Posted on 06/13/2005 4:23:49 PM PDT by CHARLITE
On 9/11/2001, Debra Burlingame lost her beloved brother Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. Today Debra sits on the board of directors of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation. Last week she penned an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal that shed light on the fact that a major part of the planned WTC Memorial calls for a huge on-site museum whose primary purpose will be to judge America's actions throughout her history to see if we, in effect, "deserved" what we got on 9/11. I kid you not.
The International Freedom Center, which reportedly will be granted about six times the space that will be allotted to the area where 9/11 artifacts can be displayed, will, according to its organizers, take us on "a journey through the history of freedom." That history is slated to include a look at Native American genocide and the lynchings and cross burnings that occurred in the south under Jim Crow laws.
The IFC also plans to look at Soviet gulags, Hitler's Final Solution, Chinese dissidents and Chilean refugees. All of this sitting atop the hallowed ground where the Twin Towers once stood. Why?
According to Burlingame, it satisfies the agenda of those 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."
And what's worse is that the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. is providing millions of our federal tax dollars to these fine folks.
Richard J. Tofel is the president of the IFC. In a WSJ op-ed piece written in response to the Burlingame op-ed, he speaks volumes about his philosophies and the philosophies of his group, by selecting the following quote from Judge Learned Hand. Speaking in New York City, Hand said, "The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women."
Taken in the context of the 9/11 attacks, there should be no debate about who was right and who was wrong.
Just which other men and women would Tofel like us to understand when it comes to 9/11? Perhaps it's those minds that believe that the U.S. brought on the attacks by executing our foreign policy over the years.
This line of thought has no place at the World Trade Center Memorial. But I will tell you what should be erected instead of this out-of-sorts anti-American debating society that will be known as the International Freedom Center.
Let's build an on-site museum that traces the history of terrorist attacks against the United States and freedom-loving people all over the world. We can call it the Museum of the History of Terror. Here are some of my proposed exhibits:
June 5, 1968: Senator Robert Kennedy is assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian who was upset over the fact that the U.S. had agreed to sell fighter jets to Israel.
September 5, 1972: At the Olympic Games in Munich, Germany, 11 Israeli athletes are killed by Palestinian terrorists.
November 4, 1979: The U.S. Embassy in Teheran is taken over by supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Fifty-three U.S. diplomats are held hostage until their release on January 20, 1981.
April 8, 1983: Islamic Jihad bombs the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 63, including the CIA's Middle East director.
October 23, 1983: Suicide truck bombers sent by Hezbollah kill 242 Marines while blowing up the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.
December 4, 1984: Kuwait Airlines flight 221 is hijacked and diverted to Tehran. Hijackers kill two Americans from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
June 14, 1985: TWA flight 847 is hijacked en route from Athens to Rome and forced to Beirut. U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem is shot and his body dumped on the airport tarmac.
October 7, 1985: The Palestine Liberation Front hijacks the cruise ship Achille Lauro and tosses 69-year-old American Leon Klinghoffer overboard in his wheelchair.
April 5, 1986: Two American soldiers are killed in the bombing of a disco in West Berlin. Seventy-nine American servicemen are injured.
September 5, 1987: Abu Nidal hijacks Pan Am flight 73 in Pakistan. Twenty are killed, including several Americans.
February 17, 1988: U.S. Marine Lt. Colonel William Higgins, chief of the U.N. Peace Force, is kidnapped and killed by Hezbollah.
December 21,1988: Libyan terrorists allegedly blow up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 aboard, including 200 Americans.
November 5, 1990: Jewish Defense League leader Rabbi Meir Kahane is assassinated in New York City by a group including Ramzi Yousef, who would be involved the first WTC bombing on February 26, 1993.
March 1, 1994: Sixteen-year-old Ari Halberstam is killed when Brooklyn livery cab driver Rashid Baz opens fire on a van transporting yeshiva students on the Brooklyn Bridge.
June 25, 1996: Khobar Towers near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, is truck-bombed, killing 19 U.S. servicemen and wounding 240 more U.S. personnel.
February 23, 1997: Ali Hassan Abu Kamal, a Palestinian, opens fire from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, killing a Danish national and wounding several more before killing himself.
