacked “any substantive diplomatic experience and has demonstrated poor judgment throughout his career,” appeared “unhinged,” and would come with a “flurry of potential conflicts of interest.” And keep in mind that, back then, Giuliani was only getting started.

In recent years, much has been written, and accurately so, about the exodus of veteran diplomats — ambassadors to toilers in the ranks — from a gutted Foggy Bottom and its global outposts under both Tillerson and Pompeo. Writing last October for Foreign Affairs, for instance, former diplomat William Burns noted that fewer people took the department’s entrance exam in 2019 than in any year in previous decades. “Career diplomats,” wrote Burns, “are sidelined, with only one of 28 assistant secretary-rank positions filled by a Foreign Service officer, and more ambassadorships going to political appointees in this administration than in any in recent history.” He added: “One-fifth of ambassadorships remain unfilled, including critical posts.”

At the State Department, as one ambassador told the Hill, morale “is at a new low, although I am not sure it could fall much lower than where it has been for the past three years.” And that decline only accelerated after the humiliating dismissal of the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch, whose ouster was orchestrated by Giuliani.

To be sure, the State Department was never a progressive bastion, not during the Cold War years nor in the era when America was the global hyperpower. It is, nonetheless, the main vehicle for any president wishing to use the levers of diplomacy rather than the oft-chosen military option. Now, with the adults gone and the diplomats increasingly neutered, we’re left with Trump and Giuliani. Neither hawks nor doves, they’re vultures, viewing every country as part of a vast veldt where they can pick at carcasses of every sort for their own business or political gain.

How to Become a Shadow Secretary of State

Giuliani’s foreign policy portfolio extends far and wide, though it was in Ukraine — specifically with that country’s many corrupt, Russian-leaning oligarchs — that he rocketed to world attention and helped trigger the president’s impeachment. In his world travels, Giuliani has combined his roles as businessman, security consultant, political fixer, and the president’s personal attorney into a mishmash of overlapping identities. He has, in other words, become a kind of walking, talking conflict-of-interest machine.

Before zeroing in on Ukraine, however, let’s consider just a few of Giuliani’s other foreign ventures. Since leaving office as New York’s mayor, through Giuliani Partners, the Bracewell & Giuliani law partnership, and (after 2016) the giant law firm of Greenberg Traurig, along with Giuliani Security & Safety and Giuliani Capital Advisers, the former mayor has pulled in millions of dollars working on behalf of foreign clients, including highly controversial ones. Among those deals, contracts, and maneuvers, before and after Trump became president and hired his old friend Rudy to serve as his personal attorney in 2018, Giuliani has been involved in a far-flung series of deals: he’s been a paid lobbyist in Romania; had a cybersecurity contract inQatar; had deals in Colombia, Argentina, and El Salvador; worked shadow diplomacy (with a business angle) with Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro; operated in Japan, Serbia, and Guatemala; and that only begins to tell the story.

Consider Turkey, starting in 2017. Back then, when Lieutenant General Michael Flynn was forced to resign after just a few weeks as national security advisor, it turned out that he had quietly (and without reporting it) been working on behalf of Turkey’s autocratic government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, during the 2016 election campaign. Erdogan was disturbed by the presence of a dissident, Fethullah Gulen, in the United States. As an unregistered advocate for Turkey, Flynn lobbied in 2016 to have the United States expel Gulen and send him back to Turkey. Early the next year, Flynn was gone, but no fear, Rudy Giuliani promptly took up the same cause. He began urging President Trump to extradite Gulen to Turkey, where Erdogan was accusing him of having plotted an attempted coup d’état. (In the end, Gulen wasn’t expelled.)

Given Giuliani’s ability to mix policy with business, you won’t be surprised to learn that he was also enmeshed in more lucrative efforts in Turkey. At around the same time, he waslobbying Trump to endorse a prisoner swap involving one of his clients, an Iranian-born Turkish gold trader named Reza Zarrab whom the FBI had arrested in 2016 on charges ofmoney launderingand trying to do an end run around economic sanctions on Iran. According to the New York Times, Zarrab had been working with Halkbank, a major Turkish bank with close ties to Turkish Finance Minister Berat Albayrak who is also President Erdogan’s son-in-law, to “funnel more than $10 billion in gold and cash to Iran.”

