“Officials from the Pentagon said the photos were not released officially by the Department of Defense. […] “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.” [1]
Wherever they came from, the stills attracted quite a lot of buzz and served to remind everyone what the “War on Terrorism” would be all about in the dawning year 2002 and beyond. Indeed, they offered no evidence toward any theory, predicting the continued “trust us” mentality the Bush regime had been fostering as it pushed ahead into Iraq and other adventures regardless of evidence.
The pictures I had found back in 2004, I thought from CNN, had time stamps and frame labels at the bottom, whereas the ones I just found on the same CNN website have these Cropped off. (link to images on page: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/03/07/gen.pentagon.pictures/)
Maybe I just used a different link from the source I got them from. Anyway, I have older copies of frames one and two with the original time and title stamps and superimposed those on the cropped versions of these frames – the other three are left unlabeled. Then I found a full uncropped set on a 757-denier page, but I liked this unique set and I don’t think anything worthwhile was cropped from the other three.
Frame one was the only one that, according to its title, showed the plane itself, a blob of about 100 whitish pixels of uncertain shape and size mostly hidden behind an unknown boxy object (far right in the shot above, just below the horizon line). With the label “plane” cropped off – as well as half of the pivotal “plane’ itself in an inexplicable right-crop – this seems almost designed to show as much nothing as possible. In its entirety, as the ASCE noted, this frame “captured an image of the aircraft when it was approximately 320 ft (approximately 0.42 second) from impact with the west wall of the Pentagon. […] the top of the fuselage of the aircraft was no more than approximately 20 ft above the ground when the first photograph of this series was taken.” [2]
Frame 2: “impact.” Its brightness and contrast are different from the others, and some have noted the aqua blue optic distortion on the left side of this frame, the worst of which has recently been cropped off. This is probably an effect of the exceptionally brilliant flash. Oddly, with nothing at on the far right to show, this frame actually has less cropped than the first.
Frame three: Here we see an explosion rolling forward with the plane’s trajectory and hurling debris away at other angles, possibly having deflected off the façade.
Frame four: The Pentagon Building Performance Report explained these apparently continuous frames were “taken approximately one second apart.” [3]
Frame Five: Now large debris hurtling forward, explosion dimmed down – plane’s smoke trail dissipating. As for what’s with the smoke trail, I’m working on two posts dealing with this: one to sort out what was object and what vapor in that first still, then one to explain the obvious smoke trail in the other four frames which ordinarily should not be there in an airliner attack.
As for the cropping of these new photos: while likely innocent and irrelevant, the reason the excised stamps are significant is the time and date: September 12, 2001, 5:37 pm. It’s got the wrong date and time on it - it’s clearly shot at the time of impact from the angle of the sun and the facts that the first frames show an intact wall that ended on 9/11 and that nobody recalls a staged explosion on 9/12. Of course no one believes it was shot on 9/12, but some have taken this as evidence of tampering. I never got that – and take this as a sign that the video was analyzed repeatedly and finally finalized, official story decided, then had it catalogued at 5:37 pm on the 12th. It may have been doctored then, or earlier, or later, or never at all. The timestamp reveals nothing, but rather than simply explain this - which they have never done to my knowledge - the stamps have been removed from newer postings, I suspect to “quell conspiracy theories.” It should be no surprise if it has the opposite effect.
sources:
[1] Pino-Marina, Christina. “New Photos Show Attack on Pentagon.” Washington Post. March 7, 2002. Accessed November 5, 2005 at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A56670-2002Mar7¬Found=true
[2], [3] Pentagon Building Report – p. 14
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