Once heroes, now traitors and agents

The state that journalism in our country has been pushed into in the past 10 years has unfortunately created and added adjectives such as “Baransu with the suitcase” to our profession.

Journalist Mehmet Baransu was arrested on March 2 and is accused of “forming a criminal organization,” as well as procuring, publicizing and then destroying “documents related to the state’s interests at home and abroad.” Police detained Baransu late on March 1 after searching his home for almost 10 hours, seizing a number of documents.

Baransu, a reporter for daily Taraf, broke the story of the Balyoz (Sledgehammer) coup plot case by delivering a whole suitcase of documents of allegations to the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office in January 2010. The suitcase included CDs, tapes, printed documents and handwritten notes as evidence for the coup case.

Many people who have earned titles such as “liar” are wandering around calling themselves “journalists” are setting bad examples for younger generations for this dear profession.

However, it is unfair to consider that the only ones responsible for this state are journalist look-a-likes.
What has encouraged such kinds of people is the political climate of the past 10 years.

Those who have created this climate have shaped these people into “courageous journalists who save the country” who in turn blossomed with threats in their columns and on television saying, “I will have them put you in jail, as well as the other one.”

Bowels not yet clean    

Sadly, when we told them “There will be a time also 10 years after this,” they attacked us with unprecedented insults, now today they are on a stage themselves that could be a textbook example.

I should say now with all my sincerity that I am not happy in the slightest bit that the suitcase holder and liar have been jailed, on the contrary, my professional sorrow is very deep.

We will perform soul-searching in our profession, but we will never forget those who created this atmosphere who are the ones truly responsible and who also believe we have a short memory span.

The people I am portraying are those, while cases such as Ergenekon and Balyoz were proceeding, they were the ones who said, “Turkey is cleaning its bowels, God forbid if we ever had gone into a war with these generals commanding the army; I am the prosecutor of these cases.”

It turns out to be that “there has been a conspiracy set up against the Army; thousands of innocent people were sent to jail.”

Well, right after that exact moment, those police and journalists the government had granted a “hero” title to, started wearing “the traitor and the agent” adjectives and began filling the jails.

One irony was that the Office of the Chief of General Staff took action after that “conspiracy” confession.

Well, “Baransu with the suitcase” was arrested as a result of this case opened by the Office of the Chief of General Staff.

Who was conspired against?

Okay then, here are still some points that our reason cannot solve, for instance did not Baransu take all of the documents he had and hand them all to the prosecutors?

It was up to the prosecutors to find out whether these documents were genuine or fake.

What about those prosecutors, who, one hour after mail was sent from a tea garden, they rushed to the Gölcük Naval Base, with the condition that “the search warrant will come afterward anyway.”

They were so prepared that they did not go into the room mentioned in the mail, but went to another room and asked the floor tiles to be removed, saying, “If you do not have the means to take the tiles out, I have the tools in my trunk.”

When a hard drive came out from under the tiles, he showed his joy by saying, “Now I can light my cigar.” The expert for this case was somehow not chosen from the Istanbul court list, but selected from the Police Academy in Ankara, who at the end reported they were “coup documents.”

It’s like a joke, but those judges who held 237 people in jail for years, then sentenced them to thousands of years, have today filed a criminal complaint on the grounds that “the expert misguided us.”

As a matter of fact, the defense said a thousand times “This evidence is fake; the expert is wrong.”

Those jurists, who issued permission for that search at Gölcük, who arrested 33 of the 34 officers there, when they were appointed as the head and member of the panel of judges at the court, normally, of course, would have rejected those demands…

These jurists, at least now, should explain how they were conspired against by Baransu with the suitcase and those power players behind them.

So, let me ask: “What do you accuse Baransu of? What is his fault?”