A news report published by the pro-government Yeni Şafak daily on Wednesday claiming that elements of the so-called “parallel state” in the Telecommunications Directorate (TİB) had wiretapped the phones of 64 prominent individuals, has confirmed a recent e-mail sent by an anonymous whistleblower from the TİB to media outlets warning that there is a conspiracy to depict the Hizmet movement as having infiltrated the TİB.
The e-mail, sent a month ago, claimed the agency had tampered with its system logs to fabricate evidence that the “parallel state,” a term the government uses to describe the Hizmet movement, had listened in on around 2,000 people. The message said the electronic serial numbers (ESNs) of these people were entered into the system as per instructions by TİB President Cemalettin Çelik and then erased -- all to make it look like the Hizmet movement had spied on citizens and then covered its tracks. The institution was then to share the “recovered” numbers with newspapers.
In the e-mail, the whistleblower said prior to fabricating the evidence, they were made to work day and night for three months in order to reveal the “illegal wiretappings made by the parallel state at TİB targeting Prime Minister [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party [AK Party]," adding that no matter how hard they worked, they could not find any traces to prove this claim.
The whistleblower also said following the appointment of Çelik, a former employee of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT), to the TİB, many TİB employees were purged on allegations of membership in the Hizmet movement.
In its story Yeni Şafak claimed that inspections conducted at the TİB found that the so-called “parallel state” had wiretapped the phones of 64 people, including politicians, journalists, governors and members of the judiciary and the police, between 2008 and 2010.
The late Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, journalists Abdulkadir Selvi, Ertuğrul Özkök and businesswoman Arzuhan Doğan Yalçındağ were among the people whose phones were wiretapped based on unfounded accusations, according to the daily. Yeni Şafak said these people were wiretapped under fake names and over accusations such as terrorism, drug trafficking or organized crime.
Yet, the daily did not publish the court decisions on which the wiretappings were based. During the time of these alleged wiretappings, the interior minister was Beşir Atalay, while the general director of security was Oğuz Kaan Köksal. The heads of the National Police Department's intelligence unit were Ramazan Akyürek and Ömer Altıparmak, between 2008 and 2010, respectively. Thus, if any illegal wiretapping took place at the TİB as claimed by Yeni Şafak, these officials and the government in particular bear some responsibility.
Senior intelligence officers who served at the intelligence unit of the National Police Department at the time told Today's Zaman on condition of anonymity that Yeni Şafak's story is not based on facts. They said the intelligence unit of the National Police Department could conduct wiretappings and monitoring across Turkey, adding that a person can only be wiretapped by court order.
“If the wiretappings took place with a court decision, what kind of legal action was taken by the police and the prosecutors concerning the suspects? Which one of the people [who were allegedly wiretapped] testified to the prosecutors as part of an investigation?” they asked.
On the other hand, the phones of some individuals who are not suspects in an investigation were also wiretapped unintentionally while the legal wiretapping is made. If there is no element of crime in the conversations of that individual, the recording of the phone conversation is automatically deleted.
The TİB is the only state agency in Turkey that can conduct legal wiretaps, but it cannot make the decision to wiretap a phone legally. The TİB needs a court order in order to start wiretapping someone's phone. It automatically transfers the records of the phone conversations to the prosecutors carrying out the investigation. When the investigation is concluded, the records are deleted from the TİB's system automatically.
The fact that Yeni Şafak did not identify the court that made the decisions to wiretap those 64 individuals raises further questions about the reliability of its report.
Published on Today's Zaman, 29 May 2014, Thursday
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