Turkey’s fraudulent coup prosecutions

It’s become standard practice in Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey: Expose fanciful coup plots — Ergenekon, Balyoz, and perhaps even July 15 — and then falsify evidence to back up the claims.

In July 2008, for example, Erdogan’s government issued 2,455-page indictment detailing an alleged plot to overthrow Erdogan by an elaborate network of retired military officers, journalists, academics, businessmen, and secularists. The government’s security forces (as the time aided if not dominated by acolytes of Fethullah Gülen) hauled most off to prison.

The Balyoz (“Sledgehammer”) plot was even more ridiculous. Harvard University’s Dani Rodrik, the son-in-law of a prominent general victimized by false accusations, wrote an excellent paper pointing out fatal flaws in the prosecution’s case. In essence they argued that the Sledgehammer documents planning and outlining the elaborate plot were prepared using Office 2007, never mind that that version of Microsoft software didn’t exist at the time when the documents were allegedly written.

Now, the same thing is happening with regard to last summer’s supposed coup attempt. Last week, I outlined several inconsistencies. One more has now surfaced involving the indictment against prominent journalist Ahmet Altan who was arrested for allegedly sending subliminal messages to the coup plotters. Page 125 of his indictment reports the confession of a man who recognized various cadets and officers from their military academy yearbook.

Now, the class in question was 1994. Here’s the problem: The military academy’s class of 1994 did not have a yearbook/graduation album because the owner of the company printing the album absconded with the cadets’ money and never published a yearbook. This means, frankly, that the identification of officers supposedly involved is based on a provable lie.

History will show that the accusations behind Turkey’s mass-imprisonments following what increasingly appears to be a “Reichstag Fire” coup are no more based on reality than those of Ergenekon and Balyoz, but rather are based on fraud. Each originated from the fevered and paranoid minds of Erdogan and his chief aides and enablers. It is time to take all accusations by Erdogan and the judiciary — which, post-referendum, he will control outright — with a grain of salt.

Michael Rubin, American Enterprise Institute