And, incredibly, this draconian repression against basic democratic rights received barely any news coverage in Western media. BBC, CNN, France 24, among others, gave little or no reports the following day on the brutal assault against democratic freedom in Turkey.
The White House and the European Union only managed to issue low-key, mundane statements expressing concern; and meekly asking the Ankara government to respect freedom of the press.
This muted response should serve as a shocking indictment and as a grave indicator of how democracy is being vanquished, not just in Turkey but right across the Western hemisphere.
Turkeys authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party have for months now been cracking down on independent news and social media in complete repudiation of that countrys constitution. Dozens of journalists have been arrested, newspapers have been gagged and TV stations closed.
But the full-scale invasion this weekend by hundreds of riot-clad police officers of the most popular daily newspaper Zaman and its various related publications, including English-language Todays Zaman, takes the Erdogan regimes drift towards fascism to an altogether new and much more disturbing level.
There seems little doubt that Erdogan and his side-kick Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu are now figuratively donning the brownshirts of authoritarianism that Europe witnessed in the early 20th Century.
Zaman and its sister papers are accused of supporting terrorism because of alleged links, made by state prosecutors, to the separatist Kurdish party, the PKK.
More to the point though is the fact that Zaman has consistently provided critical news coverage on the Erdogan governments covert involvement in stoking the war in neighboring Syria.
The media outlet has reported on how Ankara has sought to destabilize the Syrian government by covertly supplying illegally armed groups terrorists by running weapons across the border and engaging in oil smuggling.
This is the real reason why Erdogan and his ruling cronies have ruthlessly cracked down on the independent news media.
Another outlet that has been hounded is the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet, whose editor Can Dundar is facing prosecution on espionage charges. If convicted, he could end up spending life in prison. The prosecution follows the publication last year by Cumhuriyet of photos purportedly showing Turkish state intelligence service, MIT, transporting weapons across the Syrian border to militants. Those militants, including the so-called Islamic State/Daesh and Al Nusra terror groups, have been trying to topple the Syrian government of President Assad since March 2011.
But the scenes this weekend in Istanbul of police firing teargas and water cannons as they piled into the offices of Zaman to haul the journalists out on to the street are the most graphic yet to illustrate how the Turkish state has adopted outright fascist powers.
Erdogans regime is crushing news media simply because they are lifting the lid on how the Turkish authorities have been engaged in systematic criminality, from sponsoring terror groups, to waging aggression against a sovereign state. Only in an Orwellian dystopia is telling the truth considered to be a crime.
Yet, equally revealing, is just how willing Washington and its European allies are in covering up for the Erdogan regime.
We constantly get fed Western claims of repression towards democratic freedoms in Russia and China, places where there is a clear political agenda in Washington and Brussels to demonize and undermine opponent powers. However, when it comes to visibly vicious attacks on freedoms in Turkey there is studied silence in the West. This is consistent with the Orwellian concept of double think.
Part of the reason for this Western response of see no evil in Ankara is because Washington and its European partners, Britain and France in particular, are also heavily complicit in the covert criminal war for regime change in Syria.
Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have merely served as the regional point men for instrumenting the Western policy to oust the Syrian government. A policy which has led to over a quarter of a million people being killed, millions being displaced, Europes worst refugee crisis since the Second World War, and a whole country destroyed with damages estimated at several hundred billions of dollars.
Washington and its allies thus stand accused of war crimes on a massive scale. In theory at least, the Western public could demand that guilty politicians and their state agents face prosecutions and imprisonment.
Therefore when Turkish media courageously expose the criminality of the Ankara regime, and the latter reacts by bludgeoning this media, the Western powers must also, by necessity, go along with the repression.
Implication of the Turkish authorities in turn implicates the Western governments and the Western media who have systematically lied about what is really happening in Syria for the past five years.
Turkeys fascism must be hidden from public view because by extension it leads to practices by Western governments that can be equally ascribed as those of rogue, criminal regimes.
Turkeys brownshirts must be brown-nosed by Washington and the EU because all of them are deeply involved in a foul-smelling criminal project in Syria.
This article was written by Finian Cunningham for American Herald Tribune on Mar. 6, 2016. Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Ireland, he is a Masters graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism.
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