August 7, 1998: The U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are simultaneously car-bombed, killing 291 and wounding 5,000 more.
October 12, 2000: The USS Cole is bombed while in port in Yemen, killing 17 U.S. sailors. And these are just a select few. It's the acts of terror that led up to 9/11 that we must never forget. So, pick up the phone. Call New York Governor George Pataki, New Jersey Governor Richard Codey, your U.S. senators, congressmen, and members of the New York and New Jersey state Legislatures. Tell them "The IFC is not for me." Tell them to put the political correctness aside for once and tell it like it is. Insist that they tell the tales of terror.
Please listen to Steve's new radio show on WWRL in New York City, Monday-Friday from 6-10 a.m. Eastern time, also available live on the Internet at http://www.wwrl1600.com.
Char
Who in Congress provides oversight on this boondoggle?
I must be living in a paralle universe, if this comes to fruition. I have never, EVER heard of anything this crazy, for a memorial.
The US has gone over the PC edge, and the WTC Memorial is proof.
I have been seeing quite a bit on the net about this IFC crappola. They may have a tougher time selling it now that they are being dragged into the light.
Divided We Fall
The 9/11 Commission becomes another Beltway soap opera.
BY DEBRA BURLINGAME
Tuesday, June 22, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
"Is this real world or exercise?"
Those haunting words were heard on audiotape at the 9/11 Commission hearings last week. It was what the duty officer on the other end of the phone at the Northeast Air Defense Sector of Norad wanted to know when alerted about a hijacking by Boston Center, the Air Route Traffic Control Center handling American Airlines flight 11, the first plane to disappear from radar screens on Sept. 11, 2001. The time was 8:38 a.m., 25 minutes into the first attack of the first battle of the first day in the war on terror. One hour and 25 minutes later, 3,000 men, women and children would be dead.
This was indeed the real world. But somehow the 9/11 Commission hearings have succeeded in turning this, the most stunning and deadly attack on the U.S. homeland, into another Beltway soap opera--awash in politics and finger-pointing, complete with media satellite trucks, conspiracy-theory hecklers and witnesses made to feel the heat by having to stand and take an oath under bright lights. How have we gotten from that real world terror to this self-destructive exercise in such a short amount of time?
The 9/11 Commission was chartered a year and a half ago, amid much controversy, for the purpose of preparing "a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks." I vehemently supported its creation and was angry with the Bush administration for initially opposing efforts to make it happen.
When a group of dedicated New Jersey women whom I'd never met organized a rally in a park near the Capitol, I was there under the hot summer sun, carrying a poster that said, "The men who murdered my brother were listed in the San Diego phone book." It had a large picture of him, Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, sitting in the cockpit of a Boeing 757 with a big smile on his face. Chic was the captain of American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that was flown into the Pentagon. The picture was especially meaningful to me because he was smiling at our dad, who took the picture. It is the way I like to think of Chic, in the cockpit of a jet, smiling, the way he would have looked if Hani Hanjour, the young Saudi who had once lived in San Diego and who steered Chic's plane into the Pentagon's west wall, had knocked on the door at the end of an ordinary flight and asked for a cockpit tour. So, yes, I was mad. Damn mad. And I wanted to know how the hell this could have happened.
Today, the great hopes I had for an independent, bipartisan investigation into the events of 9/11 have given way to great sadness. After the Senate and House Joint Inquiry into intelligence activities leading up to 9/11 was published in 2002, I had a different perspective about who was responsible for the attacks. It was everyone, and no one. It was the systemic and institutional problems in the information-gathering, analysis and reporting structures of our dozen or more intelligence agencies. It was the legal barriers that prevented law enforcement and intelligence services from talking to each other. It was Cold War modalities that no longer applied to very evil men with apocalyptic delusions operating in adaptive networks with cell phones and laptops, and supported by millions and millions of dollars. It was our own fat complacency, refusing to see what was happening around us as American soldiers, sailors and civilians were being blown up abroad. It was the airline lobbyists who looked after their well-heeled clients as we fashioned airline security measures that called upon ACLU lawyers rather than law enforcement experts for advice about passenger screening.
I am no longer angry at the Bush administration, or at any Americans for that matter. I'd read the Joint Inquiry and wept. I now knew that Chic's murder was a long time in preparation. In 1998, while on a trip to Africa, I stood in front of the American Embassy in Kenya just two weeks after it was blown to pieces. Little did I know that the men who did it had my dear brother's fate in the works, even as I stood there. No, I am no longer angry at any Americans.
After the hearings last week, I witnessed once again how the nation's media stake out a position, set it up in a box, the size and shape and color of which senior editors and producers have a bigger say in dictating than the reporters who are filling it, then rearrange the contents to conform with their version of the truth come what may. The hardworking commission staff presented a chilling tutorial about the history of al Qaeda and how it is currently constituted. We learned that Osama bin Laden remains intensely interested in nuclear weapons and "dirty bombs," that he has actively sought biological weapons material and shown an interest in the widely available industrial materials that are found in chemical weapons. We learned that Islamic jihadists rationalize the killing of Muslim children who are the collateral damage in their thirst for more blood and that they tell parents to be grateful that their children are martyrs in paradise. The media took this information--and there was more, far more--and stuffed it out of sight in the box called "Bush's Phony War in Iraq."
Some of the tenacious family members who started it all in that park in Washington were there last week. They are still angry, and who among us can say that they shouldn't be? But there is something wrong here. Upon hearing the voice of that duty officer asking a standard protocol question, "Is this real world or exercise?" with the kind of military-trained blankness crisis personnel are noted for, a few of them snorted with contempt. They mistook the calm demeanor of a professional with no use for prepositions for the clueless question of a fool. And that contempt, for all the people whom they feel contributed to a loss of life on the day their loved ones didn't come home, is what they carry around with them now. It mirrors what is happening, not just at the 9/11 Commission hearings, but in newsrooms across the country, this corrosive tendency to tear down our rescuers, our public servants, our heroes.
According to some of the headlines after this last round of hearings, on the morning of 9/11, errors in judgment as well as communication breakdowns up and down the line at the FAA created chaos and confusion, preventing Norad commanders from scrambling jets in time to intercept the four doomed airliners. What media reports do not make clear is that the tragic outcome was based on a combination of factors: Four missing planes were airborne within the same time frame, need-to-know information crucial to understanding the scope of the attack was not available to all involved air traffic control centers--each of which looks at only one piece of a very big sky--and everything was compounded by the need to manage 4,873 other planes during the attacks and eventually put them on the ground. That feat was accomplished just one hour and 15 minutes into the crisis, itself an unprecedented event nothing short of astonishing. In sum, the nationwide air traffic control system was stressed to the limit.
The decisive factor was the loss of the transponders, the radar signatures which identify the airline, flight number and altitude. Without this radar signal, the planes were virtually invisible. After they were gone, the location and altitude of the missing planes was anyone's guess. In the words of the Norad officer at Otis Air Force base who was ordered to scramble F-15s to look for American Flight 11, "I don't know where I'm scrambling these guys to. I need a direction, a destination." No matter how much notice they might have received, searching for a target without a vector is like looking for a needle in a haystack. They were circling in military airspace off the Eastern Seaboard because they simply didn't know where to go.
As the 9/11 Commission's staff statement reported, these valiant men and women "struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet." Now they are being blamed because these improvised efforts didn't work. Even worse, they are being told that their hard-fought but doomed efforts amounted to incompetence and poor judgment that cost lives. What a rotten deal.
And how outrageous for any commissioner to lambaste the FAA administrator who had his hands full with a system carrying tens of thousands of passengers, with invisible rogue airplanes hurtling through unsterilized airspace, and who was tasked with making critical judgments based on scarce or no information and unverifiable facts that changed from moment to moment. The session's low point was when former senator Bob Kerrey--previously a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee--subjected this aviation crisis veteran to a dressing down for not revamping response policy based on the 1995 intelligence that Ramzi Yousef was planning to blow up 12 commercial airliners over the Atlantic ocean. If simultaneous Pan Am 103-type bombings were such a definitive and actionable foreshadowing of things to come, where were Mr. Kerrey and the rest of Congress in making this a priority in both the legislative agenda and the national consciousness? Instead of hotheaded preambles as the cameras rolled at the 9/11 hearings, where were his impassioned speeches in the well of the Senate, inveighing against the toothless 1997 presidential report on airline security? That report expressly mentioned 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, the Bojinka plot to blow up planes and terrorists "who are not afraid to die to carry out their plans," yet none of its meager recommendations were enacted.
