[Merged]Acknowledgement of 85 cameras at the Pentagon?

[Mangoose]

From Craig's post last month, linked by Mr. Roundhead:

We conveniently stayed at the Sheraton National on the 14th floor with an amazing view of the Pentagon and all the potential flight paths. This made it convenient to look into the situation about the video that was confiscated from the Sheraton......The Sheraton camera would have had a very valuable view and would have been in the top two most obvious locations to check first - the other being the Citgo....The importance of this is that the camera would have been nearly the closest one and would certainly have been able to confirm or deny what all of the eyewitnesses on Columbia Pike and the CITGO station told us.


And yet Craig posts this photo:

http://img389.imageshack.us/img389/5900/video1xu4.jpg

Doesn't Craig realize that the camera was not on the 14th floor with the same great expansive view of the flight paths that he had from his hotel room, but that it was just above the 4th floor with at most a view of --- trees. All he has to do is look at the image he posted. The camera in this image is not looking up or even level but slightly angled down. There are trees just across the street on the right that the camera would have been pointed at. Craig conveniently labels the flight path above and there is no way that a camera angled toward those trees would have caught the plane flying that high up.

Compare that with these pictures I took of the Sheraton camera in 2005:

http://img387.imageshack.us/img387/1987/sheratoncamvm6.jpg


This was over a year before Craig took his first trip out to Arlington. Here the camera is pointed even further down -- right at the Sheraton property itself where the driveway leads out to the street. That makes a lot better sense of where a security camera should be pointed. No way would a camera pointed down capture a plane flying above -- unless it caught a fleeting glimpse of its shadow. In the second photo you can see the trees that the camera would have been pointed it if it were a little more level (as in the photo that Craig posted). Even if the camera was pointed to the left of the trees towards the Columbia Pike itself it probably would have simply showed the ground up to tree-top height.

Craig finds it suspicious that this camera was removed. Why? It was clearly replaced by a newer model -- can't hotels upgrade their security cameras? Also my photos show that this camera was still in place as late as May 2005 -- it wasn't "confiscated" with the tape soon after 9/11 or after the report went out on 9/21/2001 that there was a hotel video tape. This report BTW did not say that the hotel in question was the Sheraton. This is what was reported:

Now word has reached us that federal investigators may have video footage of the deadly terrorist attack on the Pentagon.

A security camera atop a hotel close to the Pentagon may have captured dramatic footage of the hijacked Boeing 757 airliner as it slammed into the western wall of the Pentagon. Hotel employees sat watching the film in shock and horror several times before the FBI confiscated the video as part of its investigation.

http://www.gertzfile.com/gertzfile/ring092101.html


I think the hotel in question is the Doubletree Inn. The Doubletree footage shows the impact fireball and is certainly dramatic and the kind of thing that would have been horrible to watch at the time of the event. It is true that it does not show the plane itself but Gertz and Scarborough clearly did not view the video themselves and it is easy to see how a report about a video of the plane crashing into the Pentagon was characterized as a report about a video of the plane as it crashed into the Pentagon.

It seems that Craig mainly suspects a cover up because the Sheraton manager, after receiving "many calls" from Avery and Pickering prior to their trip, avoided the Very Important Dylan Avery like the plague when they were there. Craig, who did not talk with the manager, interprets this as indicating that the manager was "terrified to talk about it", ergo, coverup!!11!!1!! Does he consider the possibility that Dylan Avery was a known quantity in 2006, having released his first edition of Loose Change back in April 2005, and that the manager did not want to waste his valuable time with someone who denies what happened on 9/11?

[Mangoose]

I just reread my last post and I realized that I forgot to address the issue of focal length which is certainly relevant to what I was arguing. If the camera had a pinhole-type lens with a small focal length (such as 3.6 or 4mm), like the cameras at the Pentagon or Doubletree (where considerable distortion is visible in the images), then a 4th-floor camera would probably have indeed captured enough sky above the trees to show the plane as it passed by the VDOT tower and also could have falsified a NOC flight path over the Navy Annex (although the Annex itself would probably have not been visible behind the trees). But the more level orientation of the camera in the photo posted by Craig indicates that the camera had a much longer focal length, such as 8mm or 12mm. There is no point in the camera having that orientation unless it was looking at the auxiliary parking lot across the street from the Sheraton (seen in the second of my two photos in my last post). This parking lot is hotel property and used for the parking of larger vehicles like SUVs and camper trailers and it has an approximate maximal distance of 275 feet from the camera. In contrast, the hotel property near the camera visible when the camera was pointing down was only about 50-75 feet away and involved a fairly narrow field of view.

Since objects viewed through a wide angle lens rapidly decrease in size as distance from the camera increases, and since the hotel probably wanted enough detail of the auxiliary parking lot to permit vehicle identification, I believe the focal length of the lens was probably more on the long end. At 250 feet, the horizontal field of view for a 3.6mm CCTV lens is about 375 feet whereas the field of view for a 12mm lens is about 97 feet (the parking lot itself was about 100 feet wide). A shorter focal length is desirable if you want to view a very wide field of view close up (the Pentagon CCTV cameras are intended to document traffic directly at of the security checkpoints and the Doubletree camera is intended to document the parking lot directly in front of it), whereas a longer length is desirable for surveillance at greater distance or a narrower field of view close up. I doubt that the Sheraton would have wanted to devote significant amounts of the field of view to sky, trees, and traffic on the Pike (to the detriment of resolution of the auxiliary parking lot itself), when what they probably wanted to do was keep a watch on what was going on in the parking lot itself. So I find it unlikely that the camera had enough focal length to show the plane at the altitude it was when it passed by the Sheraton and the Annex. But since we don't in fact know for sure what kind of lens was used, the possibility still remains -- however unlikely -- that the Sheraton had rather crappy surveillance of the auxiliary parking lot.