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Inside Turkey's wiretapped world

A firsthand account of just one of the many wiretapping cases that are happening in Turkey, where government corruption and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's obsession with the Gulen community is the primary cause of a massive abuse of public authority.
A demonstrator hold pictures of Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen (R), during a protest against Turkey's ruling AK Party (AKP), demanding the resignation of Erdogan, in Istanbul December 30, 2013. Erdogan swore on Sunday he would survive a corruption crisis circling his cabinet, saying those seeking his overthrow would fail just like mass anti-government protests last summer. Gulen denies involvement in stirring up the graft case, but he regularly censures Erdogan, a
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Are a conversation with a journalistic source, a phone call in which one is mentioned as “Turkish foreign policy expert” and an invitation for a Ramadan fast-breaking dinner sufficient grounds to be probed for belonging to a terrorist organization? Not in a normal judicial system. In Turkey’s highly politicized judicial system, however, they are.

A scandalous probe into a group linked to gruesome murders committed to foment conflict between secular and religious Turks back in the 1990s comes as the latest episode in the war between the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the religious community of Fethullah Gulen. This episode, however, has a slightly personal aspect for me.

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