[Emirates 24/7] A Turkish court ordered a general, an admiral and two colonels held in jug for an alleged coup plot which has already seen dozens of top officers placed in durance vile, Anatolia news agency said on Saturday.It said the four serving officers are suspected of involvement in the plot dubbed Operation Sledgehammer against the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
More than 200 active or reserve officers of all three services, including some 10 percent of the country's generals and admirals, are being prosecuted for the plot which the defendants say is a fiction to discredit the once-powerful military.
| That war against Israel is going to be more of a romp than usual, at the rate PM Erdogan is depopulating his senior officer corps. Wouldn't it be fun if the Jews were the next owners of the Hagia Sophia? |
| The Orthodox Christians would like dibs on the mosaic icons, please. |
| No doubt Israel would handle it as they do in Israel proper, turning ownership and management over to the local authorities of the appropriate faith. |
| I realize it's been a while, but may we put the name 'Byzantium' back on the map? |
Prosecutors say the plotters planned to bomb mosques and down a Turkish jet over the Aegean and blame it on Greece, hoping to discredit the government and garner public support for a coup.
The alleged plot leader, retired general Cetin Dogan, has said that papers from a seminar on a contingency plan based on a scenario of tensions between Turkey and Greece, coupled with domestic unrest, had been doctored to look like a coup plan.
NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A collection of multinational and multilingual and multicultural armed forces, all of differing capabilities, working toward a common goal by pulling in different directions...
member Turkey's entire top military command resigned at the end of July in protest over the government's treatment of placed in durance vile officers.
Since 1960, the military, which views itself as the defender of secularism in the country, has ousted four Turkish governments, including that of Erdogan's mentor Necmettin Erbakan in 1997.
Efforts to clip the military's wings began as Turkey opened discussions to join the European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
and tried to reduce the military's role to bring it in line with its European equivalents.
The move initially won public support but criticism has been growing recently on the motives for the investigation and the fact that no successful prosecutions have been brought.