Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday slammed the U.S. for its reaction to a failed military coup attempt two weeks ago, accusing the country of harboring the man he says is responsible for the violence.
“Instead of thanking this government for thwarting this coup attempt, and for (maintaining) democracy, you are standing by the (plotters),” Erdogan said,according to the state-run Anadolu Agency.
Turkey continues to demand the U.S. extradite Fethullah Gülen, a cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania whom it accuses of being behind the coup attempt July 15 that left at least 290 people dead.
“The putschist (Gülen) is already in your country, you are looking after him. This is a known fact," Erdogan said. “You can never deceive my people. My people know who is involved in this plot, and who is the mastermind. With such statements, you are just revealing yourself. Turkey will not be duped.”
Serdar Kilic, Turkey’s ambassador to Washington, said last week that his country will accept a U.S. offer to work with the State and Justice departments on an extradition request for the Turkish cleric.
Secretary of State John Kerry said Turkey must provide evidence of Gülen’s involvement for a U.S. judge to consider any extradition request. Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said the extradition is “a very legal technical process.”
On Wednesday, Turkey ordered the shutdown of scores of media outlets, including three news agencies, 16 television channels and 45 newspapers, Andalou reported.
The state also formally discharged around 1,700 officers from the military and brought the Turkish Coast Guard under the control of the Interior Ministry.
The moves represent a further tightening of government control in the country.
Amnesty International said the crackdown and state of emergency imposed by Turkey far surpass responses made by other countries after an attempted coup. The human rights group said that raises concerns whether Erdogan is using the coup as a pretext to strengthen his hold on power, eliminate political opponents and curb the country's democratic tradition.
Kilic said that’s not the case. “All political parties are supporting the government,” he said.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry walks out of a plane upon his arrival at Vnukovo International Airport in Moscow, Russia, July 14, 2016.
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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry took a proposal to boost military and intelligence cooperation against Islamic State and al Qaeda in Syria to Moscow on Thursday, despite doubts among U.S. defense and intelligence officials.
Kerry was due to meet President Vladimir Putin on Thursday evening and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday, and U.S. officials described the visit as a test of Moscow's willingness to help revive Syria's peace process.
The extent of coordination with Russia proposed by Kerry and set out in a leaked U.S. document published in the Washington Post newspaper on Thursday would represent a major shift after years of rivalry between Washington and Moscow, who support opposing sides in Syria's five-year civil war.
The document called for intelligence sharing to identify leadership targets, training camps, supply lines and headquarters of the Nusra Front, al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria.
Strikes against those targets could be carried out by U.S. or Russian jets and expanded coordination would be channeled through a Joint Implementation Group based in the vicinity of the Jordanian capital Amman.
The United States and Russia would establish separate headquarters for the operation and a shared coordination office, where they would deploy senior officials, intelligence personnel and experts in strike planning and targeting.
They would decide on a date to simultaneously begin strikes against Nusra Front targets and to stop all Syrian military air activities in designated areas, except for non-combat purposes and against areas where Nusra Front has acquired territory.
The proposal also allows for Russia to use air power to defend Syrian forces from attack from Nusra Front within a designated area, if agreed in advance with the United States.
Kerry declined to comment when asked about the document.
"I'll have comments, going to Moscow, meeting with President Putin tonight; we'll have plenty of time to talk about it and I'll give you all a sense of where we are," he told reporters.
HUMANITARIAN ACCESS
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he would refrain from comment until Russian officials had heard from Kerry. He said in general Russia favored cooperation with the United States over Syria, while the RIA news agency quoted Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as saying that Moscow was not satisfied with the current pace of this.
A senior U.S. official said Kerry would discuss how to deal with Islamic State and al Qaeda in Syria, as well as efforts to reduce the violence, allow humanitarian access and move towards political transition.
"At present we are not conducting or coordinating military operations with Russia, nor is it clear we will reach an agreement to do so," the official said.
Another U.S. official said there were two major problems leading to the breakdown of Syria's cessation of hostilities - the failure of the Syrian government to respect it and Nusra Front activity.
He said time was running out to revive efforts towards a political solution.
"We are here to test in what is pretty much close to the end stage of whether this is going to work, to take a shot with the Russians at whether we can solve those two major problems with the cessation of hostilities and get this back on track."
