5 ms·

It's starting to seem like they had these lists made up ahead of time and have been waiting for the right time to start cleansing the ranks.

• nickbauman 10y ago
  This is exactly what's going on. As bad as the putsch is, in the end the wrong guy is in power if you value democracy and freedom of religion.
• zymhan 10y ago
  Starting? That was clear when they purged the first few thousand.
  • derkha 10y ago
    Even the EU seems to think so: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-security-eu-hahn-idUSKCN0ZY0EA http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-security-eu-hahn-id...
  • mcbits 10y ago
    Yes, "starting" may be too charitable, but the first few thousand were military, so it was at least plausible that they were tagged for actual involvement with the coup.
    • AndyNemmity 10y ago
      The first group were Judges actually.
• dragonwriter 10y ago
  > It's starting to seem like they had these lists made up ahead of time and have been waiting for the right time to start cleansing the ranks. That much is obvious. Erdogan didn't start laying blame for problems on the "parallel structure" only after the coup attempt, he's been doing it for years. The coup attempt provided the political pretext for stronger action against the group (and, potentially, others that the regime can use the pretext of going after the group to deal with at the same time) than the regime thought it could get away with before. Governments frequently use crises as pretexts for actions which they wanted to do previously but didn't find political support for, both against specific internal or external targets and in terms of general, non-specifically-targeted policy.
  • briarrose 10y ago
    It's likely par for the course to have lists of potential adversaries maintained in the event of a national emergency : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_84 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_84
• glass_of_water 10y ago
  It's possible the coup was staged as an excuse to purge the opposition and seize more power. Edit: changed "quite likely" to "possible" to address valid criticism.
  • imartin2k 10y ago
    In my book, "quite likely" would be, say, 80-90 %. And that is absurd. It is imaginable that the coup was staged, but it is not more likely than the other, more realistic explanations. In fact, it is still rather unlikely, even if one cannot rule it out completely. That being said, as another commentator mentioned: These lists have existed before, since tensions have been going on for years. So now Erdogan just had to pull them out of the drawer.
    • AndyNemmity 10y ago
      Agreed. There are 3 possible options in my view, and any of them could be true. There just isn't enough evidence for any of them to be likely.
• random28345 10y ago
  > It's starting to seem like they had these lists made up ahead of time and have been waiting for the right time to start cleansing the ranks. Kind of how the 342-page US Patriot Act was introduced days after the September 11th terrorist attacks?
  • bkmartin 10y ago
    You mean weeks after, right? Because it was weeks after, not days after. Good story though.
  • ams6110 10y ago
    According to Wikipedia's entry on the Patriot Act, it was introduced on October 23. Over a month to produce 342 pages of double-spaced federal legalese? Probably not incredible. That said, I'm sure the TLA agencies took advantage of the crisis to "suggest" a lot of things they'd been wanting.
  • zymhan 10y ago
    Aside from what the others said, the PATRIOT ACT (it's all an acronym) was based on an older bill that was not passed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnibus_Counterterrorism_Act_of_1995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnibus_Counterterrorism_Act_o... http://www.wnyc.org/story/whats-bill/ http://www.wnyc.org/story/whats-bill/