At first blush, it might seem odd for Giuliani to offer his services on behalf of an Iranian expat accused of trying to break U.S. sanctions whose family, it turned out, had close ties to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Curious, yes, but for Giuliani, business is business and there were bucks to be made. That he would use his connections to the Oval Office in an ultimately unsuccessful appeal for his client is even odder, given that Giuliani is otherwise a militant hardliner when it comes to demanding the overthrow of the Iranian government.

Case in point: his long-time affiliation with the People’s Jihadists, otherwise known as the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq, or MEK. Like many of Giuliani’s escapades abroad, his efforts with MEK were a money-making project.Along with John Bolton, the late Senator John McCain, former National Security Advisor Jim Jones, and former Attorney General Mike Mukasey, Giuliani has for years been affiliated with the MEK, making perhaps a dozen appearances, mostly paid speeches, at its conventions and rallies.

The MEK has almost no support inside Iran, not only because it’s conducted a terror campaign against that country’s top officials since 1981, but because it operated with the backing of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein during and after the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. It’s also widely regarded as a cult. Last year, in the midst of his anti-Joe Biden skullduggery in Ukraine, in his 11th appearance at an MEK confab, Giuliani traveled to Albania, of all places, where the group has established a military and political base. There, he called Trump “heroic” for “doing away with the reckless nuclear agreement and putting [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] on the terrorist list.”

In 2018, this reporter attended one of the MEK’s large-scale events, held at a hotel in midtown New York City. General Jim Jones, who became an ultra-hawk after being ousted as President Obama’s national security advisor in 2010, spoke to the gathering first, noting proudly that he is supposedly on a list of people the government in Tehran plans to assassinate.

Rising to speak after Jones, Giuliani seemed jealous. “I hope I say enough offensive things that they’ll put me on that list to kill me,” he commented. Needless to say, both Jones and Giuliani are still alive and kicking, and there’s no evidence that either one is on any Iranian kill list. However, thanks in part to Giuliani’s hardline, anti-Iran advice to the president, that country’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, was indeed placed on a presidential kill list and drone assassinated as 2020 began.

And Then There Was Ukraine

It was, of course, in connection with Ukraine that Giuliani’s freelancing came to the world’s attention. In the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s impeachment report, his name is mentioned about 160 times. He’s cited, first and foremost because, in that infamous “perfect” July 2019 phone call of his, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work through him; because the former mayor was the primary organizer of the smear campaign against the actual ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was subsequently fired; and because it was he who, starting as early as May 2019, masterminded a months-long political witch hunt against the Bidens, demanding over and over that Ukraine carry out an ersatz investigation of the man the president then expected to be his chief 2020 election opponent.

Numerous figures, including Ambassador Bill Taylor, who succeeded Yovanovitch at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, would express dismay over Giuliani’s role as the “irregular” channel for the Trump administration’s Ukraine policy — the “Giuliani factor,” as Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker called it. The story of how all this led to the president’s impeachment is too well known to be rehashed here.

The Joe Biden/Hunter Biden part of the Ukraine story was straightforward enough in its own way. Far more complicated and troubling was the adherence of the president and Giuliani to a weird conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, used its intelligence service to try to sway the 2016 election. According to various official reports and in the opinion of virtually every expert who’s studied the matter, it was Russia that intervened to boost Trump’s election campaign. According to Trump and Giuliani, however, Ukraine meddled in 2016 on behalf of Hillary Clinton and indeed, they argue, the actual Democratic National Committee server somehow found its way to Kyiv, thanks to a computer security firm called CrowdStrike, which Trump claimed was owned by a wealthy Ukrainian. (It is not.)

Naturally enough, this Trump-Giuliani theory was nonsense, but according to the Washington Post, it had its origins — perhaps not surprisingly — in propaganda generated in Moscow. The Post reported that Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and Manafort’s partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, “played a role in convincing Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, despite what both Mueller and the U.S. intelligence community have concluded, and that it was actually Ukraine.”

According to Rick Gates, Manafort’s deputy, the Ukraine conspiracy theory originated with his boss who “parroted” the line from Kilimnik. And both Manafort and Kilimnik — who was indicted by Mueller — had ties to Moscow operatives and pro-Russian forces in Ukraine, while Kilimnik himself was identified by Mueller and the FBI as part of Russia’s GRU.

As the Post concluded: “So we have two men [Manafort and Flynn] who have been convicted of offenses related to their Russia ties, have both lied to investigators about their interactions with Russian interests, and who apparently played a significant role in pushing a theory to Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016 election. They instead pointed the finger at Russia’s nemesis, Ukraine, and that has apparently stuck with Trump for more than three years.”

