CNN, Fox and the rest of the corporate propaganda media were taken by surprise when a military coup unfolded in Turkey on Friday.

"We don't know who's in control of the country," @HollyMAWilliams reports from #Turkey: https://t.co/yxTFc5fe8D https://t.co/Ajgsr96OWU

— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 15, 2016

They have chalked it up as a move by renegade factions within the Turkish military, or so Fareed Zakaria declared. Not to worry, the experts say, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has a handle on the situation and everything will return to normal after the malcontents are dealt with.

Left unmentioned by the establishment media is the fact Erdogan long ago reached his shelf life as the leader of Turkey, a key NATO asset that has lately produced an appreciable amount of consternation.

As Saddam Hussein and a number of other CIA assets—notably, Panama’s Manuel Noriega—learned the hard way, it is not wise to disregard marching orders. Erdogan displeased his national security state benefactors when he mulled buying missiles from China, a move that snubbed NATO and raised hackles in Washington.

Further exacerbating the displeasure, Erdogan said in 2013 he would join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as hopes of EU membership dwindled.

“I said to Russian President Vladimir Putin,‘You tease us, saying, ‘what [is Turkey] doing in the EU?’ Now I tease you: Include us in the Shanghai Five and we will forget about the EU,’” Erdogan said.

Erdogan, however, put an end to that when he shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 fighter jet on the Syria-Turkey border.

Sibel Edmonds wrote for Boiling Frogs Post (BFP) on January 18, 2014:

No matter how we look at it Erdogan’s days are numbered. One will not get away with having a major rift with the CIA. That’s one commandment. Violated. Thou shall not buy weapons from China or Russia regardless of quality or price advantage. Thou shall only feed the Empire’s own fat Military Industrial Complex players. That’s another major commandment. Violated. A puppet shall only be a member of clubs solely owned and operated by the Empire. Joining others’ clubs, even thinking of joining others’ clubs, shall come with severe retribution.

Equally significant in Erdogan’s downfall is Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish Islamist who is on the outs with the ruling regime in Turkey.

Erdogan accused Gülen of instigating a corruption investigation against the government and as a result he was put on Turkey’s most-wanted terrorist list. He stands accused of leading what Turkish officials call the Gulenist Terror Organization (FETO). Turkey is demanding the extradition of Gülen from the United States.

Gülen admits he is influenced by Islamic reformer Said Nursi, a trusted CIA asset. William Engdahl told BFP last year “all evidence suggests that NATO Turkish Gladio networks picked up Gülen as a potentially useful asset years ago.”

Unlike the CIA’s Mujahideen Jihadists like Hekmatyar in Afghanistan or Naser Oric in Bosnia, the CIA decided to give Fethullah Gülen a radically different image. No blood-curdling, head-severing, human-heart-eating Jihadist. No, Fethullah Gülen was presented to the world as a man of “peace, love and brotherhood,” even managing to grab a photo op with Pope John Paul II, which Gülen featured prominently on his website. The Gülen organization in the US hired one of Washington’s highest-paid Public Relations image experts, George W. Bush’s former campaign director, Karen Hughes, to massage his “moderate” Islam image.

It has been obvious for some time that Erdogan is not following the script, most recently in Syria where his overtures to the Islamic State and related corruption scandals in regard to stolen oil have proven to be embarrassing for the United States.

It is too early to say if the attempted coup in Turkey is an effort by US intelligence to get rid of Erdogan, or if it is in fact yet another coup in a country where coups are fairly standard. The Turkish military staged coups of varying success in 1960, 1971, 1980, 1993, and 1997.

A look at the history of military coups in #Turkey.

Live coverage: https://t.co/zPYcLqWMHihttps://t.co/0IhMi6gxh2

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) July 16, 2016

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