In jail with Can Dündar

'We Are Arrested: A Journalist's Notes from a Turkish Prison" by Can Dündar (Biteback, 297 pages, £15)

Jail can often be very productive. Great works, from "Don Quixote" to "The Consolation of Philosophy" to "De Profundis," have been penned while their authors were incarcerated. Indeed, the pinnacle of 20th century Turkish literature, Nazım Hikmet's "Human Landscapes from my Country," was written in prison from 1938 to 1950. Jail may take away the prisoner's liberty, but at least it gives them plenty of time for reflection. 

Can Dündar wrote much of "We Are Arrested" inside Istanbul's Silivri Prison, where he spent 92 days in solitary confinement awaiting trial. He had been arrested along with daily Cumhuriyet managing editor Erdem Gül in November 2015 on charges of espionage, helping a terrorist organization, trying to topple the government and revealing state secrets. As editor-in-chief of the newspaper, Dündar had in January 2015 published photographs of a covert arms shipment by Turkey's National Intelligence Agency (MİT) to Islamist groups in Syria. President Erdoğan condemned the revelations as "high treason" and called for Dündar to be given two life sentences. 

In covertly supplying the weapons, Dündar writes, "MİT was undertaking a mission it was not legally empowered to do and, by supplying weapons for a neighboring country's civil war, was committing a crime. A crime that might have been in the government's interest to conceal, and a journalist's duty to expose." Ankara has tried to draw analogies with the cases of Edward Snowden or Julian Assange. But Cumhuriyet did not hack the government system and steal classified information; it simply published evidence that was present in a legal investigation.