And it was that line that would be spread eagerly by pro-Trump writers like the Hill’s John Solomon. In a review of Solomon’s pieces, released this month, the Hill’s editors analyzed 14 of his columns with titles like “As Russian collusion fades, Ukraine plot to help Clinton emerges.” In doing so, they found numerous troubling facts about Solomon, his sources, and his overall reporting. As the Hill report put it:

“Giuliani has indicated he was a key source of information for Solomon on Ukraine, telling the New York Times in November 2019 that he turned over information about the Bidens earlier in the year to Solomon. ‘I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon,’ Giuliani said.

“The former New York City mayor later told the New Yorker he encouraged Solomon to highlight information on the Bidens and Yovanovitch, stating, ‘I said, “John, let’s make this as prominent as possible,”’ adding, “‘I’ll go on TV. You go on TV. You do columns.’”

Two colorful characters who acted as Giuliani’s Ukraine go-betweens, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, have been indicted on conspiracy chargesand, according to Fortune, Giuliani, too, could be indicted in that case. As CNN noted in January, it’s nearly unheard of for a U.S. Attorney’s office — in this case the one for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) — to end up indicting a former U.S. attorney who led the same district. CNN added: “The SDNY community has watched in disbelief as Giuliani continues to seek the spotlight even as the investigation has unfolded and expanded into new fronts on a nearly weekly basis. The impeachment inquiry has also unleashed new evidence regarding his role performing shadow diplomacy on behalf of President Donald Trump as recently as [mid-January].”

Indeed, Giuliani is still at it. In concert with a collection of corrupt ex-prosecutors in Ukraine and in his ongoing role as shadow secretary of state-cum-intelligence chief, Giuliani is still gathering conspiracy-riddled information on the Bidens in Kyiv — and Attorney General William Barr has obligingly created an “intake process in the field” to absorb Giuliani’s work product straight into the Department of Justice. One thing is guaranteed: “Secretary of State” Giuliani will have a clear field in Kyiv, since Ambassador Taylor was unceremoniously fired on January 1st of this year.

Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist and TomDispatch regular, is a contributing editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

cozy up top dic, ~ trudeau macron

Trump held undisclosed meeting with Turkey’s dictator Erdoğan at NATO

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement December 4, 2019

Not the first time a foreign power has been the first to reveal Trump met with their top leaders.

trump and Turkey: Is a grand bargain in the making?

M.K. Bhadrakumar / Independent Media Institute

econ update wolff 8/31

big overinvest in real estate, dump Lira, death spiral?

turk secret police beat up ppl in am; army beats kurd womaN SOLdier who beat isis to death DN 11/4/19

overview 1019 AN

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/how-turkey-scored-the-trumps-green-light-to-occupy-a-massive-region-in-syria/

Humanitarian catastrophe’: Civilians flee as Turkey launches military assault on Kurds in Syria

Jake Johnson / Common DreamsOctober 9, 2019

A spokesman for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) accused Turkish forces of deliberately targeting “civilian areas.”

Turkey has issued over 1,100 arrest warrants to people with suspected ties to exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen, whom the government blames for a failed coup in 2016. Since 2016, at least 77,000 people have been arrested and around 130,000 fired from government and public sector jobs such as teaching, in a purge by the Turkish government.

Turkey Issues 1,100 Arrest Warrants in Opposition Crackdown

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/activist-arrests-india-are-part-dangerous-global-trend-stifle-dissent

On Tuesday morning, the police from the Indian city of Pune (in the state of Maharashtra) raided the homes of lawyers and social activists across India and arrested five of them. Many of them are not household names around the world, since they are people who work silently on behalf of the poor and oppressed in a country where half the population does not eat sufficiently. Their names are Gautam Navlakha, Sudha Bharadwaj, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira and Varavara Rao. What unites these people is their commitment to the working class and peasantry, to those who are treated as marginal to India’s state. They are also united by their opposition, which they share with millions of Indians, to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Gautam Navlakha, a writer, was brought before the Delhi High Court. One of the two High Court judges—S. Muralidhar—was puzzled by the documents produced by the Pune Police. Some were in Marathi, which the judge could not read, while others seemed indecipherable. “It is not possible to make out a case from the documents placed before us,” he said. “What is the specific allegation against him?” the judge asked. The police remained silent. The others are to be moved to Pune. Their fate is uncertain.

