Intel in politics

Turkey’s Praetorian Guard and its Mission

Last year, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (or AKP) took steps towards converting the Republic of Turkey into a just another typical Middle-Eastern “Mukhabarat state,” a state where official intelligence services are busy keeping taps on the people while developing all kinds of nefarious cross-border activities embroiling the country in all kinds of dodgy affairs and/or relations.

Some time ago, at the very end of the previous calendar year to be precise (31 December 2015), Turkey’s Constitutional Court (or AYM) issued a review of a controversial law that had been in power since 26 April 2014. The law in question, Law Nr 6532 containing 15 individual articles, deals with the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) and has granted sweeping powers to the agency, effectively turning the organization into “Tayyip’s Praetorian Guard”, as I somewhat flippantly wrote at the time. Originally founded in 1965 by means of the promulgation of Law nr. 644 to “collect intelligence to do with threats to the country and the nation’s integrity and security” and accountable only to the figure of the prime minister (Law nr. 2937, Article 7, 1 Nov 1983), the National Intelligence Organization has really been able to act with impunity since the adoption of Law Nr 6532, with arbitrary phone tapping constituting but tip of the iceberg of its activities.