Sentencing Young Turks.

New York Times 100 years ago today, November 21, 1912:
No Counsel for Defense Allowed at the Courts-Martial.
    LONDON, Nov. 20.— Both Ottoman and foreign interests in Constantinople are excited over the large number of arrests of politicians and writers belonging to the Party of Union and Progress (Young Turks.)
    According to a dispatch from the Turkish capital, the Ottoman Government, through a local press agency, has issued a statement that only forty arrests have been made and that the sole reason for these was the organization of a demonstration by university students in front of the Government offices on Oct. 7.
    At first most remarkable stories were circulated in explanation of the arrests.
    With a view to influencing Musselman opinion, it is explained that the Young Turks were plotting to establish a republic. An attempt was also made to divert Christian and foreign sympathy from the arrested men by the circulation of a report that the object of the organization was to arrange massacres and to blow up the foreign quarter at Pera.
    These reports were so manifestly and clumsily false that the Turkish Government felt itself constrained to issue today's statement regarding the students.
    Diplomatic circles, however, attribute  the arrests to a very different reason. They believe they were due to the nomination by the Sultan at the behest of the Unionists of Mahmud Shefket Pasha as Inspector General of the army. This action was intended to cause the fall of the Ottoman Cabinet
    Neither the public nor counsel for the defense were admitted to the courts-martial which tried the arrested unionists. This severe action of the authorities is expected to suppress Unionist opposition for a long time to come. Nineteen Young Turks were sentenced yesterday. Deputy Carasso of Salonika has been arrested.
    A private letter received by a business firm from Constantinople, dated Nov. 15, says that under martial law order is being better kept there than ever before. It concludes:
    "You can take this from an old business firm — that Constantinople will always be left to Turkey and that trouble will never occur in the way people abroad imagine."