Hijacking History

My first return to New York City after 9/11 was on November 1, 2001, less than two months after the attacks. I arrived in the City, as I usually do, via Penn Station. Walking through that underground monstrosity, itself a symbol of the disaster that "urban planning" inflicted on the block when they pulled down the old Penn Station, a monumental structure built for the ages, to build Madison Square Gardens, I found myself deeply moved. For the first time, walls that normally felt claustrophobic held great meaning, even beauty. For on them were plastered thousands of flyers with faces and phone numbers of persons missing since 9/11. Under photos of lost loved ones, pleas for help were written: "Please call if you've seen her," "Missing," and the like.

I didn't venture Downtown that day, as I had business in Midtown, and in any event the area around Ground Zero was still cordoned off. But, as any visitor to Manhattan knew, the Twin Towers were visible down any number of avenues, and on that day I could see the huge cranes that were lifting the debris from the scorched earth. Smoke still drifted upwards, and one could still smell the putrid air that rose from that window into hell.

Just minutes before my arrival, as our train headed toward town, I was speaking with my friend and future Democracy Project business partner, Brent Tantillo. Upon my first glimpse of the skyline, with its missing towers, I recall interrupting him: "Brent, I see the skyline now, and there are no towers. My God, it's just empty."

I'd first seen the Twin Towers in 1969, as a boy, before either was completed. I recall the huge cranes atop them, visible through the yellow sky of a sultry August day. My last visit was in January of 2001, when I lunched at Windows on the World with businessmen. It was a cold winter day, and the clouds and snow totally blocked our view. I always assumed I'd return again on a prettier day.

It wasn't until April of 2002 that my wife and I got down to Ground Zero. Even after a winter's worth of rain and snow, the streets for blocks around the site were still yellowed and dusty from the massive fallout of debris. Windows in nearby buildings were either missing or covered in dust. Work up until then had been concentrated on the site itself; peripheral areas could wait. We ate in a small diner a few blocks from the site, and I'll never forget a man who stopped by and hugged the waitress. "How've you been," she asked. "How are you coping?" "We're still bad," he said, "but it's picking up. How about you?" "It's getting better," she replied. I can't imagine that they were discussing anything other than the health of their businesses, devastated in the wake of the attacks, and that they hadn't seen one another in some time. Nearby streets still had an unkempt, dirty look, not from poverty, but, again, from the quantity of dust the collapsing buildings had thrown up.

What struck me most forcefully was the sheer size of the hole. Sixteen acres is easy to imagine in most places; on rural drives we pass hundreds of thousands quickly without even thinking about it. But in Manhattan, of all places, 16 acres is a ranch, an unimaginable spread found only, heretofore, in Central Park. Policemen guarded the hole, which was at that point still surrounded by a chain link fence. A watering truck like the kind that used to creep down the back alley behind the house I grew up in watered down the dust on Trinity Place. Visitors spontaneously told policemen and any firemen or military personnel they saw "God bless you," "thank you," "we love you."

We walked to Liberty Street and, with hundreds of others and following a construction path and covered walkway, followed the periphery of the site to West Street and some other damaged, but intact, buildings of the WTC complex. The destruction was on a scale that only war or natural disaster could visit, and this was war. On a subsequent business visit a year later, a friend and I peered into the still gaping, but by then empty, hole from a nearby federal office tower.

What will people from around the world, but particularly Americans, and most especially survivors of those killed by terrorists on that awful day, see when they return to the site after it has been rebuilt? They, and we, will expect to see some commemoration of those who died: office workers, children, passengers on the planes, and of course the heroic rescue workers who perished as they saved others. Surely the site will evoke both sadness from needless loss at the hands of murderous men whose hatred evinces an evil force not of this world. But it should also swell our breasts with pride, not at what we have done, but at what they did. At the sacrifice of firemen, police officers, and rescue workers; and at the men and women of our armed forces whose sacrifices, today and yesterday, make possible the freedom we so often take for granted.

