America's Voice

Last week’s American Embassy press release is a tangible example of the fact that Washington is now regarding Turkey, led by the ultra conservative Tayyip Erdogan Government, as bad as and as anti-American as President Hugo Chaves’s Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and China. And the Turkish people are rightly or wrongly blaming Ambassador Edelman for the deterioration of mutual relations. Only the other day Hurriyet columnist Yalcin Dogan was saying that no matter where Ambassador Edelman went he stirred up trouble like this, and that the Yeni Safak newspaper writers in question were not even journalists.

Actually the problem in Turkish-American relations goes much deeper than Ambassador Edelman and concerns a few decades of mistakes in American diplomacy’s main instrument in foreign policy management, the Disinformation Mechanism and its byproducts in Turkey.

To cut a long story short, the subject of the latest American Embassy press release Yeni Safak reporters, columnists and some other newspaper journalists whom Yalcin Dogan says “They are not journalists” are certainly late comers to journalism. One of them, Serdar Kuru, recently delivered one of his usual broadsides on the United States and remarked just in passing that “The American Pharoah Bush” had used chemical weapons in Iraq, namely Felluje.

Disregarding this too colloquial, even blunt style of writing which is quite common in Anglo-American tabloid journalism, Serdar Kuru and his friends are indeed fulfilling a superb service in Turkish journalism as perfect researchers of “open intelligence”.

Most probably there is a hidden hand of the Turkish Counter Disinformation Service that makes Yalcin Dogan say, “They are not journalists,” but they are certainly filling a big vacuum in the Turkish media with amazingly accurate background information carefully picked among the “open intelligence sources”, and at least 95% of intelligence is open today anyway. If the Turkish press is not making the most of this correct background information, some of which has not been heard by most people, the fault is not with Kuru and his friends, but with the terrible clutches of the American Disinformation Mechanism of the Turkish media.

For the last three decades or so Pulse has been campaigning against disinformation, a hideous invention of the CIA, and it is most gratifying to observe now that these strenuous efforts within Pulse’s modest resources are coming to fruition. Even though the target of these efforts is never to harm Turkish-American relations, it is certainly delivering considerable blows to mutual relations, to the point that Washington has seriously begun to examine the reasons for this upsurge of anti-Americanism in Turkey now.

The Turkey part of the latest world human rights report of the State Department and certain indications such as the above press release are proof of the fact that Washington is not being properly briefed or ‘fed” with correct assessments from their Embassy in Ankara, but some more serious American sources, such as a long NY Times dispatch dated 13 December 2004, show that they are making more realistic and accurate assessments of the harm caused by American disinformation activities in Turkey and elsewhere.