watching the empire dance is always a curious sight to behold and with hurricane trump doing the conducting its getting into high theater;


Every year, thousands of American citizens are incarcerated in foreign countries. Yet, President Trump has decided to go to war to secure the release of only one of them. What gives with that?
The citizen who is receiving the privileged treatment is Andrew Brunson, an American pastor incarcerated in Turkey. He is charged with participating in an attempted coup in 2016 against Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
President Trump is up in arms over Brunson’s arrest and incarceration. To pressure Erdogan to release Brunson, Trump has imposed severe economic sanctions on Turkey that have contributed to a severe financial decline in the country. The Turkish lira, which had already dropped around 45 percent this year against the dollar, hit a low on Sunday and then plunged another 7 percent on Monday. Erdogan called Trump’s sanctions a “stab in the back.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. mainstream press is jumping on the release-Brunson bandwagon. An August 10 editorial in the New York Times provides a good example. The Times writes:

On Friday, Mr. Trump announced in a tweet that he had authorized a doubling of the steel and aluminum tariffs against Turkey.
The object is to force the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to release Andrew Brunson, an American and evangelical Christian pastor who has been imprisoned by Turkey since 2016 on trumped-up charges of aiding an aborted coup by Erdogan opponents. (Italics added.)

The reason I italicized the term “trumped-up” is because when I read it, my immediate reaction was the following: How does the New York Times editorial board know that the charges are “trumped-up,” as in false and bogus? How do they know that Brunson is innocent of what he is being charged with? There certainly is no indication in the editorial that the Times has reviewed any evidence that the Turkish authorities may have against Brunson.



https://www.fff.org/2018/08/13/trumps-war-on-turkey-for-pastor-brunson/