Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan arrives in Washington Tuesday evening for meetings with senior U.S. officials and, on Thursday, a visit with President Obama. The Syrian crisis is certain to dominate these discussions, as the U.S. and Turkey struggle to cope with the flow of refugees, negotiate an end to the violence, and prepare contingency plans to secure Syria’s chemical weapons should the Assad regime collapse. But the President should push the Prime Minister to address the deterioration of press freedom in Turkey and the jailing of 49 journalists critical of the government.

Security issues have defined the U.S.-Turkish bilateral relationship since the upheavals that swept the Arab world in 2010-2011, leaving Turkey and the United States searching for stable, democratic partners. The Obama administration had wisely cultivated Prime Minister Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) since 2009, when the President visited Ankara on his first trip abroad. This policy made sense — Turkey is a NATO ally, and legitimate electoral success and impressive economic growth had made Erdoğan one of the most influential leaders in the Middle East, a key interlocutor between that region and the West.

But, despite the pressing security concerns shared by the two countries, U.S. officials should ensure that important issues of democratic governance and freedom of expression don’t fall off the agenda. As a new brief by the Center for American Progress outlines, press freedom in Turkey has come under increasing threat. Dozens of journalists critical of the government have been jailed, and hefty fines have been levied against media outlets seen as opposing Erdoğan and the AKP.

The Turkish government’s increasingly hard line towards critics in the press has raised doubts about the course of Turkey’s democratic development. Erdoğan and Turkey’s joint popularity, and the country’s economic success, had sparked talk of a “Turkish model” of democratic development, secular government compatible with Islamic conservatism, and economic growth.

For the wider region, this narrative provided an example to moderates seeking to shape new political cultures in the wake of the uprisings. But the suppression of certain forms of political discourse and imprisonment or intimidation of journalists undermines the persuasive power of this example. For this reason, along with the United States’ desire to promote freedom of the press and expression, President Obama should raise the issue with Prime Minister Erdoğan on Thursday.

The U.S. is right to cultivate Turkey as a secure democratic partner with whom it can engage the broader Middle East, and therefore should clearly voice concerns about the deterioration of press freedom. Given the wave of popular mobilization in the region, it is more important than ever to preserve the democratic nature of the “Turkish model” and allow political dissent.

Max Hoffman is a research associate at the Center for American Progress. Michael Werz is a senior fellow at CAP.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has used chemical weapons against opposition forces.

“We will discuss the use of chemical weapons during our meeting with President Obama; it’s clear that the Assad regime is using it,” Erdogan told Japanese media, according to the Israeli website Ynet. “The opposition is in control of the region, but Assad is the one using chemical arms, fighter planes and helicopters. These are the final moments of the regime, but we don’t know when it will fall. It’ll happen suddenly.”

President Obama has said that chemical weapons use in Syria would change his calculations in terms of the level of American involvement in the civil war there. But while the U.S. has said that chemical weapons were likely used, Obama is taking a cautious approach regarding the next steps. “[I]f we end up rushing to judgment without hard, effective evidence, then we can find ourselves in the position where we can’t mobilize the international community to support what we do,” he said in a press conference this week.

Obama administration officials have reportedly said that the president is not ruling out any option — including a no-fly zone — but it appears that the White House is moving toward sending arms to moderate rebels because, as the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, “many officials see it as one of the few steps available to shore up the opposition without drawing the U.S. military into the two-year-old civil war.”

White House press secretary Jay Carney on Wednesday wouldn’t deny that Obama is looking closer at sending arms to the rebels. “We are engaging with the opposition. We are getting to know the opposition better,” he said.

But with Erdogan’s assessment, Turkey now joins the United Kingdom, France, Qatar and Israel as key American allies confirming that Assad’s forces used chemical weapons. Former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi said this week that the international community must respond. “Doing nothing, it’s not an option,” he said, adding that world powers should try “to help the opposition in a more concrete way, like providing them, instead of non-lethal assistance…weapons, [and] maybe to impose a no-fly zone, at least on part of Syria.”

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Syrian authorities to allow a team of inspectors in the country to investigate the allegations of chemical weapons use, saying that “a credible and comprehensive inquiry” requires access to all sites where allegations have been made.

Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday said Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s comment that Zionism is “a crime against humanity” is “objectionable,” echoing the White House’s reaction today, saying his remarks are “offensive and wrong.”

