/m832 Reflecting Absence: From November 19, 2003 to May 2005

/m832 Reflecting Absence: Underground Levels

The Planning Vacuum

BY ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE
Wednesday, June 22, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

...

This planning vacuum is at the root of the disaster at Ground Zero. The initial failure to find a way to take the land by eminent domain, the absence of the leadership that would have utilized all necessary and available means and sought others while the enormity of the attack was still fresh (was there ever a more justifiable public purpose?), threw the project into the hands of a commercial developer, sealing its fate. Sacred ground became real estate; forget civic, cultural or urban grandeur. What did not die in that trade-off was sabotaged by the political jockeying and pandering that followed as the World Trade Center site was turned into a giant memorial and bizarre pairing of art and patriotism, a place for political grandstanding while security fought architecture to a draw.
The vision, experience and conviction that turns blueprints into great cities while retaining the integrity of an idea and guiding essential changes through the intricacies of codes, zoning, market economics, popular expectations and procedural complexities is something for which politicians, businessmen and special interests are notoriously ill suited. There is no one at Ground Zero properly equipped or authorized to deal with a coordinated, conceptual rebuilding, to set the right priorities and make the right decisions. This kind of leadership has been supplanted by an ostensibly democratic process in which popular or political dictates have progressively undermined and degraded the principles and guidelines of the Libeskind plan supposedly guiding the rebuilding with every expedient, compromising, constituency-pleasing and ultimately destructive decision.

Is there hope? This is a city of eternal, last-ditch surprises. There is always hope that something will come out of this lost opportunity besides a necropolis with shops and offices, that someone will recognize its failure as a wretched political legacy. But priorities must change; the site must be treated as more than a giant mausoleum if we are to achieve a creative renewal that speaks to the living and the future. Then there may be some unexpected flashes of architectural beauty or urban richness or civic meaning to proclaim New York's survival.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110006852

June 20, 2005 (from NY1)

You guys are the BEST.

NOT FITTING !! NOT PROPER !!

Wingnuts, Left and Right, Do-Si-Do at 9/11 Memorial

Irony being our thing here—light of our life, fire of our loins; our sin, our soul—we dig this story bigtime. Back in the day, when the chips were beginning to fall where they must at Ground Zero, the idea was floated (by private, entrepreneurial, connected-by-cash-to-the-White-House types) that the site should be home to a Museum of Freedom. The Left, here [scroll down to "A Dubious Idea of 'Freedom'"] in the form of Herbert Muschamp, freaked out. Though the Times also offered up a more sober and nuanced take on MoFree [again, scroll to "The Downtown Culture Derby"], for several years the idea of the museum as a tool of the Right was fixed. Then the design for the thing was released—rebranded as the International Freedom Center—and, we suppose, lacking columns and arches and the other tranquil fittings of fascism-in-form (also looking not a little bit like the coolest Crate & Barrel in the land), alarm began to build in those very quarters where all had assumed an ideological victory was already won.

So the Right, always primed, freaked out. And that freak out has made considerably more noise than the truly patriotic whimpers it replaced. The first salvo was fired in the Wall Street Journal on June 8 by Deborah Burlingame, sister of the pilot whose plane nailed the Pentagon: "The so-called lessons of September 11 should not be force-fed by ideologues hoping to use the memorial site as nothing more than a powerful visual aid to promote their agenda," Burlingame wrote—and she wasn't even talking about Karl Rove. Weird! Naturally, our colleagues in the 'sphere have kept the thing going, aided on paper by the New York Post in full flare. Why, just yesterday the little Murdochs offered up a deeply amusing full column editorial rant freely mixing logic and bile to support the Burlingame Thesis: "[Islamists] hate material prosperity because it has eluded their culture; thus they must deny it to everyone. So destroying the iconic evidence of the fruits of U.S. freedom—the Twin Towers—was vital to sustaining their credibility." And today we are ever so happy to report that Andrea Peyser, NYP Columnist of the Year and infamous Bitch at Large, has chimed in, riffing on yesterday's Survivors' protest at Ground Zero:


After all this time, [the 9/11 widow's] tears came easily. And, to my surprise, so did mine. Because less than four years after America was sucker-punched by terrorists, we are again under a vicious attack. Only this time, those who would destroy our way of life are working from within. Here, at the spot known as Ground Zero — where Michael Diehl was killed, along with nearly 2,800 human beings — planners are busy developing an "International Freedom Center." Finally! A place you can visit to find out exactly what you did wrong to bring about the 9/11 attacks. Hundreds of relatives of those slaughtered at the World Trade Center, for a long while divided by politics and separated by time, came out yesterday in a unified show of force, to perform a previously unimaginable task. They came here to defend their loved ones against a blood libel.
 