But those reactions will have to be invoked by the place itself, and by memories and imagination alone, if a radical fringe now in charge of planning and executing the World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex has its way. Writing in today's Wall Street Journal, in an article the paper has not yet made available for free, Debra Burlingame reveals the hijacking of the memorial effort by the likes of George Soros, Eric Foner, and Michael Posner. Burlingame, whose brother Charles "Chic" Burlingame III was pilot of American Airlines ]flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon, tells a story of betrayal which will outrage most Americans:

The World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex will be an imposing edifice wedged in the place where the Twin Towers once stood. It will serve as the primary "gateway" to the underground area where the names of the lost are chiseled into concrete. The organizers of its principal tenant, the International Freedom Center (IFC), have stated that they intend to take us on "a journey through the history of freedom" -- but do not be fooled into thinking that their idea of freedom is the same as that of those Marines. To the IFC's organizers, it is not only history's triumphs that illuminate, but also its failures. The public will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man's inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich's Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond. This is a history all should know and learn, but dispensing it over the ashes of Ground Zero is like creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona.

The public will be confused at first, and then feel hoodwinked and betrayed. Where, they will ask, do we go to see the September 11 Memorial? The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation will have erected a building whose only connection to September 11 is a strained, intellectual one. While the IFC is getting 300,000 square feet of space to teach us how to think about liberty, the actual Memorial Center on the opposite corner of the site will get a meager 50,000 square feet to exhibit its 9/11 artifacts, all out of sight and underground. Most of the cherished objects which were salvaged from Ground Zero in those first traumatic months will never return to the site. There is simply no room. But the International Freedom Center will have ample space to present us with exhibits about Chinese dissidents and Chilean refugees. These are important subjects, but for somewhere -- anywhere -- else, not the site of the worst attack on American soil in the history of the republic.

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.

The driving force behind the IFC is Tom Bernstein, the dynamic co-founder of the Chelsea Piers Sports and Entertainment Complex who made a fortune financing Hollywood movies. But his capital ventures appear to have funded his true calling, the pro bono work he has done his entire adult life -- as an activist lawyer in the human rights movement. He has been a proud member of Human Rights First since it was founded -- as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights -- 27 years ago, and has served as its president for the last 12.

The public has a right to know that it was Mr. Bernstein's organization, joined by the American Civil Liberties Union, that filed a lawsuit three months ago against Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was Human Rights First that filed an amicus brief on behalf of alleged "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla, an American citizen who the Justice Department believes is an al Qaeda recruit. It was Human Rights First that has called for a 9/11-style commission to investigate the alleged torture of detainees, complete with budget authority, subpoena power and the ability to demand that witnesses testify under oath.

In fact, the IFC's list of those who are shaping or influencing the content and programming for their Ground Zero exhibit includes a Who's Who of the human rights, Guantanamo-obsessed world:

• Michael Posner, executive director at Human Rights First who is leading the world-wide "Stop Torture Now" campaign focused entirely on the U.S. military. He has stated that Mr. Rumsfeld's refusal to resign in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal is "irresponsible and dishonorable."

• Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, who is pushing IFC organizers for exhibits that showcase how civil liberties in this country have been curtailed since September 11.

• Eric Foner, radical-left history professor at Columbia University who, even as the bodies were being pulled out of a smoldering Ground Zero, wrote, "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House." This is the same man who participated in a "teach-in" at Columbia to protest the Iraq war, during which a colleague exhorted students with, "The only true heroes are those who find ways to defeat the U.S. military," and called for "a million Mogadishus." The IFC website has posted Mr. Foner's statement warning that future discussions should not be "overwhelmed" by the IFC's location at the World Trade Center site itself.

• George Soros, billionaire founder of Open Society Institute, the nonprofit foundation that helps fund Human Rights First and is an early contributor to the IFC. Mr. Soros has stated that the pictures of Abu Ghraib "hit us the same way as the terrorist attack itself."

This effort to insult the memory of those who died at the site, to slight their sacrifices, and to ignore the very purpose to which the area is dedicated, cannot be allowed to stand. As Ms. Burlingame says, honoring dissidents the world over is a good and noble thing to do, but not at this site. To do so is to politicize, to belittle, to commit an act of sacrilege. Spread the word about the efforts of Soros and company to present a warped vision of history to future generations who will naturally come to learn about sacrifice and heroism. Let's see to it that the memories of those who died are not buried on the very ground their deaths hallowed.

Update: Michelle Malkin also has excerpts from the article and links to Michael Bloomberg, George Pataki, and the cast of outlaws who're hijacking this project. Her plea: nip this in the bud, now.