Erdogan made the comments on Wednesday, speaking at a United Nations-sponored event meant to try to bridge the gap between Islam and the West. Instead, Erdogan managed to widen the divide:

“We should be striving to better understand the culture and beliefs of others, but instead we see that people act based on prejudice and exclude others and despise them,” Erdogan said, according to a simultaneous translation provided by the UN. “And that is why it is necessary that we must consider — just like Zionism or anti-Semitism or fascism — Islamophobia as a crime against humanity.”

“We not only disagree with it, we found it objectionable,” Kerry said during a press conference in Ankara with Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu. According to Reuters, Kerry said he personally raised the issue with Davutaglu and will do so with Erdogan.

“That said, Turkey and Israel are both vital allies of the United States and we want to see them work together in order to be able to go beyond the rhetoric and begin to take concrete steps to change this relationship,” Kerry added.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s office said it’s “unfortunate that such hurtful and divisive comments were uttered at a meeting being held under the theme of responsible leadership.”

CAP’s Matt Duss and Michael Werz also condemned Erdogan’s comments on Thursday. “While Prime Minister Erdogan’s outrageous comments seem intended to isolate Israel, they also threaten to further isolate Turkey,” they wrote, adding that his comments ” seemed like an attitude from a bygone era. Casting Zionism together with anti-Semitism, fascism, and Islamophobia in this way is not only deeply offensive but also quite historically inaccurate and has the potential to promote or justify violence.”

A top European expert on Turkey said that any peace deal between the Turkish government and Kurdish militants won’t do much to end the deteriorating situation of press freedom in the country.

Various human rights groups have criticized the Turkish government’s crackdown on journalists in recent years. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) issued a report last October condemning Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and his government for its campaign of muzzling and jailing journalists, saying that “Turkey’s press freedom situation has reached a crisis point.”

According to the report, Turkey has in recent years jailed more journalists than China and Iran. Seventy percent of those journalists in Turkish jails, however, are Kurds charged with aiding the Kurdistan Workers Party’s (PKK) insurgent campaign against the Turkish state (many others are in prison on charges related to the so-called “Ergenekon” case, a supposed plot by secularists to overthrow Erdogan’s Islamist-leaning government). CPJ says that the definition of terrorism in Turkey’s anti-terror laws “is overly broad and vague, allowing zealous prosecutors and judges to imprison journalists sympathetic to the Kurdish cause as though they were members of a terror group.”

A Turkish newspaper reported this week that the PKK will announce next month that its fighters will disarm and withdraw from Turkish soil in a confidence building measure aimed at ending the 28-year-old conflict. But with a PKK peace deal potentially on the horizon, Carnegie Europe scholar Marc Pierini, former EU ambassador and head of delegation to Turkey from 2006 to 2011, told ThinkProgress that despite the Kurdish issue playing a primary roll in Turkey’s troubles with press freedom, peace with PKK will not mean that the issue will go away.

“The majority of the arithmetic of the issue goes away in terms of freeing jailed journalists,” he said. “But that’s not all. The key underlying factors to the deteriorating situation of press freedom in Turkey are, one, the Kurdish issue, two, media ownership, and three, I would say the political culture around journalists.”

“Because the political culture [in Turkey] is so vivid,” said Pierini, who participated in a Center for American Progress event on Tuesday examining President Obama’s relations with Turkey during his second term, journalists and government officials “go after people instead of discussing issues. That has to change.”

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Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is sticking with his belief that the Obama administration is covering up a vast conspiracy of arms smuggling out of Benghazi, Libya to jihadi rebels in Syria, despite a lack of evidence.

At the sometimes heated Senate hearings into the causes of the attack last Wednesday, Paul surprised many by using his time to ask Secretary of State Hillary Clinton whether the United States was shipping Libyan arms to Turkey. “To Turkey? I will have to take that question for the record. Nobody has ever raised that with me,” Clinton replied at the time.

That answer seems not to have satisfied Paul, who took his concerns to the World Net Daily website in an exclusive interview:

In an interview with WND, the senator said his “suspicion, although I don’t have any proof, is that guns were being smuggled out of Libya, through Turkey and into Syria.”

“And that may be what the CIA annex was doing there,” Paul said, “and the coverup was an attempt to massage and get over this issue without getting into the gun trade.”

Known for being a hub of the “birther” conspiracy against President Barack Obama, among other choice theories, WND is a natural choice to publish Paul’s baseless concerns. WND also was the source of a unverified report late last week that an explosion at an Iranian nuclear plant was being completely covered up. The Obama administration was forced to respond to that claim yesterday, with White House Press Secretary Jay Carney saying, “We have no information to confirm the allegations in the report and we do not believe the report is credible.”

