Many Washington insiders consider John McLaughlin's imperious, shouty demeanor sort of endearing. But it looks like he's pissed off some Turkish dudes.

The McLaughlin Group website—or at least a part of it—was temporarily hijacked by Turkish hackers this morning. While the main page of McLaughlin.com appeared to function normally, Groupies who hoped to spend this Yom Kippur poring over old McLaughlin Group transcripts (considered a form of atonement in certain circles), found themselves redirected to a black-and-red website emblazoned with an image of a soldier, the words "Turkish hackers," and what appeared to be propaganda attacking the Kurdistan Worker's Party, a Turkish separatist group. The site also automatically streamed audio of a fiery speech in what sounded like Turkish, backed by Middle-Eastern-sounding music. [Screen cap after the jump]

Calls to the McLaughlin Group were not immediately returned, but Scott Hicks of Forcefield Web Development, which maintains the site, said he wasn't aware of the problem. "I guess I've got my afternoon scheduled out for me," he said after being directed to the hacked pages. "I have no idea how they did that."

When users attempted to access archived transcript pages, they were automatically redirected to the PKK page at the following web address. That address is registered to Answer Printing, a New York printing firm. Owner Larry Dunne said that while his company owned Answerprinting.com, he wasn't sure if he owned the dot-net variant, and certainly hadn't been using it for Turkish propaganda or any other purposes. "Wow," Dunne said. "I know nothing about this. Absolutely nothing."

The anti-PKK page included a Yahoo e-mail address, but a response was not immediately forthcoming.

A Google search for some of the text on the anti-PKK site turns up one other site—ghaemshahr.ir—which had been hit by the same hack. It's an Iranian site, Ghaem Shahr being a city in northern Iran.