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James Bovard, Opinion columnist Published 7:00 a.m. ET Feb. 4, 2020

What is classified? It all depends on the politicians. Long before Bolton, the Obama White House used classification as a tool of censorship.

Ever since the 9/11 attacks, Republicans and Democrats have conspired to keep Americans increasingly ignorant of what the federal government does.The number ofsecret federal documents skyrocketed, andany information classified was treated like a political holy relic that could not be exposed without dooming the nation. Ironically, the fate of the Trump presidency may hinge on perpetuating the unjustifiable secrecy now pervading Washington.

John Bolton wrote a book about his experiences as President Donald Trumps national security adviser that could provide key information regarding Trumps dealing with the Ukrainian government, and Democratic members of Congress are calling for the manuscript to be made public.Former government officials are obliged tosubmit their publications for review to ensurethat no classified information is revealed.Boltonslawyer deniesthat thebook contains classified information, but previous manuscript reviews of other would-be authors have dragged out for months or years.

Since the 1990s, the number of classified documents annually by federal agencies hasincreased more than 15 times.

In 2004, then-Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn., derided the federal classification systemas "incomprehensibly complex" and "sobloated it often does not distinguishbetween the critically important and the comically irrelevant."

TheNew York Timesreported in 2005 that federal agencies were classifying documents at the rate of 125 a minute as theycreate new categories of semi-secrets bearing vague labels like 'sensitive security information.' "

Each classified document is tacitly backed by a federal iron fist ready to squash anyone who discloses it without permission.Regardless of whether the Trump White House is conniving to stifle Boltons disclosures,it was theObama White House that weaponized classification.J. William Leonard, former chief of the federal Information Security Oversight Office, complained in 2011 that the Obama administration had "criminally prosecuted more leakersof purportedly classified information than all previous administrations combined."

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For the Obama administration,leaking classified information to the news media was worse thanspying for a hostile government. Its Justice Department declared in 2011 that government officials who "elected to disclose the classifiedinformation publicly through the mass media" were "posing an even greater threat to society" than do foreign spies.

The Obama administration believed that its classification decrees were so sacrosanct,no federal judge could overturn them. "We dont think there is aFirst Amendment right to classified documents," Justice Department lawyer Catherine Dorsey told a federal judge in 2015.

Dorsey agreed that the governments position was tantamount to claiming that the court "has absolutely no authority" to unseal evidence even if its clear the governments bid to keep it secret is based on "irrationality" or that its "hiding something," as The Interceptreported.

National security adviser John Bolton.(Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

Classification is also a literary scourge. Hundreds of thousands of former officials and military personnel with security clearances must allow pre-publication reviews of their books and other writings. Former Justice Department lawyer Jesselyn Radack observed that pre-publication review "has always been a filter to promotefawning memoirs by senior governmentofficials while censoring whistleblowers and critics."

A2019 lawsuitclaimed that thepre-publication censorshipvested excessive power in government officials who, according to The New York Times,"can delay or discriminate against lower-ranking peoplewho criticize government actions, while speedily clearing favorable memoirs and other writings by retired senior officials."

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, declared, "This far-reaching censorship systemsimply cant be squared with the Constitution."

Torturers have benefited mightily from censorship. Mark Fallon, a veteran counterintelligence officer andcounterterrorism expert, wrote a book entitled "Unjustifiable Means: The Inside Story of How the CIA, Pentagon and U.S. Government Conspired to Torture." But his account of the torture regime was badly delayed and heavily censored. Fallon charges that books by the architects and apologists for CIA tortureincluding former CIA Director George Tenet, former acting general counsel John Rizzoand former Counterterrorism Center chief Jose Rodriguezwere treated better in the pre-publication process.

Similarly, when former FBI counterterrorism agent Ali Soufan wrote a book on CIA torture abuses, the CIA demanded that Soufan who was on-site for brutal interrogations remove the pronouns "I" and "me" fromhis narrative.The CIA alsodeleted quotes in his bookthat had appeared in congressional hearing transcripts.