http://gutter.curbed.com/archives/2005/06/...at_911_memorial.php

Memorial Plots
The clash over exactly what story to tell at the ground zero museum
 
by Jarrett Murphy
June 21st, 2005 1:04 PM


Families' values: Protesters at ground zero on Monday
photo: Kate Englund
It would be easy to dismiss the people who rallied Monday against the proposed International Freedom Center at the World Trade Center site as the "Blameless America" crowd, merely the ideological opposites of the museum backers whom they were denouncing. But it's not as simple as that.
Their argument is that the Freedom Center has been "stolen" by people bent on excoriating American foreign policy over the ashes of the innocent dead. That's what Debra Burlingame, who galvanized opposition with a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, claims has happened.

"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, Guantánamo-obsessed world," Burlingame wrote. She added: "The so-called lessons of September 11 should not be force-fed by ideologues hoping to use the memorial site as nothing more than a powerful visual aid to promote their agenda."

Burlingame says politics does not belong at the WTC site, but she's no stranger to the politics of 9-11. In the three-plus years since her brother's death in the attacks, she has applauded Condi Rice's testimony and denounced those who heckled Rudy Giuliani at the 9-11 Commission, lent support to the Iraq war, spoken at the Republican National Convention, appeared with President Bush on the campaign trail, and backed his use of 9-11 images in TV ads.

As proof of the Freedom Center's blame-America bent, Burlingame cites the presence of ACLU head Anthony Romero, Human Rights First's Michael Posner, and left-wing Columbia professor Eric Foner on the roster of Freedom Center scholars and advisers. But there are at least 35 people on that list, including Medal of Honor recipient Bob Kerrey (a member of the 9-11 Commission and early supporter of the Iraq war) and David Fischer, a Brandeis professor with a recent book on George Washington's military tactics. The chairman of the Freedom Center is Tom Bernstein, who—Burlingame points out—is on the board of Human Rights First, a leading advocate for terrorism detainees held by the United States. But Bernstein is also a friend of Dubya's, a former partner with the prez in the Texas Rangers, and the man who late last year gave Bush a book by Natan Sharansky—favored luminary of the neocons.

Plans for the Freedom Center are in nascent stages but are likely to include topics like "the greatest generation," the triumph of conscience over slavery, and MLK's fight against Jim Crow. Fischer says museum curators who've consulted him were interested in some of his research on freedom symbols, like the "Don't Tread on Me" snake and the Liberty Bell. "There is nothing here that is a central expression of hostility to American values," he tells the Voice. "Quite the reverse."

But for some victims' relatives, what is ultimately exhibited in the museum is only one facet of the objection. "The first thing you need to ask," says Monica Iken, who lost her husband in the attacks, "is why it needs to be right there."

The presence of anything not directly related to 9-11 on their sacred site puzzles and offends some victims' kin. For them, it's the latest chapter of the saga over what a ground zero memorial should look like, in which family members have had to fight to preserve the footprints of the towers and to have access to the bedrock in which the buildings stood.

"The LMDC [Lower Manhattan Development Corporation], Governor Pataki, and the Port Authority—they have made a concerted effort to make ground zero about everything else but what happened on 9-11," Sally Regenhard, the mother of a slain firefighter, tells the Voice. "This just puts the cap on the simmering, boiling issues we've had with the system from day one: Get your commercial interests down there, build over the footprints, make everybody forget what happened." The motive, she suspects, is money—the LMDC wants to attract visitors, and a site devoted solely to a tragedy just won't get the traffic.

The Freedom Center will be one tenant in a cultural building of less than 250,000 square feet at the northeast corner of the memorial quadrant, the tree-filled area that will be dominated by the "Reflecting Absence" memorial filling the footprints of the towers. The actual 9-11 memorial center will be underground and comprise over 100,000 square feet of space. But plans and price estimates are not yet finalized. The difference in size between the Freedom Center and the memorial center bothers some families. That the bulk of memorial material will be below the surface also irks them. But that location was necessitated, backers of the Freedom Center say, by the families' desire to have access to bedrock.

Space for a museum building has been reserved since Daniel Libeskind's original master plan. The Freedom Center was selected to fill the space last June, its purpose "telling freedom's story, inspiring visitors to appreciate it on a personal level by looking at the countless individual women and men around the world who have made a difference." People associated with the Freedom Center say its aim is to derive something positive out of the grief and terror the site will always represent. That's why they plan seminars and debates (although the Freedom Center insists there'll be no discussion of rationalizing 9-11 itself) and will encourage visitors to volunteer for one of a range of nonprofit groups.

