The cleric has been accused by turkey of orchestrating last summer’s failed military coup
Mr. Woolsey told The Wall Street Journal he arrived at the meeting in New York on Sept. 19 in the middle of the discussion and found the topic startling and the actions being discussed possibly illegal.
The Turkish ministers were interested in open-ended thinking on the subject, and the ideas were raised hypothetically, said the people who were briefed. The ministers in attendance included the son-in-law of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the country’s foreign minister, foreign-lobbying disclosure documents show.
.. Mr. Woolsey said the idea was “a covert step in the dead of night to whisk this guy away.”
.. The filing said his firm’s fee, $530,000, wasn’t paid by the government but by Inovo BV, a Dutch firm owned by a Turkish businessman, Ekim Alptekin.
.. Mr. Erdogan has been trying for years to undermine Mr. Gulen, a onetime ally whom Turkey has now branded as a terrorist leader.
.. “It seemed to be naive,” Mr. Woolsey said about the discussion. “I didn’t put a lot of credibility in it. This is a country of legal process and a Constitution, and you don’t send out folks to haul somebody overseas.”
.. Mr. Woolsey said he also informed the U.S. government by notifying Vice President Joe Biden through a mutual friend.
.. Mr. Biden felt the Gulen matter should be handled through the courts.
.. “Gen. Flynn did discuss the Flynn Intel Group’s work for Inovo that included gathering information that could lead to a legal case against Mr. Gulen.”
.. Inovo hired Mr. Flynn on behalf of an Israeli company seeking to export natural gas to Turkey
Country’s president, strongly supported by conservatives, Islamists and nationalists, is accumulating authority, purging thousands accused of involvement in a failed July coup, and ruling by decree
.. A song titled the “Erdogan March” lauds what it calls the lion-hearted protector of the global Muslim community, and became aTwitter top trend in Turkey.
.. Mr. Erdogan delivers daily hourlong speeches, which television stations that haven’t been shut down uniformly broadcast live
..The murder of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey on Dec. 19 capped 10 days of violence, including bombings that killed at least 58 people—volatility that only strengthens Mr. Erdogan’s push for expanded powers.
.. His unfolding efforts to reshape Turkey place Mr. Erdogan in the vanguard of illiberal populism personified by leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro.
.. Mr. Erdogan’s movement has been a long campaign against a secular elite installed early last century by Turkish independence hero Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and kept in power by the military.
.. His movement, sometimes called Erdoganismo, is an Islamist-infused cocktail of winner-take-all democracy, nationalism and nostalgia for the past glories of this onetime center of the Ottoman Empire. Those sidelined include the once-dominant secular and West-leaning intelligentsia, along with ethnic and religious minorities.
.. The secret to the power grab is a political base of religious Sunni Muslims who have seen their incomes rise, their formerly circumscribed rights restored, and their pride enhanced by Mr. Erdogan’s policies.
.. Supporters say Mr. Erdogan, who has marshaled nine AKP election victories since 2002, has shown himself a benevolent and capable leader. Dismissing the idea he is autocratic, they credit his skill at developing trust and credibility across society.
.. The narrative is transparent—Erdogan is on a constant march toward absolute power
.. Then his government ousted scores of pro-Kurdish mayors on terrorism charges.
.. Party co-founders have been sidelined or silenced, their names erased from AKP literature.
.. His party swept to power in 2002 after courting European and U.S. policy makers enamored by the thought of an Islamist democratic party in the mold of Christian Democrats like Germany’s.
.. He framed protesters as elitists or foreign agents.
.. He should be handed as much power as he needs, Mr. Toraman in Sivas said, because “he’s restoring Turkey’s historic greatness.”
.. Heartland supporters say outsiders can’t imagine how dramatically Mr. Erdogan’s rule has improved life for Turks once limited by an immutable class system. Seeking treatment for illness was a challenge. Families couldn’t afford to send children to school. Conservative men tell of being ousted from the staunchly secularist military because of their piety.
.. Mr. Erdogan’s party revoked the headscarf law, and her future widened. Now, as she finishes a master’s degree in optical engineering, Ms. Subutay is angling for a coveted job with a defense contractor, Aselsan, which has opened an optics factory in Sivas. Until recently, it would have been impossible for a headscarfed woman.
.. Mr. Erdogan’s appeal also owes in part to a Teflon ability to deflect bad press.
.. The president’s lifestyle has moved beyond comfortable to opulent. He lives in an 1,100-room palace with 1,800 employees.