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Classification is often a political flag of convenience that politicians exploit to dominate the media. New York Timescolumnist Maureen Dowd observed in 2006, "The entire Iraq War was paved by (Bush administration)leaks. Cheney & Co. were so busy trying toprove a mushroom cloudwas emanating from (Saddam Husseins) direction, they could not leak their cherry-picked stories fast enough."

Bush administration disclosures of sensitive information were often handed on a silver platter to pliant journalists.Newsweeks Richard Wolffe explained the Bush White House method: "Theydeclassify when they feel like it.Ive been with senior administration officials who have just decided todeclassify something in front of me because its bolstering their argument."

When federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced former Trump aide Rick Gates last month, she declared, "If people don't have the facts, democracy doesn't work."

But Republicans and Democrats in Washington have long since approved denying Americans the facts millions of times a year. Unfortunately, secrecy and lying are often two sides of the same political coin.

James Bovard, author of "Attention Deficit Democracy," is a member of USA TODAYs Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter:@JimBovard

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Claims that John Bolton's book disclosures are 'top secret' ring hollow - USA TODAY

Electoral losers are increasingly blaming social media for their failure, but this year will demonstrate that censorship is not the answer.

Democracy only works if the losers of elections accept defeat, but sadly few are inclined to do so these days. Now we have five stages of electoral grief that are directly analogous to the original Kbler-Ross model. We still have denial, anger and depression, but instead of bargaining we have litigation and acceptance seems to have been replaced with conspiracy theories in which social media plays a central role.

The central concern is that when people vote for the other team it must be because they were mislead in some way, because no rational, fully informed person could fail to recognise the superiority of my team. In the past some blame could be attached to the mainstream media, something the UK Labour party still persists with. In the US, however, Donald Trumps victory in 2016 despite having the support of no major media, would appear to render that theory obsolete.

Trump was able to prevail because politicians are no longer dependent on the old media to communicate directly with the electorate, thanks to social media. But this significantly lowered barrier to entry into the public sphere also provides fertile ground for electoral losers searching for mitigation and another bite at the cherry.

A favourite on both sides of the pond is to blame the Russians. While the focus of cold war paranoia has largely shifted to China, Russia remains a strong source of bogeymen. Now it should be noted that there is plenty of evidence of social media bot farms originating from a number of countries, including Russia, that apparently seek to meddle in elections. What is much harder to prove is whether they had any effect whatsoever on the outcome.

The small matter of evidence is never going to stand in the way of those refusing to concede defeat, however, and it has now become conventional wisdom that social media censorship is vital if we are to ever have untainted elections again. Since the US is in the middle of another of its interminable general election campaigns this year, the heat is being turned up on social media and they are being forced to respond.

Last week Twitter announced it was turning on a tool for key moments of the 2020 US election that enables people to report misleading information about how to participate in an election or other civic event. The tweet below implies the tool has a broader purpose than that, though, as it also includes intimidation and misrepresenting of political affiliation. Already you can see how a simple censorship objective becomes immediately and massively complicated under the weight of interpretation, semantics and generally chasing its tail.

Then you have Google and its subsidiary YouTube blogging about how much they support elections, whatever thats supposed to mean. Again a lot of this focuses on content that is intended to mislead voters, but since electioneering is biased by definition, surely all of it is intended to mislead to some extent. YouTube also reiterates its aim to promote authoritative voices, which is code for the establishment media and commentariat.

In contrast, Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is increasingly pushing back on censorship, having tried and failed to walk that tightrope since the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Perhaps motivated by the prospect of an extra four years of Trump, who has made his feelings known on censorship, Zuckerberg is now turning all free speech absolutist on us. Whether that position will survive even the first engagement of the US electoral process, however, remains highly debatable.

Early signs of the immense pressure these platform owners will come under are already appearing, with the Democrats mobilising supposed experts to protect the electoral process. Iowas first-in-the-nation caucus will mark the DNCs greatest challenge so far in efforts to guard its presidential contenders from the same fate that befell Hillary Clinton in 2016 when her campaign was upended by a Russian-backed hacking and disinformation effort, reports the Washington Post in depressingly partisan fashion.

