Pinocchio comes to life and assumes the characteristics of a human boy. He almost regularly abuses his father’s (Geppetto) trust and inflicts harm, if unintentionally, on the poor man. For instance, Pinocchio promises to go to school and Geppetto sells his only coat to buy books for his beloved son. But instead of going to school, Pinocchio sells his schoolbook for tickets to a music show. Pinocchio’s nose grows longer every time he tells a lie. When he continues to lie, his nose begins to grow until it is so long he cannot turn around in the room. Pinocchio resembles some of our military officers who betray their father nation’s trust and instead of dealing with their duties, spend our scarce resources non-transparently for matters that do not legally fall within the ambit of their job description. Any time they are caught not doing their job, they vehemently deny it. But any time they lie about their wrongdoings, it becomes much more difficult to hide the truth, and next time they need to tell a bigger lie. However, their noses continue to grow with each lie so that they become unable to do further maneuvering.
As you all know, one of those soldiers, Col. Dursun Çicek, allegedly prepared a document to destroy the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and some civilian movements. The document reads like a horror story. For instance, it states that some university dormitories associated with the Gülen movement would have rifles, heavy weaponry, bombs, etc., planted in the dormitories by soldiers and then these innocent students would be caught red-handed. When Çiçek was invited by the prosecutors to give evidence about this illegal document, he signed a different signature than the one that appears on the document. He insisted that he changed his signature three years ago; thus the document that appears to be of a more recent date could not belong to him. But being more intelligent than Çiçek, civilian prosecutors presented him several newly dated official documents with Çiçek’s old signature on them. Instead of confessing that he lied, he claimed that he told his story of changing his signature by mistake.
To protect his colonel, Chief of General Staff Gen. İlker Başbuğ shouted at a press conference and pointed his finger harshly at the cameras, saying because there was not an original copy, the document was only a piece of paper. To his surprise, a few weeks ago the original document was sent to the prosecutors with a letter stating that Başbuğ knew that the document was prepared by Çiçek and wanted to protect his colonel.
I will not mention several news stories published by the Taraf daily which have shown with evidence that the military has misinformed the public about many vital issues such as the Dağlıca incident, but the recent news is very remarkable. The mysterious soldier who sent the original Çiçek document to the prosecutors sent them a second letter giving the details of several Web sites with illegal content that propagates fabricated lies about the AK Party, practicing Muslims and Kurds. These Web sites incite people to hatred, and they provoke civil strife between Turks-Kurds, Sunnis-Alevis, etc. They claim that Erdoğan and his wife are secret Jews. Anti-EU and anti-US rhetoric is also widespread in these full-of-lies Web sites. The mysterious soldier also gave the credit card details of the owners of these Web sites who paid hosting fees with their own credit cards. And guess what. All of the owners are military officers. Unable to deny this very concrete fact, the Office of the Chief of General Staff said all this was true but that the order came from the Prime Ministry. But the Prime Ministry did not keep silent and declared that they never gave such an order. This time, soldiers said it was an order from 2000. The Prime Ministry struck back, insistent that there was nothing in the archives and asked if the soldiers could give any exact date and number of the order. Unable to answer this, to this day, Pinocchios in uniforms kept their silence.
Who knows, instead of reflecting on being good soldiers beneficial to their father nation from now on, they may now be trying to truncate their noses to save their faces. Old habits die hard, and our soldiers seem to think that instead of weapons, they urgently need more and more shredders.