SPONSORED

I heard the news in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I was—coincidentally—reading carefully the 1977 letter written by the writer and militant Rodolfo Walsh. Walsh’s Operation Massacre (1957) inaugurates a genre of writing now called “narrative non-fiction.” He went to Cuba in the early years of the revolution and cracked the CIA code that warned the revolutionary Cuban government about the Bay of Pigs invasion. Returning to Argentina, Walsh became part of an organization—Montoneros—that fought against the drift of his country into the arms of the ruthless military dictatorship that began in 1976. On the first anniversary of the dictatorship, Walsh mailed several copies of his letter—an open letter—that detailed the “raw numbers of this terror,” the arrests and detentions, the vanished militants of the trade union and student movement, the gasping for air of his society. “You have arrived at a form of absolute, metaphysical torture, unbounded by time,” wrote Walsh in the letter that sealed his fate. He was arrested and vanished—his body burned and thrown into a river in Buenos Aires.

What befell Rodolfo Walsh is the fate of too many today—in plain sight.

The “raw numbers of this terror” are best counted from Turkey. Since the failed coup of July 15, 2016, the government has arrested, detained or dismissed about 160,000 government officials, dismissing 12,000 Kurdish teachers, destroying the livelihood of thousands of people. The editor of Cumhuriyet, Can Dündar, called this the “biggest witch-hunt in Turkey’s history.” In the name of the war on terror and in the name of sedition, the government has arrested and intimidated its political opponents. The normality of this is astounding—leaders of the opposition HDP party remain in prison on the flimsiest of charges, with little international condemnation. They suffer a fate comparable to Brazil’s Lula, also incarcerated with no evidence.

Governments do not typically like dissent. InBangladesh, the photographer Shahidul Alam remains in detention for his views on the massive protests in Dhaka for traffic reform and against government corruption. Condemnation of the arrest has come from all quarters, including a British Member of Parliament—Tulip Siddiq—who is the niece of Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The avalanche of criticism has not moved the government. Alam is accused of inciting violence, a charge that is equal parts of ridiculous and absurd.

Incitement to violence is a common charge. It is what has taken the Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour to an Israeli prison. Tatour’s poem, “Resist, my people, resist them” (Qawim ya sha’abi, qawimhum), was the reason given by the Israeli government to lock her up. The Egyptian government has taken in the poet Galal El-Behairy for the lyrics he wrote for the song “Balaha”—the name a reference to a character in a 1980s film who sees the world in a topsy-turvy manner, a name now used colloquially in Egypt for President Sisi. The Ugandan government has arrested the radio show host Samuel Kyambadde, who merely allowed his talk show to become a forum for a conversation that included items labeled by the government as seditious—such as the arrest of journalists and the arrest of the opposition MP Robert Kyagulanyi (also known as Bobi Wine).

All of them—photographers, poets, radio show hosts—are treated as voices of sedition, dangerous people who can be locked up under regulations that would make any fair-minded person wince. But there is not even any public debate in most of our societies about such measures, no genuine discussion about the slide into the worst kind of authoritarianism, little public outcry.

Pain shudders through the arteries of Indian society. The rule of the current government has hardened society, allowed people of ferocious hatred to walk the streets and deliver the justice that they think is appropriate. These vigilantes believe that they can kill anyone who they think threatens cows or that they can kill anyone they dislike (Muslims, oppressed castes, leftists). These are assassinations of ordinary people—people whose names are flashed across the screen for a day or so and then forgotten as other names of other people who have been murdered arrive. Some of them are killed for their social background, others for their political commitments.

Four writers and activists—Gauri Lankesh, M.M. Kalburgi, Govind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar—had been killed in sequence.

...

jailing jrnl

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/12/29/as_trump_attacks_media_with_fake

Committee to Protect Journalists has published its 25th annual survey of journalists killed and jailed around the world. This year, the list of those killed included 42 journalists and four media workers. A record 262 journalists were imprisoned around the world, with Turkey, China and Egypt topping the list for the second year in a row. Mexico reached an historic high in journalists killed this year, and the country leads the world in journalists killed in a non-conflict zone. This comes as President Donald Trump has waged a relentless campaign to discredit journalists in the United States, often with rhetoric that could potentially incite his followers to violence. We speak with María Salazar-Ferro, the director of the Emergencies Department of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

http://www.alternet.org/world/draining-swamp-turkish-money-and-influences

Turkey has mastered the art of buying influence in Washington. It pays expensive consulting contracts to lobbyists for “strategic consulting services in connection with political and public policy issues before the United States Government impacting the Republic of Turkey’s interests.” Turkey also makes major gifts to think-tanks, which act like lobbyists, circumventing the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Fourteen U.S. firms and individuals have filed documents with the Department of Justice disclosing their work as agents of the Republic of Turkey, its embassy, or its Ministry of National Defense. These firms have ties to former politicians on both sides of the aisle.