A third U.S. official said expectations were "very low", but added:
"Either we find a way to do something about it or not. And if we don’t, the entire things breaks down. That would be an end of the cessation of hostilities and that would not be a good thing for Russia, or the United states, or the world, or, most importantly, for the Syrian people."
Kerry faces strong opposition to his efforts to woo Russia from U.S. defense and intelligence officials who say Washington and Moscow have diametrically opposed objectives in Syria. Moscow backs President Bashar al-Assad, who Washington and its allies say must step down.
Kerry's trip, his second to Moscow this year, comes amid a worsening of U.S.-Russian ties due to tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions, U.S. allegations of aggressive Russian maneuvers toward U.S. aircraft and vessels and what Washington has said is a disregard for a cessation of hostilities in Syria, where Russia has bombed U.S.-backed rebels.
Relations between Moscow and Washington also remain strained over the Ukraine crisis and what the Kremlin considers NATO’s unjustified activities along its borders.
That has raised fears that disagreements could escalate into confrontations, either accidental in Syria or the result of miscalculations in the air and naval encounters from the Baltics to the Black Sea.
On Thursday, the commander of the U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic State, U.S. Army Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, voiced U.S. military concern about Russia’s intentions in Syria.
"I’d be a little leery about giving too much information to the Russians but I fully trust that our government officials understand this and know they’ll arrive at something that makes sense," MacFarland told reporters in Baghdad.
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGESImage captionThere have been large-scale protests against police brutality across the US
The deaths ofMichael Brown,Eric Garner,Walter Scott, andFreddie Grayare - some claim - evidence of long-standing problems with police racism and excessive violence.Recent high-profile cases of unarmed black men dying at the hands of the US police have sparked protests and civil unrest in several American cities.
Four expert witnesses talk to the BBC World ServiceInquiry programme, including the head of President Obama's taskforce on police reform, Charles Ramsey.
Image copyrightPOLICYLINKImage captionSam Sinyangwe was frustrated by the lack of official statistics on people killed by police officers
"I'm 24 years old. I'm a black man. It's incredibly depressing to see people just like me who have been killed.
"I started the project to provide answers in the wake of the shooting of Mike Brown. It's very heavy to read these stories, and yet it feels like the right work to do. It's important.
"There are statistics on all kinds of violent crimes. And yet, when it comes to people being killed by police officers, there's no data on that. So a light bulb went off in my head. I looked at two crowd-sourcing databases which collected all of the names. I then went through the media reports listing each of those people who were killed."
He counted 1,149 people of all ethnic groups killed by the police in 2014.
"I identified whether they were armed or unarmed. I identified them by race by looking at if there was an obituary or another picture of them online.
"In the aftermath of Ferguson [where the unarmed teenager Michael Brown was killed], there was this big question 'Is this a pattern, is this an isolated incident?' What [my data] shows is that Ferguson is everywhere. All over the country you're seeing black people being killed by police."
The youngest recorded was 12, the oldest 65. More than 100 were unarmed.
"Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police in the United States than white people. More unarmed black people were killed by police than unarmed white people last year. And that's taking into account the fact that black people are only 14% of the population here.
"It goes back to this question of how do they perceive young black men? There's something in the US called Vision Zero, a commitment by mayors to achieve zero traffic fatalities in a specified timeframe.
"We haven't seen mayors step up and make clear commitments to eliminate the level of police violence in their communities. I think that says a lot about the relative value that they place on those constituents' lives."
Lorie Fridell: Some police guilty of 'black crime implicit bias'
Lorie Fridell is an Associate Professor of criminology at the University of South Florida and was director of research at the Police Executive Research Forum.
Image copyrightUNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDAImage captionLorie Fridell cites research showing black people are often assumed to pose a higher threat
"I'm a white, middle-class professional woman. I enjoy a great deal of privilege. And I certainly have the black crime implicit bias: I am more likely to see threat in African Americans than I would Caucasians.
"Racial profiling was the number one issue facing police [in the 1990s], and I came to understand two things. Bias in policing was not just a few officers in a few departments; and, overwhelmingly, the police in this country are well-intentioned. I couldn't put those two thoughts together in my head until I was introduced to the science of implicit bias.
"We all have implicit biases whereby we link groups to stereotypes, possibly producing discriminatory behaviour - even in individuals who are totally against prejudice.
"The original 'Shoot, Don't Shoot' studies have a subject sitting in front a computer monitor and photos pop up very quickly, showing either a white or black man. That man either has a gun in his hand or a neutral object like a cell phone. The subject is told 'if you see a threat, hit the 'shoot' key and if you don't see a threat, hit the 'don't shoot' key'. "The studies suggest that implicit biases affect these actions - for example in some studies people are quicker to 'shoot' an unarmed black man than an unarmed white man. A Department of Justice report released in Marchlooking at the use of deadly force by Philadelphia police, supports the idea that police are susceptible to implicit bias:
"One of the things they looked at is what they called threat perception failure. The officer believed that the person was armed and it turned out not to be the case. And these failures were more likely to occur when the subject was black [even if the officers were themselves black or Latino].
"Officers, like the rest of us, have an implicit bias linking blacks to crime. So the black crime implicit bias might be implicated in some of the use of deadly force against African-Americans in our country.
"An important message in our training is that stereotypes are based in part on fact, and we have to recognise this because in our country, people of colour are disproportionately represented amongst the people who commit street crime.
"That does not give you licence to treat every individual in a group as if they fit the stereotype, that's where we go wrong."
Former policeman Seth Stoughton is now a law professor at the University of South Carolina.
Image copyrightHARVARD LAW SCHOOLImage captionSeth Stoughton argues police training should focus more on conflict resolution than the use of force
"The first rule of law enforcement is to go home at the end of your shift. The key principle is officer survival. That's what all training is designed to promote. But it ends up endangering civilians rather than preserving their safety.
"The warrior culture - the belief that police officers are soldiers engaged in battle with the criminal element - that has contributed to some shootings that were most likely avoidable.
"It starts in police recruitment videos that show officers shooting rifles, strapping on hard body armour, using force. That attracts a particular type of candidate, and the Police Academy further entrenches this.
"It teaches officers to be afraid by telling them that policing is an incredibly dangerous profession.
"Officers are trained to view every encounter as a potential deadly force incident: you walk up to a person who is loitering outside of a convenience store, their hands are in their pockets. You as the officer begin talking to them, and without saying a word they pull a gun out of their pocket and begin shooting you.
"Training involves an average of about 60 hours on deadly force - the use of firearms - and just over 60 hours on self-defence. Compare that to de-escalation conflict resolution training: the average there is only eight hours of training, and most of that is classroom-based.
"When the military is designing a mission, they have in mind the fact that they're going to lose soldiers. The police profession has strongly repudiated that notion. No officer fatalities are acceptable.
"If all of the states had the same approach and the same numbers of officer-involved homicides as the best states, the states that had the fewest, we could expect about 300 to 600 lives to be saved every year."
Charles Ramsey: We have to fix wider social problems first
Image copyrightPHILADELPHIA POLICE DEPTImage captionCommissioner Ramsey argues that police officers are also the victims of violence
"We live in a society where everybody wants to point fingers, but we have a lot of deeply-rooted societal problems: poverty, education, poor housing stock.
"We've got to deal with the issue of extreme poverty. Philadelphia has the highest rate of poverty among US cities. You have an underground economy that supports many of these neighbourhoods - drugs, prostitution, illegal cigarette sales.
"Why are police in large numbers in some of these neighbourhoods? We have to deal with the reality that there's a disproportionate amount of crime occurring in many of these neighbourhoods.
"We've had several police officers shot and killed during the past seven years. I've had eight officers killed in the line of duty - five shot dead. So there is violence that takes place against police as well, and that needs to be taken into consideration."
To tackle the problem, he has divided Philadelphia into separate areas with their own teams:
"They have monthly community meetings to talk about crime and disorder. Cadets that come out of the academy are assigned to foot patrol right away, they don't automatically go into cars. So that they actually get to know people in these challenged communities, good folks that are there entrapped in certain conditions."
In response to the Department of Justice report criticising Philadelphia police's use of force, Commissioner Ramsey introduced new training that focuses on de-escalation, as well as armed response:
"Putting them in scenarios where they have to exercise good judgement and being able to critique that so that when they are in these real live situations, their reaction, their response, is really more consistent with what the actual threat is."
The Inquiry is broadcast on the BBC World Service on Tuesdays from 1205 GMT/1305 BST. Listen online or download the podcast
