Dec 2, 2013

The rift between Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the prestigious Fethullah Gulen religious movement hit the surface last week. On Nov. 28, Mehmet Baransu of Taraf published a copy of a National Security Council (NSC) advisory ruling under the headline: “Measures needed to be taken to counter activities by the Fethullah Gulen group.”

In January 2010, Baransu broke news that played a pivotal role in ending the military’s tutelage over civilian politics, which terminated in a long, complicated trial process, sending hundreds of retired and current military personnel behind bars for an attempted coup in 2002-2003 that never took place. A week before Baransu published his 2010 article, an unnamed source delivered him a suitcase containing 5,000 pages of scanned documents, CDs of slides and 48 hours of audio recordings, which established the basis for the prosecutor’s case. The accused military personnel contested the authenticity of all the digital evidence in the court case — commonly known as the Ergenekon trials — to no avail. Baransu now says he has received yet another suitcase full of documents, and that he would be carefully going through them, implying that there may be new top-level classified material to be revealed in the coming days. The NSC document, he says,  appeared as an obvious news bite at first sight. This is what he reported: