Debra Burlingame, sister of the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which crashed at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, delivers a passionate opinion piece about plans for an International Freedom Center at Ground Zero (IFC) in the Gotham Gazette. Ms Burlingame thinks too much space, money, and importance is being given to the IFC, which will be a museum charting the history of freedom (whatever that is).
A separate memorial to victims of September 11 will occupy a smaller, underground space at the World Trade Center site. And the memorial is being overseen by the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, of which Ms Burlingame is a member of the board of directors. Here are some of her thoughts about the IFC:
Rather than a respectful tribute to our individual and collective loss, they will get a slanted history lesson, a didactic lecture on the meaning of liberty in a post-9/11 world. They will be served up a heaping foreign policy discussion over the greater meaning of Abu Ghraib and what it portends for the country and the rest of the world.
[…]More disturbing, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. is handing over millions of federal dollars and the keys to that building to some of the very same people who consider the post-9/11 provisions of the Patriot Act more dangerous than the terrorists that they were enacted to apprehend — people whose inflammatory claims of a deliberate torture policy at Guantanamo Bay are undermining this country’s efforts to foster freedom elsewhere in the world.
My gut reaction is that while not wholeheartedly convinced by Ms Burlingame’s arguments I can certainly see where she is coming from—especially having recently visited The Price of Freedom: Americans at War, at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, DC (which as a non-American I found overly simplistic and overly patriotic). It’s not that I don’t agree with the concept. But I doubt that visitors, especially foreign visitors, to the World Trade Center site are going to be interested in an American lecture on human rights. In fact, I’m not so sure such a museum even belongs on the WTC site. I fail to see the connection. And as Ms Burlingame points out:
The public will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man’s inhumanity to man.
Unfortunately, the argument in favor of the IFC, written by Richard Tofel, the president of the International Freedom Center, is limp at best:
“9/11 is a story of courage, hope, and freedom: the courage to make the decision to go into the buildings to save someone, the hope to start anew after disaster, the wish to base our society on free will in the context of a pluralistic public sphere. It was a moment of truth in the story of freedom, and it connects the United States with democratic revolutions around the world, which share this quality of believing in the possibility of new beginnings.” Out of the tragedy of September 11 came a renewed civic spirit, and the International Freedom Center will work to sustain that. This is work that can unite people of goodwill everywhere.
Not convinced? Me neither.
Gotham Gazette story
New York Times story about newly released 9/11 tapes and transcripts
World Trade Center Memorial Foundation website
International Freedom Center website