It was a strange and unsettling experience last week to hear commission members, witnesses, and even some 9/11 family members nonchalantly describing the inability to shoot down four airliners carrying a total of 261 passengers and crew as a regrettable "failure." One 9/11 relative described Norad's failure to shoot American 77 out of the sky as "emotionally devastating." A closer examination of a shoot-down scenario reveals how futile this lives-for-lives trade-off really is. American 77, the airplane most talked about as a "missed opportunity," wasn't observed after it disappeared from radar over northern Indiana at 8:55 a.m. until it was six miles from the Capitol. While the commissioners were able to squeeze an ambiguous statement from Norad's commander, Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, that "given more time" all four planes could have been intercepted, the truth is, they can't shoot at something they can't find, no matter how frantically people are looking for it.
By the time American 77 was sighted, it was one minute from impact and circling right over Crystal City, a vast complex of high rise offices, apartment buildings, hotels, shopping malls and an underground metro system where thousands of Pentagon employees arrive for work every day--a kind of sprawling version of the World Trade Center complex. Assuming the fighter jets could have located the plane and confirmed its identity (not all that easy with those other planes flying at nearby Dulles and National airports)--I would ask those who have been the most vocal in complaining about fighters scrambling "too late" to imagine the kind of grilling Gen. Eberhart might have received after a 200,000-pound aircraft filled with 66,000 pounds of jet fuel was blown out of the sky directly over what might have later been dubbed "Ground Zero II."
As the 9/11 Commission puts the finishing touches on its findings and recommendations due next month, I am steeling myself for the media's breathless rush to publish all the shocking revelations that show how incompetent we are as a nation. While I am skeptical of the commission's stated determination to keep politics out of its final report, I have no doubt whatsoever that with the presidential election just months away, those editors and producers who package the news will find it impossible not to do what they've done since Watergate changed the face of journalism: find a smoking gun, present it to the American people, and congratulate the effort as "what distinguishes us from our enemies." Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden and his murdering tribe will sit back with satisfaction as they watch the infidels tear themselves apart.
Yes, let's have a debate, but let's stop this self-battering, which is weakening us in the only place where al Qaeda can never penetrate, the core of who we are. Instead of pulling together at such a crucial time to prevent even more lethal attacks in the future, we are displaying a divisiveness that energizes our adversaries. They know us better than we know them. Their strategic kills in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and beyond are aimed at breaking our resolve to root them out at home and hunt them down abroad before they can do us more harm. We will not win every battle, but we will only prevail in the war on terror when we unite, not as Republicans and Democrats, but as Americans.
Ms. Burlingame is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
http://attacked911.tripod.com/
THIS is a 911 memorial to beat all others. I can't watch it without crying.
I'd love to see the FDNY mobilze on this one. This is beyond outrageous.
What's next? An exhibit in homage to Palestinian terrorists at Yad Vashem? A government-sponsored plaque decrying Hiroshima at the USS ARIZONA?
http://www.link4u.com/littledidsheknow.htm
Another nice one. Have your sound on for both.
Where It's 9-11 All the Time...
Click the picture...
Mr. Tofel's piece...
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006795
FOR THE RECORD
A Fitting Place at Ground Zero
The International Freedom Center will respect the victims of 9/11.
BY RICHARD J. TOFEL
Thursday, June 9, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
A year ago tomorrow, a new institution called the International Freedom Center was formally designated by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. as one of the four cultural institutions for the World Trade Center site, all to be operated under the aegis of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.
But some ask why such an institution--including museum exhibition spaces, an educational and cultural center already boasting commitments from nine of New York City's, the nation's and the world's leading universities, and a robust service and civic engagement program all devoted to advancing the cause of freedom--should be placed at Ground Zero. It is a serious question, and it deserves a thoughtful response.
The answer can be found in our society's proudest traditions and its deepest aspirations.