If that WaPo piece is anything to go by everyone is going to be trying to manipulate not only the US Presidential election, but the Democratic primaries too, where non-establishment candidate Bernie Sanders is currently the front-runner. Presumably YouTube doesnt intend to punish the countrys mainstream media for misleading the electorate, so it seems it will support democracy by censoring everyone else.

As ever, restricting speech in free societies is a game of whack-a-mole, in which countermeasures can never hope to keep up with the desire of its people to say what they want. Even if the social media companies are successful in their stated censorship objectives, which they wont be, the team that loses will still blame them. So they might as well not bother and trust their users to sort the wheat from the chaff. After all, theyve been doing that with mainstream media for years.

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The US election will test social media censorship to breaking point - Telecoms.com

HuffPost UK ran yet another hit piece smearing academic critics of the dirty war on Syria as Russian stooges. The outlets executive editor, Jess Brammar, assists a British government program that censors journalism that may compromise UK military and intelligence operations.By Ben Norton

The Huffington Post has relied on Western government officials and organizations funded by Western governments to viciously smear anti-war academics as useful idiots of Russia, claiming they are being used by the Kremlin.

Ironically, HuffPost UK has done this while its own executive editor actively collaborates with the British Ministry of Defense in a program that censors journalism on behalf of UK military and intelligence operations, in order to protect national security interests.

HuffPost UK published a hit piece by Chris York on January 29 that hearkens back to the era of McCarthyite witch hunts. Titled The Useful Idiots: How These British Academics Helped Russia Deny War Crimes At The UN, Yorks hatchet job is dedicated to destroying the reputations of several anti-war scholars who have done extensive research exposing the lies and regime-change propaganda spread by Western governments in their hybrid war on Syria.

It was Yorks twelfth piece attacking this small group of academics. From the perspective of the British public, a group of semi-obscure professors is an unusual source of interest. However, it is clear that the UK military-intelligence apparatus that dumped untold millions of pounds into promoting regime change in Syria has a clear agenda here.

Yorks article relies almost entirely on the unsubstantiated opinions of European government officials and groups that are bankrolled by the United States and European governments. It also features some glaring omissions, leaving out key details and misleading readers.

HuffPost UK executive editor Jess Brammar took to Twitter to promote the hit piece, claiming it shows how a group of British academics have been used by Russia to help them deny war crimes by the Assad regime at the UN.

Its quite a tale please give it a read, Brammar added. It is indeed a tale and a tall one at that, given the article dabbles in fiction with unsubstantiated hyperbolic claims based on Cold War-era propaganda tropes.

Brammar shared a quote from the piece that is attributed to an anonymous European diplomat, who claimed anti-war British scholars are unwittingly and naively acting as agents of propaganda for the Russians, or actively support[ing] Russian disinformation.

While the HuffPost UKs executive editor smears dissenting academics as agents of propaganda for the Russians, she herself actively collaborates with a British government censorship program as writer Caitlin Johnstone first pointed out.

Jess Brammar is a member of the Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee, a government initiative overseen by the Ministry of Defence (MOD) that, according to its official website, exists to prevent inadvertent public disclosure of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations and methods or potentially challenge national security interests.

In other words, the DSMA Committee is a group of media elites who voluntarily agree to collaborate with the British government to censor stories and information the UK military and spy operations deem inconvenient or too dangerous for the public to see.

The DSMA Committee is chaired by the director of general security policy for the UK Ministry of Defense. It includes four more government officials: the directors of national security at the MOD, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Home Office, and the Cabinet Office. They are joined by three military officials in secretarial positions, along with a government assistant.

Rounding out the committee are 17 media elites, representing major publishers such as the Huffington Post, the Times, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, Sky News, ITV, the BBC, the Press Association, Harper Colins UK, and more.

Brammar was one of the only two members of the committee to be nominated directly by the chair and vice-chairs. In other words, the director of general security policy for the UK Ministry of Defense personally chose her to be on the DSMA Committee a clear stamp of approval for her editorial judgment from the British military establishment.