"I've always been supportive of having some form of what I would call a living memorial or something that engages people positively," says Tom Roger, whose daughter, Jean, was an attendant on American Airlines Flight 11. "After they've visited the site and paid their respects, to me it makes sense to take people in a sort of different direction." Roger says he thinks the planners of the Freedom Center are too ideologically diverse for the museum to espouse a left-wing agenda.

Some family members, however, are anxious that visitors will fail to grasp the linkages that the Freedom Center will make between 9-11 and struggles for freedom in other places and times. They are frightened by any attempt to introduce complexity to the site. Burlingame contends that people will be confused when they look down at the WTC site from the Freedom Center and, instead of seeing a crushed fire truck, view exhibits on Chilean refugees and Chinese dissidents who fought for freedom. "Americans do not want a sacred memorial to be about causes. They want it to be about people," Burlingame says. "September 11 was an atrocity in itself. Is American blood so cheap that that is not enough to tell the story of man's inhumanity to man?"

The question, though, is how that story would read, a point that divides even the people who oppose the Freedom Center. Like every argument about 9-11, the fight over the Freedom Center is about simplicity versus complexity—the big, intricate picture opposed to a broad-stroke portrait of horror and heroism.

Burlingame, for one, sees 9-11 as a moment of quintessential American character. After learning that her brother Charles "Chic" Burlingame was on the plane that rammed into the Pentagon, she says, "I looked back at the television and I saw what my fellow New Yorkers were doing. It was black, white, young, old, and it was a picture of America. That was the story of that day."

But Regenhard says the failures in planning before the attack, and in radio communication, and in emergency management on the day of the disaster, demand mention. The museum, she says, "should be about accountability and responsibility of government, which is a huge lesson of 9-11."

A host of family organizations, like September's Mission and Advocates for a 9-11 Fallen Heroes Memorial, are protesting the Freedom Center, but other groups take no position. September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, on the other hand, will soon press for a greater theme of forgiveness at the site.

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0525,murphy,65153,5.html

9/11 families protest cultural plans at Ground Zero

From Phil Hirschkorn
CNN

Tuesday, June 21, 2005; Posted: 1:01 p.m. EDT


NEW YORK (CNN) -- Dozens of relatives who lost loved ones in the September 11, 2001, attacks are protesting plans for cultural institutions on the World Trade Center site, particularly the International Freedom Center that some families fear will detract from a 9/11 memorial.

Family members from support groups gathered Monday at the site to launch a campaign to "take back the memorial" weeks after a model for the first cultural building was unveiled.

"If the memorial fails to convey how we as Americans value the loss of life, if it fails to tell the story to those who visit 100 years from now, then we as a nation have failed," said Mary Fetchet, founder of Voices of September 11th, whose son, Brad, 24, died in the twin towers.

Families have expressed concern that the cultural buildings will sit adjacent to the 16-acre site reserved for the memorial and an underground museum.

The Freedom Center is the most controversial of the proposed four cultural institutions. The others include the Joyce International Dance Theater, Signature Theater Company and a fine arts drawing center.

Freedom Center planners said the yet-to-be-determined exhibits will offer a historic "narrative of hope" to complement the memorial. Rebuilding officials said the content will reflect "humankind's quest for freedom."

"The organizers of the International Freedom Center say that in order to understand 9/11, we must see exhibits about slavery, segregation and genocide and its impact around the world. This is a history that we all should know and learn, but not here -- not on sacred ground," said Michael Burke, whose brother, Billy, was one of the 343 firefighters killed responding to the attacks.

"Nobody is coming to this place to learn about Ukraine democracy or to be inspired by the courage of Tibetan monks. They're coming for September 11."

Some families also said they find the size of exhibition space planned for the Freedom Center -- roughly double the 100,000 square feet for an underground memorial -- unfair.

"If we put the wrong buildings on this site, the 9/11 memorial will be lost in the abyss. If we put the right buildings on this site, the entire site will seem as a memorial," said Rose Talon, whose slain brother was also a firefighter.

"We have another tragedy -- forgetfulness," said Edie Lutnick, whose brother, Gary, worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, the brokerage atop the north tower where 658 people, more than any employer, lost their lives. "9/11 is being buried underground."

The debate erupted in public when one of the September 11 family members on the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, Debra Burlingame, wrote an op-ed column this month in The Wall Street Journal complaining about plans for the site.

Burlingame's brother was the pilot of the jetliner al Qaeda hijackers crashed into the Pentagon outside Washington.

"Looking generations ahead, people will come to this site and they will want to know what happened on that day and the days going forward, and they'll be confused because the real events of that day will be plunged underground," Burlingame said Monday.

"It is a massive, imposing building which dominates the site, and inside there will be nothing -- nothing about September 11."

