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Police Force News Portal To Censor AK Party Graft Story

01.10.2014 10:04

E. BARIŞ ALTINTAŞThe online newspaper Karşı Gazete said police officers who came to its central office in İstanbul on Tuesday asked the editors to remove a news story published online regarding graft allegations against the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government.Prosecutors in December ordered police officers to make a number of detentions and arrests in relation to a corruption and bribery investigation that has implicated the AK Party government. Several businessmen close to the government as well as the sons of three ministers were detained on Dec. 17, but were later released when the government responded by carrying out purges in the police force and the judiciary. The prosecutors investigating alleged government graft also planned to detain many others on Dec. 25, but those detentions were stonewalled by a counter-move from the government, which removed many high-ranking police officers from their positions after Dec. 17. “Karşı Gazete is currently being raided by pol

E. BARIŞ ALTINTAŞ
The online newspaper Karşı Gazete said police officers who came to its central office in İstanbul on Tuesday asked the editors to remove a news story published online regarding graft allegations against the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government.
Prosecutors in December ordered police officers to make a number of detentions and arrests in relation to a corruption and bribery investigation that has implicated the AK Party government. Several businessmen close to the government as well as the sons of three ministers were detained on Dec. 17, but were later released when the government responded by carrying out purges in the police force and the judiciary. The prosecutors investigating alleged government graft also planned to detain many others on Dec. 25, but those detentions were stonewalled by a counter-move from the government, which removed many high-ranking police officers from their positions after Dec. 17.

“Karşı Gazete is currently being raided by police,” the news site said in a post published at noon on its website. “Police officers who came to the karsigazete.com central office in the morning asked us to remove a news item about the Dec. 25 bribery and corruption operation from our website. They said they will not leave until it is removed and also threatened us with shutting our website down if we refused to remove it. They have overtly forced us to censor a story, although they have not produced any court or prosecutor orders to show us.”

The online newspaper recalled an earlier scandal which showed that the AK Party government had installed what might be called a government commissioner on the board of the Habertürk daily and directly controlled that newspaper's editorial decisions. This is commonly called the “Hello
Fatih” phone line in Turkey, after the name of the appointed government representative.

The newspaper said the police officers had asked to remove a news story titled “We thought you had said those voice recordings were doctored.” It said the story, by Karşı Gazete correspondent Emre Erciş, had exposed details -- from a pro-government prosecutor's indictment against several police officers who participated in exposing alleged government corruption -- which proved that several voice recordings that were leaked earlier this year featuring the voice of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan allegedly managing and conducting unlawful business transactions were authentic.

Karşı Gazete called on the entire media to support the newspaper, saying, “We are resisting the police state.”

Although the police provided no court orders or search warrants, another independent news site, Grihat (Grey Line), reported that it had found out the İstanbul Chief Prosecutor's Office has launched an investigation into Grihat and Karşı Gazete. The two news portals are being accused of “violating the confidentiality of an ongoing investigation,” Grihat reported.
The İstanbul Criminal Court of Peace -- a new court introduced by the AK Party government after the corruption investigation as part of larger changes the government made to the judiciary in which some say is an attempt to hush up the corruption allegations -- has issued a search warrant for the two news sites' offices, Grihat said.
It also reported that the police officers at the Karşı Gazete office in Gayrettepe had a warrant to search the hard disks in the computers in the office. The National Police Department also made a statement confirming this.

But Karşı Gazete wasn't convinced of the police action's legality. Its reporter Emre Erciş, who penned the story the police wanted removed, asked on Twitter: “Is the warrant for that specific story?” He also tweeted: “They are not letting anyone do any work. They say remove the voice recording story and we'll leave.” Karşı also wrote that people who wanted to leave weren't allowed to leave.
Erciş told Today's Zaman late Tuesday afternoon that there indeed was a search warrant, but there was no mention of the article the police wanted removed. He also said the officers told Karşı staff in the morning: “We don't have much to do here; just take that story offline.” The police officers were still at the Karşı office in the late afternoon taking copies of the hard disks at the office. The news portal has made it clear that it has no intention of removing the story. Editor-in-Chief of Karşı Emrah Direk said: “We are used to this, we are OK. We will never give up on defending what we believe is right.”
A lawyer for Karşı said the police had come from the Counterterrorism Unit, and not from the Press Crimes Bureau.

