Toward the end of the 2004 presidential campaign, the Bush campaign released a television ad titled "Whatever It Takes." The ad included a photo (top) of a crowd of soldiers listening to a speech with a child in the foreground waving an American flag.

A poster on the liberal Daily Kos weblog soon noticed that the image had evidently been faked since the same faces appeared in different places throughout the crowd. Initially it was suspected that faces had been cloned in order to make the crowd appear larger than it actually was. But the Bush campaign quickly responded to the growing controversy, revealing that the original version of the photo (middle) had shown Bush standing at a podium. A video editor had been asked to edit the image in order to focus on the boy in the foreground waving the flag. Instead of cropping the image, the editor had removed the podium by copying portions of the crowd over it.

The Kerry campaign released a statement saying, "Now we know why this ad is named 'Whatever It Takes.' This administration has always had a problem telling the truth from Iraq to jobs to health care." The Bush campaign replaced the ad with a new version that did not include the doctored photo.

In the bottom photo the cloned faces in the crowd have been circled (image from Daily Kos).

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