Now it's CNN: Blocked in Turkey!

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ISTANBUL:   I'm sure you are all getting sick of these headlines, "(Insert Web site here) blocked in Turkey!" In fact, I'm even sicker writing them. But yes, this one's true too. Although, to be more precise, the CNN Political Ticker blog, to be found on the CNN.com site -- i.e., not the whole of CNN.com -- is blocked in Turkey. The very same message that appears when visiting any WordPress (WP) blog, or the Yahoo-owned Flickr Blog as also recently reported, comes up for the Political Ticker: "Access to this site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/195 of T.C. Fatih 2.Civil Court of First Instance."  Which, of course, means it is the subject of the same private "defamation" court order enacted by one infamous Adnan Oktar.

Those familiar with the original WP blocked in Turkey story will know that the court order stems from the an attempt to close down a number of WP blogs "slandering" the controversial Islamic creationist. But, instead, the entire network of the fourth largest blogging platform in the world has been suspended on Turkish soil. So is there any slanderous/defaming/libellious material to be found when scouring CNN's Political Ticker? Well, considering that the whole blog is decicated, more or less, to covering the US 2008 Presidential campaign you'd think you'd be hard-pushed to find something wouldn't you? But not wanting to discredit the Turkish legal system's objectivity outright without further investigation, I did a thorough "find on this page" word search for the words "Adnan" and "Oktar." Not surprisingly my probe yielded no results. Still, with a cigarette-rolling-paper-thin hope that the Turkish legal system could not be that blind, I extended the probe to include the pen-name of the self-described (on his own Web site) "prominent Turkish intellectual," who is "[c]ompletely devoted to moral values and dedicated to communicating the sacred values he cherishes to other people," namely "Harun Yahya." The thorough 30-second probe is now officially closed, and the paper-thin faith totally burnt. It seems that Hillary, Obama, Rudy and the rest of the US presidential hopefuls couldn't find a single thing to say on the man on every Turkish WP blogger's lips (often preceded by expletives.)

Likewise, another similar search on the photo-sharing Flickr Blog on the two alternative names -- or any combination thereof, as Oktar's lawyers' demanded from WP in their initial letter explaing why the WP network was now blocked -- revealed, equally, not a single pic. (Viewers still keen to see his visage can easily check his own Web site -- even in Turkey.)

Not that I expected to find anything of the sort on these sites anyway. It was just worth a shot to exclude the man at the eye of the storm from the line of enquiry, so to speak. The only real linkage I could find to the court order (no: 1007/195) blanket ban was that both CNN Political Ticker and Flickr Blog are both powered by WordPress software, as it says at the foot of these respective sites. The real answer, however, was provided by a technical guru who recently -- and fortunately, for me -- took to posting comments on my own WP blog. The actual nut of the matter is that both of these sites have URL aliases for sites on WordPress. Basically, politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com is aliased ("CNAME" in tech terms) to cnnpoliticalticker.wordpress.com, and blog.flickr.com is really at flickrtheblog.wordpress.com. Mystery solved then... But it would be nice if CNN and Yahoo woke up to the issue and weighed into what is rapidly turning into a farce, not to mention a serious curtailing of freedom to access pretty harmless information -- alongside the 12 million page views per month of WP from Turkey-based readers.

As for the one-size-fits-all court order, perhaps some enlightenment can be shed on the issue from WP founder Matt Mullenweg's personal site, Photo Matt. In his latest Turkey update -- whereby the lawyers for Oktar seemingly rub the Internet community's face in it (see "WP block: Oktar lawyers issue 'threat' to Internet") -- one Turkish commenter wrote:

"Istanbul is [the] last stop for old judges before retirement. They’re all too old (to rock and roll and) to learn web technologies. They’re also too busy to research for [these] kind of 'childish' issues. That means, if someone requests a domain blocking to any Istanbul court, [the] judge (probably) thinks: 'There may be [no] risk for society (or for my car[e]er [in its] last minutes), let me block now, some other one [can] fix it anyhow'."