Free Republic

Here’s one outcome of the Turkish coup attempt that you can bet on: Washington lobbyists will be getting rich off it. The Podesta Group, a firm with close ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, registered in May to lobby for the “Alliance for Shared Values.” That comically named organization supports Fethullah Gulen, the Pennsylvania-based imam that the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, blames, rightly or wrongly, for the coup.

Dani Rodrik has just returned from Turkey, shunned while defending his father-in-law, the main defendant in the military coup plot case. The Harvard professor explains his take. IN DECEMBER I traveled to Turkey with my wife and young son, as we do every year during winter break. This time, though, we had more than visiting family and friends in mind. We were on a mission to demonstrate that what many have called the trial of the century in Turkey is in fact a sham built on fabricated evidence. Nearly two hundred Turkish military officers stand accused of having plotted a...

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s director of policy planning, now denies she endorsed Today’s Zaman, the flagship newspaper of Fethullah Gülen’s Islamist cult. Here is a google cache record with Prof. Slaughter’s endorsement, and here is the page now, with Professor Slaughter’s endorsement excised. Professor Slaughter denies she made the endorsementThere are two possible explanations: (1) Professor Slaughter is being truthful, and Today’s Zaman simply made it all up. If so, this suggests that the ethics of Zaman and the organization which sponsors it are non-existent. (2) Professor Slaughter asked for the retraction only after learning about Today’s...

Members of a secretive Turkish Islamic movement that is at the center of a congressional ethics committee investigation have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and to her family’s charity, a Daily Caller investigation has found.The largest donation from a leader of the Gulen movement, which is operated from Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains by a moderate Muslim cleric named Fethullah Gulen, came from Recep Ozkan. A former president of the Gulen-linked Turkish Cultural Center, Ozkan gave between $500,001 and $1,000,000 to the Clinton Foundation in recent months, the charity’s website shows. He also served as a national...

Russian President Vladimir Putin said economic isolation of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) should be ended. Putin has signaled for concrete steps to be taken in this regard. Russian President hosting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as an "honorary guest" in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi noted, the "meaningless" embargo imposed on TRNC must be lifted and his country will have direct contacts with both the Turkish and Greek Cypriot societies on the island. The two leaders emphasized their opinions overlapped on many issues. "The first thing we must do is to solve the problem...

We've written a number of times about Minnesota's Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TiZA), a charter school that appears to be Muslim in all but name, and is closely affiliated with, if not an alter ego of, the radical Muslim American Society. The American Civil Liberties Union is engaged in litigation against TIZA, in which the ACLU alleges that the school unconstitutionally promotes religion at taxpayer expense. That litigation has gotten quite bitter. Our friend Kathy Kersten has done more than anyone else to shed light on TIZA and its relationship with the Muslim American Society through her columns in the...

SNIPPET: "Discussion: I first observed discussion of binary explosives on the al-Firdaws forum in January of 2007. In light of recent events I will post here my archive:" SNIPPET: "Implementation: On Christmas Day, 2009, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab boards a flight in Amsterdam, bound for Detroit, and on final descent he attempts to set off what was most likely a binary explosive. Thank goodness he either screwed up or had bad instructions, because the chemicals he was working with were evidently quite good."

September 7, 2009 Mass murder at 30,000 feet: Islamic extremists guilty of airline bomb plot Philippe Naughton Three British Muslims were found guilty today of conspiracy to murder thousands of passengers and crew in an unprecedented airline bomb plot that could have proved as deadly as the 9/11 attacks. After a retrial at Woolwich Crown Court, jurors found the ringleader, Abdulla Ahmed, and two other men, Assad Sarwar and Tanvir Hussain, guilty of plotting to use liquid bombs to blow up airliners en route from Heathrow to the United States. Another defendant, Umar Islam, was found guilty of a more...

Attacks on nuclear power stations, oil and gas terminals, Canary Wharf and Heathrow’s control tower were being considered by leaders of the plot to blow up seven transatlantic airliners in mid-flight, a court was told yesterday. Documents found on computer memory sticks at the home of an alleged terrorist ringleader contained a list of targets across Britain – including the gas pipeline between Britain and Belgium. The man, Assad Sarwar, was said to be in contact with terrorist leaders overseas and visited Pakistan a month before his arrest as preparations for the airline attacks were being finalised. Peter Wright, QC,...

TERROR suspect Waheed Zaman met controversial MP George Galloway many times, his sister said last night. Safeena, 24, said of her 23-year-old brother: “He saw it as his duty to stand up for his community and that’s what led him to know George Galloway. He has a lot of respect for him and has met him many times.” A spokesman for MP Galloway, left, said: “Waheed Zaman is not a name that George is familiar with. He is not known to him on a personal level.” There is no suggestion Galloway is an associate of Zaman.

TEHRAN -- The U.S. Congress on Tuesday ratified the sale of four AWACS to Turkey, the Turkish daily ***Zaman*** reported on Wednesday. According to an agreement signed between Ankara and Washington in April, Turkey will buy four AWACS worth around 1.1 billion dollars from Boeing Co. Turkey could raise its demand from four to six spy planes. It has been said that money for the purchase of the planes will come from the Support Fund for Turkish Defense Industry. The Support Fund for the Turkish Defense Industry is an official foundation which provides fund for some Turkish defense expenditures through...