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September 29th, 2017 
Awake Goy 
nsnbc : Turkey, holding U.S.-American pastor Andrew Brunson jailed on highly dubious national security charges, reiterated its demand that Washington extradite the self-exiled Turkish cleric Fetullah Gülen. The USA is not the only target of Turkey’s hostage taking and blackmail. The German government stressed that several Germans are held in Turkey under political and trumped-up charges.
U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauer stressed that the United States will not consider extraditing the self-exiled, Pennsylvania-based cleric Fetullah Gülen in exchange for the release of Pastor Andrew Brunson, who has been in jail in Turkey since October 2016. During a press briefing on September 28, 2017 Nauert, when asked about remarks by Turkey’s President R. Tayyip Erdogan, said “I can’t imagine that we would go down that road.”
Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on the United States to exchange Gülen, whom Ankara accuses of having orchestrated the July 15, 2016 coup attempt, with Pastor Brunson. Earlier on September 28, Erdogan implied that the Washington wanted to “trade Gülen for Brunson” when he said “We have given you all the documents necessary [for the extradition of Gülen]. But they say, ‘give us the pastor.’ You have another pastor on your hands. Give us that pastor and we will do what we can in the judiciary to give you this one.”
Brunson was taken into custody on October 7, 2016 on suspicions of “being a threat to national security.” Erdogan did not detail when or to whom he made this proposal. His last meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump took place on September 21 in New York. “You say you have a judiciary, do you think we don’t? Anyway, the one that we have [in our hands] is being tried, the one you have [in your hands] is not being tried. It is easier for you to give,” Erdogan frowned in his speech.
Fetullah Gülen, Türkish cleric in self-imposed exile in the USA with long-standing links to the CIA, and allegedly involved in the failed military coup in Turkey on July 15, 2016.
Nauert said U.S. President Trump raised the issue of Branson’s arrest with Erdogan. “That is a very important issue for us, to try to get Pastor Brunson home,” she said. “It is something that the president had raised with Mr. Erdogan not too terribly long ago. The State Department has been in as close of contact as we can be with Pastor Brunson. We were last able to visit him on September 18. That’s a new bit of news. The last time that we had visited him was—let’s see, it was August 24. And we just—we continue to advocate for his release. He was wrongfully imprisoned in Turkey and we would like to see him brought home,” she said.
“We have received several requests for his extradition from the Turkish government,” said Nauert, regarding Turkey’s request for Gülen’s extradition. “Though—that is something—we have not talked about this for a while … We continue to evaluate it [and] take a look at the materials that the Turkish government has provided us,” she said.
The United States is not the only country targeted by Turkey with political hostage situations. Another country targeted by an increasingly erratic Erdogan regime is Germany. Germany put all major arms exports to Turkey on hold due to the deteriorating human rights situation and increasingly strained bilateral tes between the two NATO members, said German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel on Monday, September 11.
Sigmar Gabriel’s remarks came after a German Foreign Ministry spokesman in the capital Berlin said yet another German couple was believed to have been detained in Turkey on political charges. During a panel discussion organized by the German business daily Handelsblatt, Gabriel said “We have put on hold all big requests [for arms exports] that Turkey has sent us and these are really not a few.”
In November 2016 German defense manufacturer Heckler & Koch (H&K) already questioned whether the company would deliver more weapons to Turkey. H&K, in 2016, mulled the stop of arms exports to Turkey as the company planned to rebrand its image and limit exports to other NATO member States and other “solid states”. Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel is a senior member of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD),and at that time member of Chancello Angela Merkel’s CDU-led coalition.
Gabriel would modify his statement when he said Germany was “obliged” to send arms to another NATO country “if requested”, and them re-modified his statement when he said that this was currently not possible because nearly all arms exports to Turkey had been put on ice”. Gabriel explained that there were only a few exemptions, such as if the government’s decision was tied to international agreements or if the requested exports were about vehicles, not weapons.
The relationship between the two NATO members deteriorated rapidly when Germany would not cave in to Ankara’s “demands” to prohibit Kurdish demonstrations in Germany and demands from the AKP government to allow “elected Turkish officials” to participate in rallies up to the referendum on constitutional change that saw an executive presidential system introduced in Turkey.
Germany blasts Turkey for systemic human rights abuses including arrests of elected officials and arrests of German citizens in Turkey on what Berlin claims are political charges. Reports that Turkey launched an investigation into 700 German firms, including giants Daimler and BASF, added further fuel to the tension, with Berlin considering whether or not to impose economic sanctions on Ankara.
CH/L – nsnbc 29.09.2017
Source Article from https://nsnbc.me/2017/09/29/with-american-pastor-as-hostage-turkey-demands-extradition-of-gulen/
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