Frequently Asked Questions » Doesn't the Pentagon security gate camera video that the government released show something hitting the building?

Glenn Beck shows the video on CNN the week of its 2006 "official" release

Five still frames from this video were originally "leaked" in 2002, while the "full run-time" (with an additional camera view) wasn't officially released by the Department of Defense until 2006.

Here are official statements from Pentagon spokesperson Cheryl Irwin and the DOJ, published by the Washington Post on March 7, 2002, denying any association with the original five frames:

Officials from the Pentagon said the photos were not released officially by the Department of Defense. A Pentagon spokeswoman could not verify that they came from surveillance cameras. "The Pentagon has not released any video or any photos from security cameras from the terrorist attack of Sept. 11," said Pentagon spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin. A spokeswoman at the Department of Justice, which reviews taped and photographed evidence obtained by federal security cameras, said she could not comment on whether the photos are legitimate, adding that the photos "were not disseminated by the FBI or the Department of Justice."

Here is a passage from an Associated Press article announcing the official release of the video over four years later, in May of 2006.

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon on Tuesday released the first video images of American Airlines Flight 77 crashing into the military headquarters building and killing 189 people in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The images, recorded by Pentagon security cameras outside the building, were made public in response to a December 2004 Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch, a public interest group. Some still images from the video had previously been leaked and publicly circulated, but this was the first official release.

Within the context of an investigation into government involvement on 9/11 it is not logical to automatically accept information that has been controlled and provided solely by the suspect in question.

In this case, this dubious government-supplied video cannot be accepted as valid in light of the fact that it is contradicted by conclusive, independent, verifiable evidence proving that the plane did not hit the building, and most certainly did not show up low and level over the lawn as depicted in the one frame that supposedly shows a blurry "plane."

There is also zero independent, verifiable evidence (or any evidence at all for that matter) corroborating the alleged "smoke trail" seen in this video. We were not able to find a single witness who saw such a thing, including the witnesses who were (allegedly) right in front of the building.

Additionally there were numerous other "prima facie" reasons to believe this video was fraudulent even prior to our obtaining this absolute confirmation.

1. If you look closely, the alleged "smoke trail" casts no shadow while everything else in the video does.

2. The alleged "smoke trail" almost completely disappears after two frames.

3. The time stamp reads "Sep. 12, 2001" (the day after the event).

Regarding this third point: According to the 2002 Washington Post article cited above, "Officials say the date may reflect when the images were catalogued by investigators since they are not the actual date of the attack." Later it says, "officials said the dates and times shown on the photos were added the day after the attack, when they may have been catalogued for investigative purposes." So this video, which the DoD, DoJ, and FBI at the time all claimed that they did not disseminate and did not even acknowledge as valid, "may" have been catalogued for investigative purposes, and these time stamps "may" reflect that time at which this "may" have been done -- at least according to unnamed "officials."

These unverifiable, secondhand alleged suggestions are flimsy at best, especially considering that these "added" time stamps could potentially be covering up real time stamps. While we cannot prove that this is the case, it seems unlikely that the Department of Defense, with a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars per year, would not even have cameras which record with time stamps at their headquarters, one of the most highly secure buildings in the world. If the video did have time stamps in it, and if the official story were true, it seems preposterous that they would overwrite them.

Additionally, the seconds column reads "19" for the first two frames, and then jumps to "21." This means that the camera either does not take images at a fixed frame rate (the frames show two images in one second and then no more images for over a second), or that one or more frames have been omitted. It seems highly unlikely that the cameras at the headquaters of the Department of Defense would record at a frame rate of approximately one frame per second anyway.