What's he on about now?

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   Friday, March 31, 2006

   THE CAMERA DOESN'T LIE

My favourite kerfuffle this week has been over this photo of beautiful downtown Baghdad (with over 35,000 troops in the city, it's America's favourite vacation spot!):



The placid photo appeared Tuesday on Howard Kaloogian's campaign website. The aspiring US Congressman said:

We took this photo of downtown 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.

I think there's a typo there -- I'm sure he meant to write "journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism run by greedy incompetents attacking the wrong country" -- but the real mistake was much more fun. Within hours of the photo being posted, members of a discussion forum on Democratic Underground found that this was wasn't a photo of Baghdad at all, but one taken in Istanbul, Turkey!

Caught, Kaloogian blamed it on an underling and then later insisted, "the military asked us to use our discretion and put things on the Internet that were nondescriptive...(because) if we posted something that was easily identifiable, it could be a target." Because Baghdad is so calm and stable, right? He replaced the offending photo with this one:



As the delightful Postal Service song goes, "Everything looks perfect from far away..." What's even better about all this is that this photo was taken on a trip dubbed "the Truth Tour."

This in a nutshell is what's so fascinating to me about US politics -- the horror of such rampant and outrageous lying from those in power, followed (hopefully) by the thrill of seeing it exposed by dogged activists. Markos Moulitsas, founder of the liberal web-forum Daily Kos, wrote:

That this photo was recognized as a fake was amazing. That someone actually tracked down another photo of that very street corner in an obscure suburb of Istanbul, Turkey, is downright mind-boggling...The political landscape changes dramatically when you have hundreds of thousands of people doing real-time research into campaigns and candidates. In years past, people would've taken Kaloogian at his word that the photo in an e-mail was from Baghdad.

If it feels like politicians are playing fast and loose with the truth more than ever these days, it's out of desperation. The Internet is making it harder to lie.