| Absolutely, I watched every bit of news as it happened, and the video channels. The military that were holding areas were told it was a drill. It was by far one of the worst coups from an organizational standpoint I've ever seen. That leaves you with either 1. A extremely poor, unfocused, and uncoordinated coup that had real intentions, but was rushed and ultimately had no chance of succeeding. 2. Erdogan knew a coup was going to happen, and pushed them to go forward with it while he was safe, with protection from fighter jets, etc. 3. A staged coup, and the fighter jets were always part of Erdogan's attempt, at the beginning flying low as a show of support, and at the end, validating he can land safety with no lucky/unlucky coup member getting to take him down. And, I don't really know. It's one of those, but there isn't enough evidence in any direction to really make a claim of anything in my view. I will say, none of it makes any sense. Erdogan telling everyone to take the streets to stop this felt ridiculous during it, but afterwards makes a ton of sense. Most of the military didn't know they were in a coup. And the only shutdowns were things that could potentially alert the military on what was going on, facebook, cellphones, etc. But I think you have to take it at face value, and go with option 1 unless other evidence comes. It was already pretty shaky that they had a list of judges to immediately sack 2 hours after the coup. I mean, that's incredible timing. Edit: I'd also like to add, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cia-officials-turkey-cou... Ignore the tone, but it was incredible during the coup, Robert Baer, a veteran former CIA officer said “I have been involved in coups before,” he said. “They should have taken CNN Turk and closed it down the first minutes, the radio station, social media, the internet. Even if they didn’t arrest [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, they should have taken care of all of that right at the beginning.” Baer also revealed that he had discussed the possibility of a coup with Turkish military officers in the past few months. “I’ve been speculating with Turkish officers a couple months ago about a coup and they said, ‘Absolutely not,’” he said. “And clearly they’re not involved, so there’s limited support for this.” ----- At the time when we said it, everyone focused on how inappropriate it was to be giving the coup leaders advice, but if you remove that from the equation, what you have is legitimate criticism as to the plan, and more questions that don't have answers regarding who actually started this in the Turkish military. |