The Pentagon has awkwardly removed a 10-year-old video from its website after trying to pass it off as new evidence that a full-scale United States invasion of Yemen is not only justifiable but is in the interests of ordinary Americans.

On Friday, the Pentagon released footage that showed a man wearing a ski-mask encouraging people to build bombs, with a US Central Command spokesman touting it as an “example of the volumes of sensitive al-Qaeda terror-planning information recovered during the [recent Navy SEAL] operation.”

The video was intended to convince the public that Yemen is a hot-bed of terrorists intent on building weapons of mass destruction to destroy the West.

However, the Pentagon quickly removed the video from their website after experts in terrorist media pointed out that the clip was actually 10 years old and not from Yemen.

“The video clip that was posted and abruptly taken down was one of 25 videos that appeared (published) in 2007,” said Adam Raisman, a senior analyst at SITE group which monitors online activities by extremist groups.

US military officials tried to downplay the blunder by hyping up the Sunday raid in Yemen’s al-Bayda province. The operation was the first offensive authorized by Trump as the new commander in chief.

“It does not matter when the video was made, that they had it is still illustrative of who they are and what their intentions are,” Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said.

CENTCOM spokesman Colonel John Thomas also confirmed that the footage was not current.

“We didn’t want it to appear that we were trying to pass off an old video as a new video,” he said, without explaining why an old, misleading video was presented to the public at all.

The January 29 mission killed 14 militants. Washington said a Navy SEAL also lost his life during the attack and three others were injured.

Medics at the scene of the raid said that at least 30 people, including 10 women and children, also died as a result.

At least three US officials confirmed to Reuters earlier this week that the operation was carried out without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup.