It's crazy that someone sat on the footage for 21 years and it just got made public now. Makes you wonder what else other footage or details are out there that has yet to be shared online.
It's hard to believe, but new media of the September 11 attacks (and the towers before) comes out all the time. This includes rare pictures and videos. There are YouTube channels [0] specifically dedicated to finding music played on the plaza (muzak), partly inspired by Jack Taliercio's video [1], where you can hear songs being played while the attacks went down. Other channels have more mainstream videos (FOIA, NIST) but all of them were digitally enhanced [2], [3]. Other channels have pictures found online [4], but mainly the pictures can be found in recent subreddits [5], [6] where they also collect pictures of the inside of the towers, the other buildings of the complex and even the bridges between them. There is also a Flight 11 impact video with some recordings that were never quite known [7], although the first everyone has already seen.
Caveat: some of the channel's owners seem to be conspiratorial, but the majority of the videos are unedited. You'll be surprised how specific some of the footage is.
I personally don't know if there ever was a video of the impact other than that of the security camera [0]. I think of two reasons: the Pentagon is not NY, which is a highly populated area in a developed country, it's natural that so many people were filming. Even more so, the Twin Towers were cultural icons. I don't know if many people were around the Pentagon, but I have read about witnesses of the crash in DC. The other reason would be that they don't want to release it and it's understandable.
The road patterns were different back then (they changed them specifically because of 9/11), but if you've ever been near the Pentagon, it's pretty obvious: it's a low building, nestled in a bowl-like land formation, there aren't many good places to sit and "observe" it, and it's surrounded by highways. Most of the time, if you are looking at the Pentagon, you are probably also driving.
And this is 2001, so any tourists driving on those highways were almost certainly holding paper maps and arguing intensely with their passenger about which exit to take to get into DC. They weren’t holding their analog camcorders.
It seems perfectly plausible to me that releasing video of the Pentagon being struck by terrorists would only serve to glorify the events that day. At the end of the day those agencies did their job and secured any footage. This gave the government the opportunity to decide what is released to the public and I think they made the right choice considering the promotional value of it to the terrorists.
That's not how this works. Classified material is not classified because it would make people feel some type of way. It's because the release of the material would have some effect on national security. With the end of the war in Afghanistan, there is no clear reason in my mind why the declassification of any existing video would be a cause of concern.
"National Security" as a term is broad enough to include anything. Case on point I see "national security" given as a reason why economic espionage is okay or why the government won't release things that are embarrassing to politicians because it can effect how foreign leaders view them and that's "national security".
Some 3 letters agency (FBI?) immediately raided all the nearby places that could have had cams and seized everything. I'm pretty sure that it's documented: IIRC footage from a petrol station nearby was confiscated.
I was there (at the time, in front of my TV I mean) and I clearly remember the first witnesses being interviewed by reporters: as soon as a witness would say something not fitting the official narrative, it would never be aired again. For example regarding the pentagon one eye-witness said he saw something like a big missile on which wings had been strapped. I saw that on TV. I clearly remember it. Now I'm not saying it's not a Boeing that hit the Pentagon: what I'm saying is that it's very weird that all these ramblings from these drunkards mistaking, say, a Boeing with a "missile with wings strapped on it" were basically aired once then erased. I'm pretty sure that guy was both drunk and of course because the plane was going fast, the mistake was made in honest faith (you, too, would certainly mistake a Boeing for a missile with wings strapped on it).
Same thing with people saying they heard explosions in the WTC: as soon as they'd mention that, they'd be cut off by reporters and these people would never be interviewed again and their account never aired again (FWIW I don't believe in a controlled demolition but I do believe in narrative manipulation).
After these oddities of course we all know totally normal things then happened: for example IIRC one the rare flight that was allowed to happen when no plane were flying in the US was a flight evacuating members of the Bin Laden family.
And then the wars that followed. Made perfect sense. No fabricated evidence. Guantanamo and the like: all perfectly cromulent.
When you take all this, honestly that we don't have any footage of that impact just seems on par for the course.
Perhaps they didn't rerun the weird takes because as new information came in and everyone started getting a better picture of what happened, they stopped airing info that was apparently wrong. There is always confusion and wrong reports when events are unfolding.
I don't know what Bin Laden flights, Guantanamo, or the following wars have to do with the pentagon on 9/11 or footage of it. Honestly, I don't know what point you're trying to make.
It’s interesting to me that even 20 years later, any comments that don’t fit the official narrative still get downvoted on HN (and the rest of the internet). There was such a giant push after it happened to not question the official narrative, and that still remains embedded in everyone’s heads. I wonder how long that will last.
I think these comments get downvoted for the same reason that comments that "don't fit the official narrative" about the moon landings would get downvoted.
I can only speak for myself and extrapolate to others, but I think people really hate the conspiracy crap that emerges. There are enough conspiracy people that it falls into the "this is why we can't have nice things" camp. As someone who rejoices in truth, I can relate to this a lot.
However I really hope people move toward skepticism (even of the official narratives) because I fear the effects of censorship more than I do the disinformation. Conspiracy crap has been around a long time and most of those people were considered crackpots, but since the major ramp up in effort that started about 6 years ago, the conspiracy stuff has exploded and is absolutely everywhere now. I think it's because the censorship (in some cases for clearly political reasons) actually makes the conspiracy theories seem more credible, because if they were wrong why would anybody waste effort trying to fight it? (I'm not arguing that's solid reasoning, only that it seems a reasonable argument to most people). Once you can't trust that most people operate in good faith, you have to question everybody's motives with extreme skepticism. Combine that with human nature to look for patterns/explanations in everything and you get a mess.
There is helicopter footage that shows an object apparently accelerating outward from the highway. This video regularly gets taken down and is often posted mirrored to defeat automatic screening.
