"Enough. No more. The army's morale is broken," said General Ilker Basbug, the chief of staff of the Turkish army, but the humiliations continue.
Another 50 officers were arrested last week for suspected involvement in a 2003 plot to overthrow the government, including the current chief of the navy, a retired air force chief, and a former deputy chief of the army.
The plot, code-named "Sledgehammer", was revealed when the newspaper Taraf began publishing information gleaned from 5000 pages of stolen army documents that came into its hands early this year.
This comes on top of the Ergenekon scandal of 2008, in which several hundred people including generals were arrested for belonging to a secret organisation of that name that was also planning a coup.
In fact, however, the threat of a coup has been declining for years.
The information is only coming out now, but the actual coups were planned for 2003.
In at least one case, the army high command intervened directly to block it.
And today's army chief of staff has accepted the arrest of dozens of generals and admirals with nothing more than the above plea.
Turkey has been a democracy for half a century, but it was a rigidly secular democracy (in a 99% Muslim land) that allowed no reference to religion in its politics.
If any politician hinted that he had "Islamic" leanings, he faced prosecution.
If he became prime minister, he faced a military coup - four have occurred since 1960.
The reason lay in Turkey's history.
The Ottoman empire was an Islamic state, but in the end, all the Muslim subject peoples became nationalists and rebelled against Turkish rule.
Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) concluded after World War 1 that to survive, Turkey must become a strong, modern state - which at the time meant only one thing: it must become a fully European society.
Islam was a potential weapon in the hands of those who wanted to resist that change, and therefore it must be rigorously excluded from politics.
By the start of this century, Ataturk's goals had been achieved.
Turkey was a powerful state with a higher average income than several of its Balkan neighbours, and more people than all of them combined.
It was also a democracy in most respects, and even a candidate to join the European Union.
The ban on religion in politics survived, and so did the (unwritten) right of the army to enforce that ban.
The Justice and Development (AK) Party has its roots in political Islam, and since it was elected in 2003 the country has been divided into two camps.
It's not just the army: despite that 99% Muslim figure, Turkey is a typical European country in that many of its citizens are not very religious.
Devout Turks, on the other hand, do not see why they cannot organise politically to resist anti-religious discrimination.
The AK Party swears it has no wish to shove religion down the throats of secular Turks, and in six years in power it has not done so.
But secular people suspect it is just biding its time until it has tamed the army, the historic guardian of the secular state - and then it will be full steam ahead to the Islamic state.
That seems unlikely to me but, more importantly, it seems unlikely to the collective leadership of the Turkish armed forces.
Groups of generals may plot coups, but the high command blocks them.
And both the coup plots that have now become public were hatched back in 2003, when the AKP had just won power and suspicion about its intentions was at fever pitch.
The murders and bombings allegedly carried out in later years by Ergenekon, like the bombings of mosques and the war with Greece that the more recently discovered Sledgehammer plot envisaged, were intended to raise tension and force the high command to accept a military takeover.
But they failed: there was no coup.
And there will not be one now.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.
