Is Turkey’s SETA a Think Tank or Political Hitman?

SETA’s media survey is less a think tank report than a detailed intelligence study, revealing extensive information about journalists and exposing them to great risk and peril.

In 2000, Turkey was rattled by a revelation by veteran journalist Nazli Ilicak (now in prison) about a study (and exposé) by the intelligence department of the Turkish military headquarters to blacklist journalists who were critical of the military’s handling of the Kurdish conflict and other key national security matters. The list of journalists was published by the Hurriyet daily two years before, in 1998, and originally based on a fabricated testimony of a captured senior PKK figure, Ilicak revealed, unearthing the startling nature of the practice by soldiers. The piece was infamously called “andic” (memorandum) and later became a catchphrase to describe authorities’ clandestine or subtle efforts to categorize critical media figures.

As time went by, people tended to assume that the dark legacy of that practice vanished and receded into eternal irrelevance. But they could not be more wrong.

A recent report by the Istanbul branch of Ankara-based Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (SETA), a think…