First, of course, the World Trade Center site must include a fitting and powerful memorial. And so it will. Michael Arad and Peter Walker's "Reflecting Absence" will transform the footprints of both of the Towers into "voids," each nearly an acre in size, and including perhaps the largest continuous man-made waterfalls in the world, surrounded by a veritable forest in the middle of the nation's third-largest business district. The Memorial will dominate the site, and provide its soul.
Then there will be the Memorial Center, a museum devoted to the events of September 11 itself, with exhibit space roughly equal in size to that at the International Freedom Center. The Memorial Center will tell the stories of the day--of heroism and sacrifice, of rescue and service, of courage and resolution, of memory and loss. It is the Memorial Center that will contain the iconic artifacts of September 11.
That is necessary, but not sufficient.
As envisioned in Daniel Libeskind's master plan for the site's redevelopment, the International Freedom Center's building will serve as a buffer between the sacred Memorial and the hustle and bustle of the surrounding city, including the thousands of people who will move each day in and out of Santiago Calatrava's spectacular new transit hub.
But the International Freedom Center itself will do much more than that. It will serve as a complement to the Memorial, bringing a universal "narrative of hope" to a place where hope is imperative.
In a world awash in so-called watershed moments, September 11, 2001, was the beginning of a new era, the end of what President Bush called the post-Cold War "sabbatical." Many of the meanings and lessons of September 11 will not be fully clear for years, but as the president reminded us in his second inaugural address, "We have seen our vulnerability--and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny--prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder--violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom." Freedom, we have learned time and again, is not a gift from our parents to be put on a shelf and admired. It requires work in our own time, work each of us can do and all of us must do.
Nor is the story of freedom one which began in America--or one that can end here. Ambassador Martin Palous, who fought for freedom in his own Czechoslovakia, now serves the free Czech Republic, and is also one of the more than 35 scholars of freedom who have advised the International Freedom Center, put it this way:
"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.
To be sure, the International Freedom Center will host debates and note points of view with which you--and I--will disagree. But that is the point, the proof of our society's enduring self-confidence and humanity. Moreover, the International Freedom Center will rise above the politics of the moment. It will not exist to precisely define "freedom" or to tell people what to think, but to get them to think--and to act in the service of freedom as they see it. And it will always do so in a manner respectful of the victims of September 11.
Judge Learned Hand may have put it best in the speech he gave in a New York City park during one of freedom's darkest hours, in the midst of another generation's greatest test: "The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women."
Ground Zero is precisely the right place to make this stand and leave a legacy for our children and generations to come. No less than Abraham Lincoln told us so, and at no less a place than Gettysburg. One hundred and forty-two years later, many Americans remember what was done there, but nearly all know what was said there. Lincoln did not speak at Gettysburg of Little Round Top or Pickett's Charge. He talked about the future, and here is what he said:
"It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom."
Mr. Tofel is president of the International Freedom Center.
Without being reminded of that morning by the images you both posted, we Americans forget the stab and turn of the knife in our hearts. We Americans need to look at them and be reminded often, because to forget those who died and how they horribly they died, is tantamount to saying these Americans and their lives were expendable and worthless, mere pawns in a idealogical/political dispute. They were real,they were alive and they were us. And They, not this travesty of a Memorial Museum represents America's soul.
Thank you again.
Unbelievable. Where is the outrage in this country?
Make them memorialize WHAT each of the 3,000+ did wrong to personally cause 9/11.
And if they want to say that the 3,000+ deserved to die merely because they lived and worked in the USA, then they had better LOOK at their grounds for a warped memorial. Because I can come up with 3,000+ REASONS why we should CAUSE an atrocity, in a similar manner as 9/11, on the islames/mooslimes who ALSO live and work in the USA.
Well, I'm certainly offended.
I'm always surprised how effective the haters of America are at wangling their way into positions of authority over information dissemination.
Of the many good resources which examine the genuine history of what really led up to 9/11, the inquiring mind might consider Reckless Disregard by Buzz Patterson. (The 9/11 material is a subset of the overall focus on how national security is being undercut by the certain, well-known liberal fungi.)
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#6 FYI.
bttt
Thanks for the ping!
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