Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Fun with photography


Sometimes it amazes me what people can do with the Internet.
Case in point:

Yesterday somebody noticed this picture on the web site of a Republican running for Congress in California. The guy claimed it was a picture of downtown Baghdad and went on to say that it demonstrates that media reports of chaos and turmoil there are overblown and just flat wrong.

But then some people on the web started looking more closely at the photo. They noticed a conspicuous absense of Arabic on any of the visible signs in the photo. They note that the girl in the picture is not wearing a head scarf and even more scandalously is wearing a strapless dress!
Soon there were allegations going around the web that the photo was not of Baghdad. But where is it and how could you ever prove it?

Well, amazingly, earlier today someone over at Daily Kos tracked down a photo of the same street scene from a slightly different angle making clear that the scene is not that of wartorn Baghdad, but a peaceful suburb in Istanbul, Turkey.

As Atrios was quick to note: it’s Istanbul Not Baghdadinople

Needless to say, the lying Republican (is that redundant?) was forced to pull the picture off of his web site.

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