Many journalists have reacted to the news. Yusuf Kanlı, head of the Press for Freedom of Journalists Association said in a statement he made for Today's Zaman: “Can there be any explanation to the police raiding a news office asking for the removal of a story? These are things that shouldn't happen in a democracy. Things like this happen when an atmosphere of fear spreads over a long time.” He said the raid demonstrates that “we are faced with a very serious situation,” adding that the police raiding a news office and violating fundamental freedoms is unacceptable.

“In a word it is a scandal,” Taraf daily's columnist Hayko Bağdat told Today's Zaman over the phone. “In a country where you speak of a prosecutor wondering ‘whose man' he is, or where you wonder whose people will win the HSYK elections, you cannot speak of law, justice or safety. Such a country is based on rules of the jungle, where the strongest is always right.”

Main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) deputy Mahmut Tanal described the police raids on Karşı newspaper as illegal and aimed to muzzle the press.

CHP Secretary-General Gürsel Tekin also made a statement, saying, “What's being done to Karşı is criminal abuse.”
The Turkish Journalists Association (TGC) condemned the raid and said journalists who uphold ethical principles cannot be intimidated by such displays of oppression.
On Tuesday, police raided the office of an online news portal, asking it to remove a report that claims voice recordings featuring the voice of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan suggest he was managing unlawful business deals.
On Sept. 2, Today's Zaman published a similar story titled “Erdoğan tapes not doctored, daily claims.” Below is a reprint of the same article:
The interrogations of the police officers detained in the latest wave in a series of raids on officers accused of plotting to overthrow the government have revealed that audio recordings purportedly of now-President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that were released surrounding graft probes made public on Dec. 17 and Dec. 25, 2013, are authentic and not doctored, as has been claimed by Erdoğan and his aides.
A news report in the Karşı daily on Tuesday written by Emre Erciş said the police gave the detained officers' lawyers compact discs containing evidence to use while preparing their defense, and that the discs had over 300 minutes of conversations in which Erdoğan participated. The records were included in a file named “Legislative Immunity.”
Erdoğan's telephone was not wiretapped in any of these recordings, but he was an interlocutor in conversations with individuals who were under surveillance as part of the Dec. 17 and Dec. 25 investigations.
Prosecutors say the investigations of the police were launched after allegations of spying and illegal wiretapping surfaced, but the operations are widely believed to be an act of government revenge for the Dec. 17 and 25 corruption and bribery operations, and are seen as targeting the Hizmet movement. A volunteer-based education movement with several million followers, the Hizmet movement has sympathizers in all segments of society, including the police force and the judiciary. Cornered by assertions of corruption, the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) averted the accusations by claiming that Hizmet was the backstage perpetrator of a coup against the government through Hizmet-affiliated prosecutors. The probes, which were made public with early morning raids on Dec. 17 and 25, were stifled by the government through mass demotions and reshuffling in the police and the judiciary. The waves of detentions since July 22 have been perceived by the public as the government taking revenge by mobilizing the prosecutors and judges who have been accused to adopt the government's political stance.
In some of the documents published by Karşı, Erdoğan is talking on the phone with Yasin al-Qadi, a Saudi Arabian businessman who is on the US Treasury Department's “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” list, as well as with former İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality Secretary-General Adem Baştürk and Mehmet Fatih Saraç, an executive at the Habertürk daily and TV station. The conversations date back to 2012. (Cihan/Today’s Zaman)



 
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