In a report entitled, How the UK Security Services neutralised the countrys leading liberal newspaper, journalists Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis demonstrated how the military-intelligence apparatus cultivated The Guardian as its tool. The process began in earnest after the Guardian embarrassed Western governments by publishing secret documents leaked by National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

The DSMA Committee was previously called the Defence Advisory Notice (DA-Notice) and Defence Notice (D-Notice) Committee, and purports to be voluntary. Kennard dug through officials minutes of meetings held by the committee and found that the secretary implied otherwise, insisting, The Guardian was obliged to seek advice under the terms of the DA notice code, and This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it.

Periodically, the MOD-led committee sends out a private message to British media outlets called a D-Notice, which warns the ostensibly independent press against publishing information that would jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel.

Kennard outlined how these D-Notices have been used to muffle journalists, and prevent the publication of stories that threatened to embarrass the British government.

HuffPost UK editor Jess Brammar is at the heart of this government effort to silence critical media.

But it is not just Brammars ongoing, willing participation in a British military-led censorship program that makes her attempts to portray Huffington Post and her reporter Chris York as noble truth-tellers fending off attacks by a baying mob of Kremlin-sponsored abusers so hypocritical.

HuffPost UK smearing independent thinkers and critical-minded academics as Russian puppets while actively peddling propaganda on behalf of Western governments is astoundingly ironic.

In his wildly misleading article, York describes the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM), a collective of dissident British scholars, as agents of propaganda for the Russians.

The thrust of this smear piece is the unsubstantiated opinion of an unnamed European diplomat, who is quoted in five paragraphs viciously maligning the scholars, and whose personal partisan views are presented as absolute fact.

The HuffPost UK hatchet job provides no actual evidence that these scholars have been working with or for the Russian government. The only links to the Kremlin that York could find are hilariously thin: one Russian official praised the group, and another tweeted a link to their work.

Moreover, some of the so-called experts cited by York happen to work for pro-war organizations funded directly by Western governments.

York relies on pundit Shadi Hamid to depict WGSPM as crazy loons. Hamid works at the hawkish think tank the Brookings Institution, which is funded by the Qatari monarchy and US governments.

Hamid is also a vocal advocate for Western military intervention who has gone to absurd lengths to defend NATOs regime-change war on Libya, which destroyed the most prosperous country in Africa and left behind a failed state that turned into a massive ISIS base and a hub for trafficking and enslavement of African refugees.

Another purported expert cited by York is the open source reporter Eliot Higgins, who smears the WGSPM as useful idiots.

Higgins is the founder of the pro-NATO blog Bellingcat, which is funded directly by the US governments regime-change arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a notorious CIA cutout. Bellingcat is also part of a UK government-financed program backed by the British Foreign Office. And Higgins former employer is the Atlantic Council, NATOs unofficial think tank, also bankrolled by Western governments as well as Gulf monarchies and the arms industry.

While HuffPost UKs in-house regime-change cheerleader Chris York treats the Bellingcat founder as an expert, even the New York Times acknowledged in a puff piece that Higgins has no real expertise. Higgins attributed his skill not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, the paper noted, but to the hours he had spent playing video games, which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.

In recent months, the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media published leaks from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) revealing that at least two whistleblowers complained that the UN-created organization had become politicized, accusing the management of suppressing and even reversing scientific findings under US government pressure.

The apparent OPCW suppression concerns the allegations that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in the city of Douma in April 2018, in an area occupied by Salafi-jihadist insurgents.

The US, British, and French governments claimed without evidence that Damascus had launched a gas attack in this Islamist extremist-occupied area. In response, Washington and its allies launched missile strikes against the Syrian government in violation of international law.

Numerous leaks from the OPCW have cast doubt on the unsubstantiated allegations of Western governments. Along with the WGSPM, WikiLeaks has published several batches of leaks from the OPCW, including internal emails that show signs of high-level suppression of inconvenient scientific findings about the incident in Douma.

HuffPost UKs Chris York did not even mention WikiLeaks in his wildly misleading article. Instead, York falsely asserts that there is no reliable evidence to support the theory that the alleged Douma gas attack was staged by the Salafi-jihadist insurgents on the ground.

Conspicuously absent from Yorks article was the smoking gun that arrived in the form of testimony at the United Nations Security Council by former OPCW inspection team leader and engineering expert Ian Henderson.

