Baghdad? Suburb of Istanbul? Same thing ...

Howard Kaloogian, a Republican candidate for California's 50th Congressional district (and chairman of the Recall Gray Davis Committee), posted the following picture and accompanying text on his "Support Our Troops & The War Against Terrorism" issues page (Google cache):

Downtown Baghdad: We took this photo of dowtown Baghdad while we were in Iraq. Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be. But, each day the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it - in part because many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism.

There's only one problem: posters on DailyKos have determined that the picture was actually taken in Bakirkoy, a suburb of Istanbul, Turkey. Here's a picture of the same neighborhood taken by Faruk and posted on the wowTurkey.com website:


Photograph of Bakirkoy, Turkey, by Faruk on wowTurkey.com.

(Want more examples of politicians misusing images? Go take a look at a Bret Schundler campaign photo and Bush's plagiarized yakuza ad.)

[Update 7pm: Kaloogian's website has been updated; the picture has been replaced and the caption now reads: "We originally posted a photograph not of Baghdad, Iraq but from Istanbul, Turkey where our delegation traveled on the way home to the United States. We apologize for this mistake. We have corrected it with a photograph we took from Baghdad. We took this photo of downtown Baghdad ..."]

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• politics
• Iraq
• California