Five Video Frames

Video Frames Leaked in 2002 Show Moments of the Pentagon Attack

In March of 2002, five frames from a Pentagon surveillance camera became public, published by the Associated Press. The camera was positioned north of the section of the Pentagon's west wall destroyed on September 11th, and its field of view includes the destroyed section.

This was the only video footage capturing the seconds of the attack that had been made available to the public until May, 2006, when the Pentagon released two video clips, both showing slightly more than three minutes at about one frame per second. One of the two clips contains the five frames, and the other is from a nearby camera.

The copies of the five frames on this page, which have been widely circulated on the Web, have greater horizontal cropping than glossy photographic prints of the frames provided by the AP. Copies of the frames published by CNN have higher resolution than these, and about the same horizontal cropping as the AP glossies, but have the date stamp on the bottom cropped off.

What do the frames show about the attack and its investigation or cover-up by authorities? This analysis suggests the answer is not the immediately obvious one.