HalkBank, a state-owned Turkish bank, recently hired former Congressman Bob Wexler and Ballard Partners for $375,000 each quarter. Mehmet Hakan Atilla, Halkbank’s deputy general manager, has been charged by the Justice Department for conspiring to evade sanctions on Iran.

The Gephardt Group, founded by former House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt was hired by Turkey from February of 2016 through December of 2016 for $1.7 million. The Gephardt Group sub-contracted Capitol Counsel LLC, led by former Republican Congressman Jim McCrery, for $32,000 a month. The Gephardt Group also sub-contracted Greenberg Traurig LLP, where Rudy Giuliani works, for $40,000 each month.

Greenberg Traurig subcontracted the Daschle Group, founded by former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. The Daschle Group was to receive $432,000 in 2017.

Turkey and its embassy hired Amsterdam & Partners LLC for $50,000 each month, which subcontracted Mercury, which receives $20,000 each month. Paul Manafort was employed by Mercury.

The Flynn Intel Group, run by General Michael Flynn, was paid $530,000 by Turkish concerns to advance Turkey’s national security interests.

In May, Burson-Marsteller signed a contract with the Turkish Embassy for $1.1 million. Capitol Counsel gets $32,000 each month; Madison Group $20,000 each month; McBee Signal $20,000 each month; Jim Arnold $20,000 each month; MediaFix gets $9,000 each month. Turkey also paid APCO Associates $741,000 in 2016.

Think tanks are also cashing in. The Brookings Institution received multi-year six-figure gifts from the Turkish Industry and Business Association (TUSIAD), a progressive trade promotion agency traditionally tied to Turkey’s secular establishment.

The Atlantic Council of the United States has also benefited from Turkish largess. According to its web site, the Atlantic Council received gifts from the Turkish government and other Turkish sources beholden to the Turkish government in FY 2015:

Turkish Ministry of Energy & National Resources ($250,000-$999,999)
Türkiye Halk Bankası A.S. ($100,000-$249,000)
Türkerler İnşaat ($50,000-$99,000)
SOCAR Turkey Enerji A.Ş ($25,000-$49,999)

In 2013, the Atlantic Council released a list of “foreign government entities” that have given funds over the previous five years. The list includes Turkish concerns (without amounts):

Petroleum Pipeline Corporation (BOTAS) (Turkey)
Istanbul Natural Gas Distribution Company (IGDAS) (Turkey)
Turkey Army College
The Electricity Generation Company (EUAS) (Turkey)
Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO) (Turkey)

Turkish sources do not give money to be nice. Funds support the Atlantic Council’s annual regional energy and economy conference in Istanbul, and office operations.

Al-Monitor reported on the Atlantic Council’s participation in the visit of Erdogan to Washington in May 2017, DC. “Atlantic Council leadership is enthusiastically pursuing its relations with Erdogan and reportedly drew up a detailed memo for him offering advice on how to handle his meeting with Trump.”

While the Atlantic Council was inside the residence providing a forum for Erdogan on May 17, U.S. citizens were outside being beaten up by Erdogan’s security guard. Nineteen members of Erdogan’s security detail have been indicted by a grand jury.The Atlantic Council arranged a forum at the Turkish Ambassador’s residence for Erdogan to pitch Washington luminaries such as Madeline Albright, William Cohen, and David Petraeus. Erdogan asked for help getting the U.S. to suspend military assistance to Syrian Kurds. He also demanded the extradition of Fethullah Gulen.

An Atlantic Council employee testified at a hearing of the Europe Sub-committee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in April 2017. Witnesses are required to submit a “truth in testimony” disclosure form. Question 5 asks: “Since January 1, 2013, have you or your organization(s) received any contract or payment originating with a foreign government related to the subject of the hearing or your representational capacity at the hearing?”