In January, Henderson told the UN via video that OPCW management had suppressed the fact-finding mission (FFM) teams findings on the ground in Douma. (Henderson had wanted to testify in person at the UN, but the US government did not give him a visa.)

We had serious misgivings that a chemical attack had occurred, Henderson explained. The former OPCW expert added that his months of research provided further support for the view that there had not been a chemical attack.

In his article, York completely avoided mention of Henderson and UN testimony, in a very egregious and misleading oversight. And this striking omission appears to be intentional, because on Twitter, York later condemned Henderson, along with the other OPCW whistleblower who goes by Alex, claiming they are wrong.

The fact that York would conveniently leave out Hendersons UN testimony the most important, and scandalous piece of evidence yet of OPCW chicanery while publicly smearing him on Twitter shows that the methodology of the reporting itself is clearly biased, sloppy, and unprofessional.

Yorks attack piece is also self-referential. In one especially dubious sentence, he claims the WGSPM has previously been accused of whitewashing war crimes.' To support this grave accusation, York links to an article by himself from 2018, which is essentially a mimeograph of his latest attack.

This 2018 smear piece accusing the WGSPM academics of whitewashing war crimes attributes the outrageous accusation not to a legal expert on war crimes but rather to Leila al-Shami, who has spent years lobbying for foreign intervention to violently overthrow the Syrian government.

Al-Shami is, in fact, the pen name for a mysterious British activist whose credentials are impossible to validate. According to Robin Yassin-Kassab, the co-author of her book, Burning Syria, Leila al-Shami is the pseudonym of another British Syrian who worked in Syria in the human rights field before the revolution.

For years, al-Shami has refused to show her face on camera. During a 2016 event at NYUs Kevorkian Center, for example, attendees were forbidden from filming al-Shamis talk for security reasons. In a June 2017 interview with Spains El Nacional (in which she and Yassin-Kassab wrongly forecasted a partition of Syria), al-Shami was photographed turning away to hide her face. She claimed that she could not be seen publicly for security reasons.

However, during an April 2016 event at New York Citys New School, al-Shami was photographed and filmed while on stage. The image was published by Flatiron Hot News, a local culture publication.

Al-Shami is best known for marketing the cause of regime change in Syria to the Western left, painting it as a glorious grassroots struggle for participatory democracy, while branding its leftist opponents as crypto-fascists and idiots.

Her book, Burning Country, contained no on-the-ground reporting, relying instead on reports by and about opposition activists largely funded by the US government and Gulf states such as the White Helmets and Raed Fares.

While al-Shami claims to have been involved in human rights and social justice struggles in Syria, the human rights group she supposedly co-founded, Tahrir-ICN, appears to be an empty shell that consists of a few barely active social media pages and a dormant blog.

Yorks reliance on a shady figure like this further highlights his deceptive tactics. By citing regime change activists as credible experts while heaping scorn on his subjects with passive-voice phrases like have been accused of, he disguises his own opinions as objective reporting.

Under the leadership of executive editor and British security state collaborator Jess Brammar, Yorks brand of propaganda is not only tolerated at HuffPost UK; it is encouraged.

Yorks hit piece on the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media was, in fact, his 12th attack on the small band of dissident academics. Desperate to suppress inconvenient facts about the dirty war on Syria, some powerful forces have found reliable propagandists at the HuffPost UK.

Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.comand he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.

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HuffPost UK editor works with govt censorship program while smearing anti-war scholars as tools of Russia - The Grayzone

National Guard photo (Excerpt) by Tech. Sgt. Daniel Gagnon, JTF-DC [Public domain]

January 31, 2020; Washington Post

Fear of ruffling powers feathers in Washington these days is palpable. Twice, exhibits designed to mark the 100th anniversary of women receiving the right to vote and tell the story of the ongoing struggle for womens rights have been modified to avoid the ire of the president and his supporters. In both cases, leaders pulled between protecting organizational integrity and what they perceived as potential political blowback yielded to fearand ethics and mission integrity were compromised.

