A court in Istanbul has charged two journalists from the opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper with spying after they alleged Turkey\u2019s secret services had sent arms to Islamist rebels in Syria.<\/span>
<\/span>Can Dundar, the editor-in-chief, and Erdem Gul, the paper\u2019s Ankara bureau chief, are accused of spying and \u201cdivulging state secrets\u201d, Turkish media reported. Both men were placed in pre-trial detention.<\/span>
<\/span>According to Cumhuriyet, Turkish security forces in January 2014 intercepted a convoy of trucks near the Syrian border and discovered boxes of what the daily described as weapons and ammunition to be sent to rebels fighting against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.<\/span>
<\/span>It linked the seized trucks to the Turkish national intelligence organisation (MIT).<\/span>
<\/span>The revelations, published in May, caused a political storm in Turkey, and enraged president Recep Tayyip Erdogan who vowed Dundar would pay a \u201cheavy price\u201d.<\/span>
<\/span>He personally filed a criminal complaint against Dundar, 54, demanding he serve multiple life sentences.<\/span>
<\/span>Turkey has vehemently denied aiding Islamist rebels in Syria, such as the Islamic State group, although it wants to see Assad toppled.<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cDon\u2019t worry, this ruling is nothing but a badge of honour to us,\u201d Dundar told reporters and civil society representatives at the court before he was taken into custody.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nUnderstand, the very fact that they were charged with, “divulging state secrets” means constitutes an admission on the part of the Turks that they did<\/b> sent arms to ISIS.<\/p>\n
This is not a surprise.<\/p>\n
Erdogan is looking to establish an<\/b> Islamic state in Turkey, so it’s no surprise that he is supporting the<\/b> Islamic state in Syria.<\/p>\n
It does put that shoot-down of the Russian in perspective, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Journalists in Turkey uncovered arms shipments from the Turkish Military to ISIS\/ISIL\/Daesh\/Whatever. Of course, the response of Ankara was to charge those journalists with espionage and treason: A court in Istanbul has charged two journalists from the opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper with spying after they alleged Turkey\u2019s secret services had sent arms to Islamist rebels in …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[971,981,970,964,1129,972,1099,1021,980],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-rights","category-civil-war","category-corruption","category-foreign-relations","category-journalism","category-justice","category-near-east","category-religion","category-syria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182180"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}