The Atlantic Council’s 990 Form submitted to the Internal Revenue Service indicates that Turkey, Azerbaijan and other governments are financiers. The Congressional Research Service should do an analysis of money flowing to think-tanks, including where the money comes from, for what purpose it is given, and whether think-tanks are functioning like lobbyists. If so, their 501(C)3 tax-deductible status should be revoked.

In addition to the law, there are ethical issues. Turkey just signed a contract for $2.6 billion to buy S-400 missiles from Russia. Turkey’s President Erdogan is increasingly authoritarian, stealing elections and jailing opponents. In the Turkey case, think-tanks taking money from Turkish sources are abetting an anti-American and anti-NATO agenda.

Contractors and think-tanks pocket huge sums from Turkey. Time to spotlight Turkey’s investment in their activities.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/06/turkey-lobbying-texas/

There isn’t much Turkey wouldn’t do to go after Fethullah Gulen, the controversial cleric Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan blames for a failed coup in 2016.

Last fall, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Turkish officials reportedly considered going beyond trying to convince the U.S. to extradite Gulen, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania: They discussed “a covert step in the dead of night to whisk this guy away,” James Woolsey, a Flynn Intel Group board member and former CIA director, told the Wall Street Journal.

But the plot gets as granular as agents lobbying Texas legislators to pass bills forcing charter schools in the state to be more transparent, according to a Justice Department filing from the end of May.

Why Texas? That’s where Harmony Public Schools is headquartered, a charter school system that Turkey alleges is a cog in a vast network tied to the controversial cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Harmony has denied the claim, but a number of individuals associated with the schools are followers of Gulen. And they’re quite active in politics: A CRP analysis found that 20 Harmony employees or vendors donated more than $350,000 at the federal level in the last three elections, $255,000 of which went to liberals. This group gave more than $110,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, $50,000 to former President Obama’s joint fundraising committee and $42,000 to Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas). They also contributed to state politicians.

Last July, the Turkish government filed a complaint with the Texas Education Agency, alleging Harmony abused public money, used discriminatory hiring practices and favored certain vendors in violation of competitive bidding rules. The agency dismissed the complaint in October, saying it didn’t warrant an investigation.

Reports indicate that some Gulen-connected schools, including some in Ohio, are under FBI investigation, though the scope of the investigation is unclear.

Amsterdam & Partners, which was hired to file the complaint, subcontracted the legislative angle to Arnold Public Affairs, the firm listed on the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act filing. Arnold Public Affairs was hired last April on a $20,000 monthly contract, which dropped to $15,000 in January.

According to principal Jim Arnold, his firm is promoting legislation that would require charter school meetings to be streamed and posted online, as well as to disclose additional information about their business transactions in their annual financial reports. The firm met with lawmakers, widely circulated a derogatory media story to them and their staffs and filed cards of support, meaning they publicly endorsed the legislation.

“Transparency is good, whether for public schools and charter schools, and there isn’t much transparency in the business that Harmony conducts,” Arnold said. “That was the purpose of these bills. Anything we can do to shed some light on the interconnected network and transactions… Harmony is the largest charter school network in Texas and is connected to Gulen.”

Harmony Public Schools did not return multiple calls seeking comment.

Neither bill made it to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk. Texas’ legislative session is over, but the firm is working with legislators to try to tack some parts of the bills onto other measures as amendments before June 18, the deadline for the governor to sign or veto a bill.

But the association representing 90 percent of Texas charter schools, including Harmony, says reporting requirements are already stringent

...

In Turkey, Erdogan’s harsh repression of ethnic and political enemies has essentially sunk his bid for entry into the European Union, plunged him into an unwinnable war with Kurdish rebels, and complicated his alliance with the United States against Islamic fundamentalism -- all potential barriers to his successful bid for unchecked power.

cap:

A little more than a decade ago, the Turkish Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and its main protagonist, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, celebrated a historic electoral victory. Founded in 2001, the AKP mobilized a broad alliance—consisting of religious and social conservatives, members of the newly emergent Anatolian middle class, and liberal Turks frustrated with the coalition government of the democratic left and establishment nationalists—to become the country’s first and only popular, broad-based national party.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s biography exemplified the transformation within Turkish society that underpinned this political shift. Erdoğan immigrated to fast-growing Istanbul at the age of 13 from a rural province on Turkey’s Black Sea coast. He later built a political career by connecting with underprivileged, rural, and religious Turks, who had been largely ignored by the traditional Turkish political elite.

