'Mission Accomplished' Banner Vanishes

Remember Bush's speech on the aircraft carrier three and a half years ago, in which he declared an end to major combat in Iraq while standing under that instantly notorious 'Mission Accomplished' banner? Well, the White House doesn't want you to remember. In fact, it never happened, all right? Just go to the White House website and look at the video footage of that event (scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click on the video link for May 1). Presto: the banner is gone — it appears to have been crudely cropped out of the picture.

Hmm. Now what does that remind me of?

[thanks, Lynn!]

Comments

[pudge]

This didn't actually happen. ALL the videos on that White House page (at least the dozen or so I clicked on, from different days and events throughout May 2003) had the same black bar. It is not cropping out the Mission Accomplished banner, it is covering up CNN graphics or something. No conspiracy here, sorry. :)

[David]

Winston Smith would have done a better job.

[Phelps]

Yeah, the banner is above him, not underneath him. Maybe you should send your TFH in for recalibration.

[George Arndt]

Um, that EXACTLY the kind of things the Soviet Union used to do..

[Michael Chaney]

Debunked completely:

http://hotair.com/archives/2006/11/07/did-the-white-house-doctor-the-video-of-bushs-mission-accomplished-speech/

The banner was far too high above him to show in that particular picture.

[matt]

While I don't think the White House Doctored the video, I don't think it matters. We all know what the shot looked like. Mission Accomplished has entered the lexicon like h.w.'s "read my lips". he f*cked up, and we all know it.

[Barry]

The 'Mission Accomplished' banner should be visible in some of the shots, above Bush's head. It was clearly put there as a background, so that (not all, but some) frontal shots of Bush would have that banner above and behind him. If there are no shots where that banner is visible, then the White House did indeed play games.

What they probably did was to cut out the frames which would have included the banner. Somewhat more subtle, but certainly dishonest.

[Rogier]

>> Yeah, the banner is above him, not underneath him. Maybe you should send your TFH in for recalibration. <<

You don't understand, Phelps. Probably, considering earlier comments you've left here, you don't WANT to. But let me explain it to you anyway, just in case: If you wanted to excise the banner from the video footage, the easiest (and crudest) way to do it would be with an electronic pan downward, so that the top of the image (where the banner is) is cut off. With that downward pan, every horizontal scan line you cut from the top is going to show up as a line of black at the bottom, where there is no information, no data, no image. That's what that black bar appears to be.

[CS]

I started watching the video from whitehouse.gov. However it is long and repetitive so I got bored and gave up early on (using a fighter jet to fly GWB in must have been very expensive, so a long speech was probably felt necessary to recoup the cost).

Anyhow, the Snopes article is persuasive. The "Mission Accomplished" banner was located near the top of the superstructure, way too high to feature in the video. The black space at the bottom of the video was used by CNN etc. to display scrolling text and graphics. And if you read the comments on the Snopes page, you'll see that the banner was there to celebrate the end of the aircraft carrier's 10 month tour of duty, not the end of the war (although it probably should have removed before the president got there - I'll bet someone got in trouble for that).

[Phelps]

pwnd

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkRHki5P6fc&eurl=