Infidels: freepmail me if you want on or off this list.
The Islamist takeover excellerates. Here's a more comprehensible wrap-up from WSJ:
" Chief of General Staff Isik Kosaner asked to leave because he “deemed it necessary,” the state news agency Anatolia reported from Ankara, citing no one. The chiefs of the army, air force and navy announced their resignations soon after, the NTV news channel reported. Erdogan, re-elected to a third term in office in June, has reduced the secularist armed forces’ power over Turkish politics since he came to power in 2002. His party was formed after the closure of an Islamist party. More than 40 generals are under arrest after prosecutors alleged that they planned bomb attacks to undermine Erdogan’s administration. The resignations are “unprecedented” and “the situation is extremely fluid,” Inan Demir, chief economist at Finansbank AS in Istanbul, said in an e-mailed comment. “The balance of power has shifted decidedly in favor of the government over the recent years, which could limit the fallout from the resignations.” Turkey’s lira currency weakened as much as 1.3 percent to 1.6991 per dollar in Istanbul, heading for its biggest drop in a week. Bond and stock markets were closed. Chaotic ”Things look chaotic,” Suha Yaygin, deputy chief of emerging markets at Toronto-Dominion Bank in London, said in e- mailed comments. “There’s never been such a thing in the history of Turkey. The lira could fall below 1.70 again.” Members of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party contacted by telephone declined to comment. Today’s resignations followed a meeting in Ankara between Kosaner, Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul to discuss promotions of senior military staff, Anatolia said. Erdogan was pushing to force the retirement of the generals and admirals who are jailed as part of the trials, according to a report in Cumhuriyet newspaper on July 5. None of them have been convicted." Turkey's Chief of the General Staff, Gen. Isik Kosaner, retired from his post Friday in a surprise decision, the state news agency Anadolu Ajansi said, triggering a fall in the Turkish currency, the lira. It wasn't immediately clear why Gen. Kosaner made the move, but there has been running tension between Turkey's Islamic-leaning government and the military. The military has also come under criticism lately for a clash with Kurdish guerrillas in which 13 soldiers were killed. The Turkish lira fell from 1.677 to the US dollar to as low as 1.698 on the news Friday evening. In a sign of the confusion surrounding Gen. Kosaner's move, Anadolu Ajansi initially reported that the country's top military official had resigned "because he deemed it necessary," before printing a correction and saying he had submitted a request for early retirement. CNN Turk television reported that the heads of the Turkish land forces and of the Navy also resigned, but that couldn't be confirmed immediately. No statement was posted on the website of the general staff. Gen. Kosaner's decision came after a meeting with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul on Friday morning, as they prepared for a semiannual four-day session of the military's joint military-government council, known by its acronym YAS, next week. The YAS decides all senior military appointments. Gen. Kosaner was known as a hardliner within the military and got the top job at a tense session of the YAS last August, where the government excluded a number of top generals from promotion, as they were defendants in an unresolved case accusing them of plotting to overthrow the government. According to local media reports, the prime minister and president had been due Friday to discuss with Gen. Kosaner the position of officers still jailed pending trial in the case, known as Sledgehammer, after the plot name. They were also due to discuss Kurdish terrorism and the incident in which the 13 soldiers died earlier this month."