After its watershed victory in the 2002 elections, the AKP—with Prime Minister Erdoğan at the helm—oversaw a decade of strong economic growth, began important reforms to move Turkey toward EU membership, and softened the Turkish state’s traditionally harsh stance toward religious and ethnic minority groups. Alongside its broad popular support, the AKP built a potent political machine based on awarding patronage and government contracts to business leaders in exchange for financial support and positive coverage from media arms affiliated with those business leaders. Building upon their economic record and the support of religious and socially conservative Turks and powerful Anatolian business interests, the AKP secured additional decisive electoral victories in 2007 and 2011.

A crucial test

Turkey will head to the polls on March 30 for key local elections for the first time since 2009. While voters will choose members of provincial and municipal councils, as well as mayors, across the country, control of Istanbul—home to nearly 20 percent of the Turkish population and the launch pad for Prime Minister Erdoğan’s own political career—is the real prize. Control of the capital, Ankara, is also at stake, and the result there will help shape the political narrative following the elections, although to a lesser extent than Istanbul. Additionally, even though these local elections are ostensibly supposed to address local concerns, the major political parties and most political observers are framing the vote as a referendum on the rule of Prime Minster Erdoğan and the AKP. The percentage of votes earned by each party nationwide will carry great political weight, helping define the popular will in advance of Turkey’s first-ever direct presidential election in August 2014.

These elections are a crucial test of Prime Minister Erdoğan’s legitimacy, which has been eroded by years of suppression of dissent and revelations of corruption within his party. It will be the first opportunity for Turkish voters to express their opinions in the wake of a series of political upheavals and scandals that have considerably weakened the AKP’s brand. Turkey was rocked by the Gezi Park protests and subsequent police crackdown on protesters and critical media voices in May 2013. The draconian tactics employed by the police and the divisive rhetoric used by the prime minister in response to the protests alienated many urban and middle-class Turks. Then, a series of corruption investigations into the prime minister’s close associates were made public in December following pre-dawn raids on several AKP stalwarts. Widespread media coverage of the cases has been stoked by regularly leaked recordings of the prime minister and his confidantes discussing bribes, kickbacks, and the use of the judiciary to punish political rivals.

The AKP says the investigations are politically motivated—orchestrated by exiled religious leader Fethullah Gülen’s followers in the police and the judiciary, referred to as Gülenists—and denounces the cases as an attempted coup. The public falling out between former allies of the AKP and supporters of the prime minister has shattered the party’s conservative coalition and threatens its decade-long hegemony. This challenge has prompted a strong backlash from the prime minister’s supporters inside and outside of government, including the passage of controversial laws granting greater parliamentary authority over the appointment of judges and prosecutors and a new law tightening government control over the Internet.

In short, the elections will demonstrate the extent to which Turkish voters have turned on the prime minister in light of his autocratic tendencies and charges of widespread corruption. Observers in Washington and European capitals will be watching the polls closely, as the result will likely shape Prime Minister Erdoğan’s course on a range of important issues surrounding the rule of law, freedom of the press, and the Kurdish peace process.

Off the rails

The past two years have shown that the great political strengths that gave the prime minister such staying power—his populism and the AKP’s patronage system—have become liabilities. Since assuming power in 2003, Erdoğan has shown himself capable of speaking directly to his supporters, bypassing the elite-led party structures that had traditionally dominated Turkish politics. He initially used this approach to mobilize support for initiatives, including democratic reforms aimed at EU membership and the extension of important rights to Kurdish and other minorities. In addition, his party delivered significant improvements in economic standards and important initiatives to broaden access to health care.

Alongside these tangible efforts, the prime minister championed popular initiatives designed to mobilize his conservative and pious base, such as fighting to remove the ban on headscarves for women in public education and government offices and picking diplomatic fights with Israel. But after more than one decade in power, he has largely exhausted the populist policy initiatives that are available to him—and that the Turkish state can afford. Meanwhile, a worsening macroeconomic environment characterized by softening stimulus from the U.S. Federal Reserve and a $64 billion account deficit has brought greater scrutiny to the AKP’s economic record.

Over the past three years, the prime minister has relied on ever more divisive and controversial refrains to whip up support. Erdoğan’s rhetoric has turned increasingly exclusive and hostile, focused on demonizing his opponents rather than promoting unity. The abuse of the patronage system after a decade in power contributed to the political rift with the Gülenists and the corruption allegations that now threaten his rule, prompting further angry outbursts from the prime minister.

The AKP’s efforts to control criticism by exerting control of the media through economic and political pressure on journalists and owners have further alienated liberal Turks who were initially sympathetic to the party’s pro-EU stance and have exacerbated concerns about the prime minister’s authoritarian turn. Erdoğan has become increasingly paranoid and hostile in the face of legitimate criticism, and he and his inner circle have sought scapegoats, concocting elaborate conspiracy theories with enemies including the airline Lufthansa, the Financial Times,the Jews,telekinesis, and the Queen of England, to name just a few.

This paranoia and desperation is, at least in part, the result of the prime minister’s failure to embrace institutional reform and respect the rule of law.He has demonstrated that he believes the ballot box to be the sole source and arbiter of legitimacy, dismissing criticism of corruption or judicial malpractice and claiming the people—“his people”—will decide what is acceptable. This formulation has further undermined the already fragile and poorly functioning judicial system and the free press. Additionally, while Erdoğan’s combative democratic approach might be defensible if he had triumphed in a free market of ideas, he and his allies have used extrajudicial means to silence critics and hamstring the press—retaliating against journalists, Kurdish activists, protestors, scholars, and former allies in the conservative Gülen movement. Because he relies entirely on the ballot box and controlling the narrative, Prime Minister Erdoğan cannot permit a countervailing narrative that might challenge his conversation with his constituents.

The stakes

The AKP’s conspiracy theories have made the new Turkey look very similar to the old Turkey. Certain institutions within the Turkish state structure—such as the Turkish National Police, the Gendarmerie, the National Intelligence Organization, the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors, and the military’s General Staff—have long been distinct seats of power and often acted at cross-purposes. As a result, changing political circumstances can dramatically alter the application of the law.

The recent corruption investigations should be partly seen in this light: Prime Minister Erdoğan and his supporters are struggling with conservative opponents for control of the state structure. While this is not a new phenomenon in Turkish politics, the de facto suspension of the rule of law and the politically motivated reassignment of thousands of police officers and prosecutors has shocked a country that has long lacked institutional checks and balances. The current consolidation of the conservative political camp—played out in part within the state structure—comes at great cost for Turkish society and institutional development, and the country might face a prolonged and chaotic transition period.

Meanwhile, Trump — like Lincoln and FDR — is now also a leader of a worldwide movement: the populist nationalism that already rules Russia and Turkey, contributed to the Brexit vote in Britain, and will soon be tested in France and Germany.Since then, it has become even clearer that Bannon sees this moment as a crisis of the sort Strauss and Howe described. “What we are witnessing now,” he wrote this week in an email to the Washington Post dealing with the outcry against the immigration order, “is the birth of a new political order, and the more frantic a handful of media elites become, the more powerful that new political order becomes itself.”

Turkey's Free Press Withers as Erdogan Jails 120 Journalists - The ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/world/europe/**turkey**-**press**-**erdogan**-coup.html

Nov 17, 2016 - Turkey's Free Press Withers as Erdogan Jails 120 Journalists ... its supporters are behind a wave of demands to Twitter to remove offending posts, ... media activist named Cem Kucuk, anationalist who many journalists say is ...

Turkey's Gülen Movement: Between Social Activism and Politics ...

carnegieendowment.org/.../turkey-s-g-len-movement-between-social-activism-and-politi...

Oct 24, 2013 - Each brought different skills to the task—Erdoğan and his AKP colleagues ... He is also anationalist, seeking to boost Turkey's influence and ...

Turkey and the Road to Genocide | Jacobin

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/.../**turkey**-kurds-erdogan-armenia-genocide-hdp-p...

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:{Nov 23, 2016 - It was not so long ago that Turkish president Recep Tayyip :{Erdoğan:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: was ... question” — the conflict between :{Turkish nationalist:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: elites in Ankara and those ... father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was one of :{suppression:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and denial. ... a new generation of Kurdish intellectuals and :{activists:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: began to mobilize in a ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Behind the Kurdish Hunger Strike in Turkey | Middle East Research ...

www.merip.org/mero/mero110812

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Nov 8, 2012 - Yet others essentially have two choices: to press their demands peacefully, ... The Turkish government's decision to stop talking left the Kurdish side frustrated. ... statement and imprisoning Kurdish activists en masse, Erdoğan has ... itself to ride a wave of Turkish nationalism erupting in the country's west.