Late last week, we learned that back in May, shortly before an exhibit entitled Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote was set to open at the Library of Congress, curators decided that a photograph of the January 2017 Womens March in Washington was inappropriate. Rather than depict the massive crowd that turned out a day following the inauguration, they chose a picture of only eight marchers in Houston, Texas. The new picture chosen showed one sign, reading, Fight Like A Girl. The picture removed included many signs with messages challenging President Trump.

Kevin Carrolls photo of the Washington march was initially selected because it captured the scope, size, and energy of todays womens movement. In an email to Carroll obtained by the Washington Post, Library of Congress senior exhibition director Betsy Nahum-Miller explained the Librarys thinking. While the vast majority of the exhibition will focus on the years leading up to attaining the vote, the exhibit will also give visitors a sense of the ongoing struggle for women in the political, economic and social realms.

For that reason, says Nahum-Miller, we wanted to include an image from the 2017 March on Washington. We believe it captures the essence and energy of the march and serves as a contemporary representation of women using the power of protest and exercising their right to engage in American democracy.

Just days before the exhibit was to open, though, Nahum-Miller informed Carroll that his photo was out. I am so sorry that this happened and Im very disappointed we cant use your spectacular photo. Library of Congress Spokesperson April Slayton explained the decision to the Washington Post:

The Library of Congress strives to present historical exhibitions that are balanced and engaging for all visitors with diverse points of view and generally seeks to avoid content that would unnecessarily alienate visitors based on political viewsvulgar language and political content was not appropriate for the Librarys exhibit.

Slayton says that Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden was informed of the decision soon after and supported it.

This mirrors language used by the National Archives when it sought to explain why it had doctored a similar photo at the entrance to its Womens Suffrage commemorative exhibit at the end of 2019. In organizations whose missions were historic accuracy and preservation, the leaders in both cases chose to edit that history for fear that those in power might cut their budgets. James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, described this dilemma in comments to the Washington Post: Everybody who leads these institutions has to ask themselves, In taking a principled stand, am I endangering the institution that I consider to be useful and essential to public culture? Thats a tough question.

For the artist whose work is censored, the question is not so difficult. I was a little embarrassed, a little hurt, Carroll says. I really wanted to be a part of it. Ive looked again at the photo, and I dont see anything over the top. Its also not that tough for those whose story is erased from the history being taught. Rinku Sen, co-president of the Womens Marchs board of directors, said in an email to the Post that removing the anti-Trump references from images or choosing an image without such a reference obscures the fact that the Womens March was a pointed oppositional action, not just a sweet expression of womens empowerment. Public institutions have a responsibility to present us accurately.

Protecting the financial and political strength of their institutions is the responsibility of organizational leaders. Worrying about how various segments of the community and key stakeholders will react is part of their jobs. But so too is defending their missions. The National Archives, after widespread reaction to its self-censorship, reversed course and displayed an unaltered picture. The Library of Congress has so far chosen to stand pat. Both organizations censored themselves without being asked to do so. Of course, power operates best when it remains invisible.Martin Levine

Originally posted here:
Et Tu, Library of Congress? How Far Will Self-Censorship Go? - Nonprofit Quarterly

A law that allows Turkish citizens convicted of minor charges to stay out of jail is piling pressure on journalists and activists to censor themselves, Inside Turkey reported.

Article 231 of the Turkish criminal code allows people hit with a prison sentence of under two years to defer their sentences by five years and keep it off their criminal record if they do not face a fresh conviction.

But for writers and activists in the country that has been among the top jailers of journalists in the world, the prospect of a jail sentence looming over their heads is pushing many to self-censor, Inside Turkey said.

Many journalists and activists in Turkey, particularly those linked to the Kurdish political movement, have been charged in recent years for their links to outlawed organisations or for social media posts. Deferments, which can be applied by courts against the defendants wishes, have sometimes been used to avoid making judgements on sensitive or complex cases, leaving the defendants in a state of legal limbo, it said.

Journalists face various accusations, not just crimes against the state but accusations such as defamation, insults or attacks on personal rights, said zcan Kl, a lawyer who often defends Kurdish journalists and social media users in freedom of speech cases. The courts must apply either a sentence or an acquittal.

See the rest here:
Suspended sentence law contributing to self-censorship in Turkey - Ahval