.. Mr. Erdogan started invoking the phrase “national will” to defend his policies, which primarily cater to his Islamist supporters. Mr. Erdogan has ignored pleas from minorities in favor of rhetoric that galvanizes nationalist feeling and the Sunni majority.
..
In last year’s elections, however, the HDP doubled its previous showing and won 13%. That was enough to deny Mr. Erdogan’s party a ruling majority in parliament.
Mr. Erdogan then accused the HDP of supporting terrorism. He revived scorched-earth tactics against Kurdish insurgents. He froze the peace talks and called snap elections. With voters spooked by rising violence and insecurity, the AKP was propelled back to majority control of parliament.
A pro-government newspaper, meanwhile, published a list of names and photographs of journalists suspected of treachery.
.. The step followed the dismissals of tens of thousands of workers — teachers, bankers, police officers, soldiers, bureaucrats and others — as well as the arrests of thousands accused of ties to the conspiracy.
.. The emergency statutes give the government a freer hand to make laws by allowing it to bypass Parliament and to stifle expression it deems harmful to national security.
.. Many Turks, often inclined to believe in conspiracy theories, think that the coup was a hoax staged by the government to provide a pretext to crackdown on its perceived enemies.
Then came statements from the junta. It was calling itself the “Yurtta Sulh Konseyi,” meaning “Peace at Home Council,” a play on the famous words of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. Like coups before it, it was trying to take control of or suppress government organs and communications channels. The state television broadcast was stopped, and a speaker read a text stating that the government had failed in its duties and that the military was taking control of the situation. All of Turkey’s international obligations would be honored, everybody should just stay home, it said. I actually pinched myself to make sure it was real.
.. Unlike in decades past, however, Turks had plenty of private channels to flick around on to see what was going on and receive instructions. Twitter and Facebook were blocked, but slightly tech-savvy people just used VPNs (virtual private networks) to connect. The coup plotters must have thought that they could do their work without effectively blocking communications.
.. It looked as if President Erdogan was in mid-flight returning from a vacation, and then he connected to CNN Turk through a Facetime call. It was surreal watching the president addressing two journalists from a cell phone screen.
.. But there was not a peep where I was in Ayrancı and Gaziosmanpaşa, some of Ankara’s most affluent districts.
.. The booming of jets was near-constant, but was now met with chants from mosques. At first it was a standard call to prayer, which was odd, since it was well past prayer time. By authority of the president and head of Diyanet, Turkey’s religious authority, loudspeakers called upon people to leave their homes and occupy central locations in resistance to the coup. Most of the rest was “sala,” Islamic chants or messages spread from the minarets of mosques. The people’s resistance would have an Islamic character.
.. Chants of “polise uzanan eller kırılsın,” (“may the hands seeking to harm the police be broken!”) and “Türkiye sizinle gurur duyuyor!” (“Turkey is proud of you!”) rose from the crowd. The most popular chant by far however, was “Allahu Akbar,” and there was a vindictive feeling in the takbir, as if it that elation had been caged up for too long.
.. These people were not from my neighborhood up the hill, but from Ankara’s various poorer districts. An overwhelming majority were male, with lean faces and sunburnt skin. Rather than the urbane “Istanbul Turkish,” they spoke in various Anatolian accents, and a few wore traditional Islamic garb the way Arabs do. Many used hand signs with their slogans, either the sign of takbir, an extended index finger (which in Turkey suggests political Islamism) or the sign of the gray wolf, (which belongs to the nationalist party). It was these people who had faced down the junta’s tanks.
.. Many Turks on the left are already uncomfortable with this, pointing out that the same group is known for beating up journalists and oppressing minority groups. Their actions, they say, were more motivated by the will to hold on to power than by a love for democracy.
.. The crowd was now calling for the junta to be put to death.
.. It is difficult to make predictions about how the coup attempt will change things in Turkey. What is certain is that the country’s major political factions will often refer to it to define themselves in the future. The opposition will be rightly proud of having denounced it early on, before anyone knew which way it would go. Secular-leaning media organizations like Dogan News, which owns CNN Turk, will point out that they resisted the junta even as its forces entered its building.
.. Erdogan and his cadre have been mentally preparing for a coup ever since they rose to power in 2002.
.. At worst, the coup will encourage the AK Party’s worst attributes and serve as a stepping-stone to a regime that will make the country inhospitable to others. At best, it will be a uniting force in the country’s politics that leads to a new consensus. Time will tell.