(The author is a Seattle native who moved to Istanbul in January of 2006. He has previously published reports on Slog last Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday.)

Things have gone from bad to worse in Istanbul. Here is a brief account of my experience of the events here on Tuesday.

7:30 am: From the taxi on the way to work, I saw a group of 20-30 riot police heading up the hill from their permanent camp—a collection of ten or so regular city buses where the police sleep—towards Taksim. Something was very obviously wrong, as they are never mobile at that time of day.

8:30 am: At work, I turned on Halk TV’s live broadcast from the square, where I saw a disturbing scenario playing out. Since the beginning of the protests, I have felt like the protesters have been pitching a perfect game. No violent action had been taken against the police, other than the odd stone or water bottle being thrown. Attempts to attack the police had been consistently stifled by other protesters. Now on the screen was the thing that I had feared: protesters making a serious assault on the police, which is just what the Prime Minister would need to prove the Gezi Park demonstrators were the “vandals,” “radicals” and “terrorists” he has accused them of being. A handful of people waving flags and carrying shields with “SDP” (Socialist Democratic Party) prominently displayed were chucking molotov cocktails at a group of police TOMAs (their crowd-controlling vehicles equipped with water cannons) which had entered the square for the purpose of “opening it to traffic.” After a few minutes of watching things unfold, though, it struck me that it was all a bit hokey. Why weren’t the police making any real attempt to stop or arrest these men who were assaulting them? Why were all the news stations who had ignored the protests up to this point suddenly broadcasting from the square?

By evening the newspapers had pointed out a number of other items that had the stench of fakery in this showdown, and the SDP denied that the people involved were members of their party at all.

The tear gas continued throughout the day, and early in the afternoon, the police (whose commissioner had vowed Gezi Park would not be touched) entered the park itself. Volleys of tear gas were set off on the perimeters of the park, and inside the park, police overturned some of the tents and the structures the park-dwellers had constructed in the past week-and-a-half before leaving.

7:30-8:00 pm: Having come home from work and eaten dinner, I got my camera out and began getting my things together for a walk up to the square to see how the day’s events were ending. People in breathing masks, bandanas, goggles and construction helmets had begun walking up our street towards Taksim. I was hit with the smell of something burning outside. Stepping out on the balcony I realized it was tear gas and shut the door. Our apartment is ten minutes' walk from Taksim Square where the gas was being released and, carried by the wind, was still so strong that it permeated the house in a couple of minutes.

9:00 pm: The sound of pots and pans being banged from all the neighboring buildings was our cue to step back onto the balcony and make some noise, this time with our masks on. I never made it up to the square, since I could hardly get out my own door, but I continued to watch the news. The most telling image of the day was a lone protestor in a wheelchair targeted by one of the TOMAs and sprayed with a water cannon:

While the sense of unity in the face of a common enemy has been the most wonderful thing about the Istanbul protests, the most insidious has been the constant stream of lies coming from the mouths of politicians. Stories appear in the news every day which either contradict firsthand accounts of events or have no substantial evidence to back them up. Accounts of the mosque in Dolmabahce which was used as a makeshift hospital for wounded protesters (mentioned in my previous posting) have been revised so that the wounded entered with their shoes on and with bottles of alcohol in hand, despite previous accounts by the mosque’s müezzin that no such disrespect occurred.

Even more despicable is the claim that an overworked policeman in the city of Adana who fell to his death from an overpass last week was in fact pushed. One news source claims that six policemen have committed suicide since the riots began, though no other information has been released to suggest that this is anything but a ploy to gain sympathy for the riot squad.

The fakery has extended to photoshopped crowd scenes, including an AKP rally in Ankara in which the same figures appear again and again.

The belief seems to be that if the AKP repeat lies enough times, the lies will become true. Earlier this week, Prime Minister Erdogan made a speech about his further plans for Taksim Square, which also include demolishing the Atatürk Culture Center to build “Turkey’s first opera house.” He seems to think that people will not remember that the Culture Center itself was an opera venue for years and that there is a very nice opera house just across the Bosphorus in the district of Kadiköy.