While the New York Times has previously reported that U.S. agents are on the ground in the countries neighboring Syria to help investigate the recipients of arms from Gulf state allies, the charges that Paul are making are different. Instead, the theory Paul is peddling says that the CIA annex in Benghazi was involved in not only rounding up loose arms following the fall of Moamar Qaddafi, but secretly smuggling them to rebel forces in Syria. In the theory, the reason Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in the attack, was in Benghazi on Sept. 11 was to help facilitate the movement of these arms.

This morning’s tale of a dramatic escape from Syria by an NBC correspondent only serves to highlight the near record bad year for journalists around the world in 2012.

NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel, along with his production team, made their way across the border to Turkey after five days in captivity in Syria. In interviews on Tuesday, Engel said that he and his team were captured while traveling with Syrian rebels and theorized that he was being held by a Shiite militia group loyal to the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Engel said the militia’s members used “psychological torture” on him and his crew and intended to exchange the NBC crew Engel and other journalists for the freedom of others being held by rebel groups. (Watch an interview with Engle and his associates here.)

Word of Engel’s capitivity began to spread on social media on Monday after reporting from Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, despite an official media blackout from NBC. Engel’s freedom came at the hands of a Syrian rebel group known as Ahrar al-Sham:

Hazem al-Shami, spokesperson and a fighter in Ahrar al-Sham battalions, said the rebels had been on the lookout for the missing journalists, and so they had set up checkpoints to search for them. One of the checkpoints was near the town in Idlib Province where the hostages were being kept.

“When they saw we’re searching cars, they started to shoot at us,” he said in an interview on Skype. “So we attacked them until the kidnappers ran away and the hostages stayed in the car.”

Engel’s escape is unquestionably a welcome development, but it also draws attention to the scores of journalists who find themselves either unable to flee prisons or who have given the ultimate sacrifice for their work over the course of this year. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 67 journalists have been killed in the line of work in 2012, a number only surpassed in 2009 in terms of lethality.

The spike in those lost this year comes primarily from Syria, where 28 have died in combat or have been targeted by the government, and another 18 in a mass of targeted deaths in Somalia. The vast majority of those lost this year have been local journalists, though four international members of the press, including American writer Marie Colvin and Japanese journalist Mika Yamamoto, were killed in Syria.

Meanwhile, as of Dec. 1, 232 journalists remain imprisoned worldwide for attempting to cover the news. According to the Committee to Protect Journalist, fifty journalists are behind bars in Turkey alone, the highest rate of incarceration for media members in the world, having just arrested another on charges of terrorism yesterday. The majority of those locked up in Turkey are Kurds on terrorism charges.

Engel’s release also shines a light back onto journalists who also remain in captivity within Syria. Among them is Austin Tice, a freelance journalist who first went missing in August, whose whereabouts are still unknown.

The European Commission published its annual report on the performance of newly minted and aspiring members of the European Union on Wednesday. Notable among the findings — often seen as a road map for prospective members to follow — was the view that Turkey has not yet met the civil rights requirements to join, particularly regarding press freedom issues.

The report chided Turkey for a “lack of substantial progress” in ensuring the “right to liberty and security and a fair trial, as well as of the freedom of expression, assembly and association.” The unwritten threat: if Turkey does not secure these bare minimum social freedoms, it will have little hope of joining the EU. But perhaps that is what Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has in mind. While Erdogan said it was his goal to midwife Turkey’s ascension to the EU when he came to power in 2002, he has since turned away from the West amid the European financial crisis and European skepticism about a majority Muslim nation joining the bloc.

Turkey’s minister of EU relations, Egemen Bagis, responded to the news, claiming the EC’s report placed “too much emphasis was placed on isolated incidents.” Yet history indicates that such rights violations, especially in the realm of press freedoms, are far from isolated. It is estimated that around 100 journalists are currently imprisoned, held on suspicions ranging from conspiring against the government to being aligned with the Kurdish separatist and terrorist group PKK.

One of the most highly-publicized cases was that of Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener, who were held for more than a year until their release in March. They were accused with being affiliated with the so-called Ergenekon plot — a shadowy group allegedly aimed at overthrowing the government — but lack of evidence, and severe domestic and internal pressure led to their release. But the Turkish government’s war on journalists didn’t start and end with the Şık and Şener cases, as past arrests of journalists in Turkey have been just as suspicious.

But other reporters rounded up in the Ergenekon case have been left to languish in prison. Forty Kurdish-affiliated reporters were put on trial Monday in the biggest case of its kind.

A recent report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace notes that the “overall diagnosis” on press freedom in Turkey is “rather bleak” with “more negative than positive developments.”

– Nate Niemann