Courtesy of Mish.
Erdogan called the coup attempt a “Gift from God“.
It’s a gift to Erdogan and his thugs, no one else.
#Turkeycoup #eu No Optimism for Turkey in This Corner – Coup Attempt Guaranteed a Bad Outcome for Turkey, US, EU
— Mike Shedlock (@MishGEA) July 16, 2016
Coup Staged?
Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, in exile in the the US, told the Financial Times the coup may have been orchestrated by Erdogan.
Reader nodhannum previously commented “So there has been a fire at the Reichstag set by Der Fuhrer’s opponents, soon to be followed by The Night of The Long Knives … imagine that.”
Complicating matters for the US, Ergogan blames Gulen and seeks his extradition.
#eu #Turkeycoup US Drawn In: Erdogan calls on US to extradite Islamic cleric. What will he demand of Merkel?
— Mike Shedlock (@MishGEA) July 16, 2016
Those seeking more information about Gulen can do so at Acting Man’s excellent writeup from 2014: Bizarre Power Struggle in Turkey.
Turkey’s Erdogan Wins Local Election and Vows to Hunt Down ‘Traitors’
You have to give it to the Machiavellian Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan, so far, nothing seems able to shake his position. There has been an extremely damaging corruption scandal involving himself, his son and several prominent cabinet members and their families (inter alia, the scandal involved smuggling gold into Iran to help it circumvent sanctions, and everybody getting a big cut in the process).
This was followed by the recent revelation that the cabinet was pondering a false flag attack on the Tomb of Suleiman in Syria (or alternatively, firing missiles from Syrian territory into Turkey), so as to have a casus belli for military intervention in Syria.
In the course of these scandals, Erdogan brutally suppressed all opposition, banned both Twitter and You-tube in the country and let his police fight it out with protesters in the streets of Istanbul and other big cities. He also purged the judiciary and police, dismissing hundreds of judges and prosecutors in order to stop the investigations into his and his political allies’ corrupt dealings. Some of the purges were laughably transparent, such as the detective heading the corruption investigations in Izmir suddenly finding himself ‘promoted’ to head of Izmir’s traffic department, without explanation.
We previously wrote about Erdogan’s implementation of authoritarian ‘state security’ legislation, which inter alia purported to make “the internet more safe and free”. Safe, that is, from reporting on corruption in the ruling party.
The suppression of political dissent in Turkey hardly rates a peep from the Western political elites of course. Imagine if Russia’s president Putin had engaged in only a fraction of Erdogan’s antics – we wouldn’t stop hearing about it and he’d be buried in threats.
The Financial Times Live Blog reports
