Why are Turkish journalists, again, detained?

On Sunday, yet another weird episode was added to Turkey's endless hall of shame: About three dozen people were detained, including many journalists. These included Ekrem Dumanlı, the editor-in-chief of Turkey's top selling newspaper, Zaman, and Hidayet Karaca, the general manager of Samanyolu, a news station and TV network. The detention of Dumanlı was particularly scenic, with policemen taking him from the Zaman building amid thousands of protestors cheering for press freedom.

But why? One does not have to be rocket scientist to see the political nature of the event. Zaman and Samanyolu, which are both voices of the movement of U.S.-based Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, were once very pro-Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the current president, but turned bitterly against him over the past year. So, the arrest of their top executives only comes across as yet another step in the Erdogan administration's now globally notorious efforts to crush critical media in Turkey.

However, there is also a more complicated side to this story. All of the people who were detained last Sunday (who are apparently all related to the Gülen movement) are accused of having roles in a specific event in 2010: The arrest of 120 alleged "al-Qaeda members" throughout Turkey, which was hailed at the time as a crackdown on terrorism but which is now requisitioned. The prosecutor seems convinced that the grenades found in an apartment of one of the accused in that case were actually planted there by the police, in order to create evidence to depict the group as terrorists.

Moreover, those who were arrested in 2010 as "al-Qaeda in Turkey" were apparently not members of al-Qaeda; rather, they were a tiny group of Turkish Islamists with radical views but a totally non-violent...