What to do about the journalists in jail?

On July 14, a night before the failed coup attempt in Turkey, there was a political discussion show on Can Erzincan TV, a small TV channel unofficially operated by the Gülen cult. Ahmet Altan and Mehmet Altan, two brothers who are iconic names in Turkey's liberal-left tradition, were on the show. They were quite critical of President Tayyip Erdoğan, and argued that if Turkey kept going in his direction, there could be a military coup. They did not call for a coup, they only said even this could happen along Turkey's doomed trajectory. 

However, a prosecutor thought otherwise. He blamed the Altan brothers for "giving messages that insinuate a coup a day before the coup." More than six weeks after the coup, the two men were detained by the police. As I am writing these lines, they are still in custody after 10 days, because the state of emergency extended the normally short detention period. When they see the prosecutor, they will probably explain that they were not "insinuating" anything, they had no idea about the coup which would happen the next day, and even if they really knew, there would really be sense in exposing it. 

Yet if the prosecutor and the judge who overlook their case don't get persuaded, the Altan brothers might be "arrested," to be put on trial in custody. In that case, they might be in prison for months, if not years. They might join, in other words, the more than 1000 journalists who have been arrested with similar charges.

Since the Altan brothers are famous, their case attracted attention. Writer Orhan Pamuk defended them, and Western media has shown interest. But there are many others who are in exactly the same situation. There is Murat Aksoy, another liberal-leftist, who merely appeared in Gülenist media months...