I'm sure we are all aware of the puzzle posed by
Anthony LA. Where
was that photo taken?
Here is the answer. (I posted this as a comment in Anthony's diary, but with 700 comments it's hard to find.)
The photo is of a bustling street in the Istanbul suburb of Bakirkoy.
This photo was taken by a photographer named Faruk, a member of the wowturkey.com community, and posted there. Check out his portfolio.
(Note: I grabbed a copy of his photo to put onto flickr.com, just to avoid stealing bandwith from the wowturkey.com site and avoid Dailykos traffic crashing that site. I do not intend to steal Faruk's intellectual property. He takes great pictures, by the way!)
For comparison purposes, here is the photo Kaloogian claimed he or his staff took in Baghdad:
Uncanny, you might say.
UPDATE: Credit where credit is due. This was mentioned in Anthony's thread but it bears repeating. The spot was recognized by a friend in Istanbul from Kaloogian's photo. She emailed the information that it was Istanbul Caddesi in Bakirkoy. Once I had that, it took about a 5 minute google search to find this photo. I have not mentioned the name of this friend because I don't have permission, but I'll find out if she would like a piece of glory and if so I will update with her name. In the meantime, I hope that all Kossacks will raise a toast in her honor.
UPDATE II: I am now using the link to a copy of the Kaloogian photo posted by free speech zone on AnthonyLA'S original diary, because, of course, the photo has been taken down from Kaloogian's website. If anything should happen to this, I'm sure that the
copy on Josh Marhall's site should be up for a long, long time. Thanks to rigger for the heads-up.
UPDATE III: Josh Marshall has a nice analysis of the two photos
here. Also, I should note that I have changed the word "claims" to "claimed," since Mr. K. now admits that the original claim about the photo is false.
UPDATE IV: Here is a partial rundown of response to this story on the internet and in the press.
Blogs and Wikipedia:
Talking Points Memo (along with many other posts).
Eschaton.
WikiPedia.
Sadly, No! (pretty funny).
Press:
Editor & Publisher.
Newsweek.
New York Times.
San Diego Union Tribune
San Francisco Chronicle
And don't forget that the story was on Keith Olbermann's Countdown on MSNBC, where Kaloogian was declared the second runner-up to be the "Worst Person in the World!"