Regardless of what variety of Muslim the purported abductee is - can we all agree that kidnapping should be decriminalized?
Who among us hasn’t been approached to accept $15million to kidnap someone, spirit them out of the country and give them to someone who might torture and kill them?
More likely, the perception is blowback, don’t you think?
For example, Dani Rodrik, here:
But it is not farfetched to think that there are some groups in the administration – perhaps in the intelligence branches – who have been protecting Gulen because they think he is useful to U.S. foreign policy interests. This could be because Gulen’s brand/mask of moderate Islam is a rare thing in that part of the world. It could be because taking Gulen down would only benefit groups in Turkey they consider more inimical to U.S. interests – Erdogan’s AKP and the arch-secularists. It is even possible that the movement has occasionally performed services for U.S. intel operations. (Some of Gulen’s schools in Central Asia were used to “shelter” American spies according to a former Turkish intelligence chief.) That kind of thing would not be beneath either the CIA or the Gulen movement.
I don’t think that the CIA directed the coup attempt [1], or that they specifically wish to see the Gulen faction take over.
However, I do think that they decided years ago that they’d rather be rid of Erdogan, and have been up to their usual subversion tricks in the meantime. Which normally means supporting all local opposition groups that aren’t socialist, regardless of the consequences.
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[1] I don’t think anyone really knows what was going on there. That blew up prematurely, but it’s impossible to tell if that was just incompetence by the Turkish opposition, or if it was manufactured by Erdogan to justify his purges.
Yeah, normally. As you say, who knows. I look at Erdogan, an autocrat with an Islamist facade, and then Gulen, an Islamist with a secular facade, and their strange marriage of convenience, now utterly devolved into a coup and all kinds of fracture throughout the Turkish state… and so when I ask myself, “what would CIA do” my head just spins!
There’s some interesting commentary on Turkey in this, BTW:
It was good. Thanks!
Hmmm, any evidence of that?
Nah, that’s all gut-instinct best-guess stuff. Not a lot of actual data available, for anyone. Even the Turkish people themselves have no idea what really happened there.
However, see:
Nice find. Interesting insight. Thanks.
My takeaway from this thread is that I am in need of some good baklava.
It’s just as well I found this out - I’ve been turning down all requests so far and now I find out that I’ve been offered far below the market rate. We need a free market solution to give price transparency.
You’re not on RenditionBook?
See that “/s” in the post you’re responding to? That’s netgeek shorthand for “end sarcastic statement.”
I’m aware. That’s not what I was arguing, of course. I’m mocking that idea.
I can read perfectly well, thank you. I’ve been round since Usenet. Talk down to somebody else, please.
It would appear that my attempt at humour failed to cross the Atlantic. I guess you didn’t actually read the post, where I was trying to satirise the apparent categories used by your current Administration.
Anyway, it’s gone now. If you have to explain the joke, it’s a failed joke.
I think in future I will confine any comments on this subject to another social media site somewhere else on the Internet.
Okay. I’m not sure why you’re upset, but my apologies.
No apologies expected, I was being simply literal about the misunderstanding of my post. I had forgotten briefly the rather general US tendency to take things very literally unless there’s an explicit signifier (like US programs with laugh tracks and some British ones without).
I was mildly annoyed by NickyG, who had to demonstrate the accuracy of the observation elsewhere that women correct to help, but men usually correct to show superiority. Even when they haven’t actually understood.
Is that a thing? I thought it was just one of those “I lost my job, now I’m earning $5000000 a month just rendering people to abusive foreign governments” scams. Now I’ve been trying to rent Lewis Hamilton’s private jet, on which you can apparently get a very good low tax deal - but he doesn’t return my calls.
It’s more this one simple trick that “they” don’t want you to know.
You know, I’ve also been on the interwebs since USENET. But your response seemed to indicate you didn’t pick up on the sarcastic nature of the post you were responding to. Sorry to bruise your internet-old-timer ego, it wasn’t my intent at all – I thought you genuinely didn’t understand the /s. shrug
