Free Republic

State Dept.'s Disgraceful Censorship of Report Blacklisting Turkey By Harut Sassounian March 27, 2012 Each passing day brings new revelations of the Obama administration's shameful schemes to cover up Turkish misconduct. The latest scandal involves the State Department's covert attempt to alter the contents of a report by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), condemning the Turkish government's violations of the religious rights of Christian minorities. USCIRF is an independent bipartisan federal agency established by the U.S. Congress to make "recommendations unburdened by foreign policy considerations other than the defense of religious freedom," according to a Commission member....

The United States government continues to remain silent on free speech restrictions in Turkey – most notably, what the European Union has called the "infamous" Article 301 of the Penal Code. Under Article 301, more than 60 fiction and non-fiction writers have been prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness" – typically, for acknowledging the Armenian Genocide.Turkish novelist and Novel Laureate Orhan Pamuk was prosecuted under Article 301 because he told a Swiss magazine, "Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it." Another Turkish novelist, Elif ªafak, was also tried...