Some families also cited concern that the political nature of the Freedom Center's exhibits could dilute the story of September 11 and become a magnet for disruptive protests.

"Do you find a debate about Nazism at Auschwitz? Do you find a debate about the North and the South at Gettysburg?" asked Charles Wolf, who lost his wife, Katherine, in the trade center attacks.

Seeking to rebuff the complaints, rebuilding officials pointed to a new poll of 105 September 11 family members that found them nearly evenly split, with 47 percent for the cultural plans and 45 percent against them. The Families of September 11 commissioned the telephone survey.

"This vision for the Freedom Center should be a tribute, a celebration of those men and women who through the course of history have moved us forward in our march to freedom," said John Cahill, a special adviser to the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., the agency overseeing the rebuilding effort.

Cahill and Lower Manhattan Development Corp. Chairman John Whitehead said it was too early to characterize the Freedom Center's content. Whitehead advocated installations for the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and "important events in our history that we are all proud of."

"The Freedom Center stands for what was attacked that day here and around the world," Cahill said. "The idea that we are going to allow the Freedom Center to get hijacked from the political right or from the political left is something that none of us will stand for."

Whitehead also said the September 11 memorial center will be underground to provide families what they wanted -- access to the bedrock of Ground Zero and the site's thick concrete border "slurry wall" that survived the collapse of the towers.

"The memorial has always been and will always be the centerpiece, the heart and soul of our efforts. At six acres in size, it will be an appropriately prominent and moving memorial," Whitehead said.

The cultural buildings are part of the master plan for rebuilding the World Trade Center site that architect Daniel Libeskind developed. The plan includes a 1,776-foot-tall Freedom Tower and a massive new train station.

Libeskind originally described the buildings as buffers between the high traffic street on the east side of Ground Zero and the memorial plaza.

The memorial, chosen after an unprecedented international competition, will feature two reflecting pools where the acre-wide towers once stood.

 
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TRAVEL/06/21/ground.zero.plans/

The original World Trade Center Plaza.

By ANDREA PEYSER
Tue Jun 21, 5:59 AM ET

NEARLY four years after her husband was murdered on 9/11 just because he was American, Loisanne Diehl stood in lower Manhattan, defending her beloved from those who would insist he deserved to die.

"He did not have it coming to him," said Lois. "None of them."

After all this time, her tears came easily. And, to my surprise, so did mine. Because less than four years after America was sucker-punched by terrorists, we are again under a vicious attack.

Only this time, those who would destroy our way of life are working from within.

Here, at the spot known as Ground Zero — where Michael Diehl was killed, along with nearly 2,800 human beings — planners are busy developing an "International Freedom Center." Finally! A place you can visit to find out exactly what you did wrong to bring about the 9/11 attacks.

Hundreds of relatives of those slaughtered at the World Trade Center, for a long while divided by politics and separated by time, came out yesterday in a unified show of force, to perform a previously unimaginable task. They came here to defend their loved ones against a blood libel.

They needed to make sure that no one forgets what really happened here.

"There is no justification for what happened — this was a mass murder," said Richard Pecorella of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, who came to Ground Zero clutching a photograph of his dead fiance, Karen Juday.

He and his "farm girl from Indiana" lived together five years, and were to be married in a few months.

"I never got to see her again," he said, through tear-stained eyes.

It struck me how awful it was that Pecorella found it necessary to make this argument. To suggest that someone might blame Karen, an administrative assistant for Cantor Fitzgerald, for her own death was beyond obscene. But there it is.

Planners entrusted with developing the Ground Zero memorial have determined that this city needs some sort of "cultural" — their word — component to the site.

The idea is to build an educational center — more like an indoctrination center, it seems to me — with exhibits examining unrelated outrages of the past, many of them committed by Americans. Slavery and the treatment of American Indians, just to name two.

There is a place for this, to be sure. But why at Ground Zero?

It seems the advisory committee for the Freedom Center is peppered with folks who brandish leftist political agendas. These include a Columbia professor who said, three weeks after 9/11, that he didn't know what was scarier — the terror attacks or the White House's response to them. Also, types who condemn America for supposedly cracking down on civil liberties after 9/11.

The Freedom Center would feature a forum for "debate" — center president Richard Tofel's word — about such issues.

Rose Canavan, 64, of Long Island, who lost her son, Sean, doesn't want to hear of it. With none of his remains recovered at the Trade Center, she just wants a peaceful place to visit him. Nothing more.

"They were all there just to go to work," said Rose, "not to mess around.

"It shouldn't be too much to ask."

No, it should not.

If you want to engage in political debate, there are many venues in which to do so. Not here. Not now.

We don't need the Freedom Center.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nypost/20050621/cm...s39pcprattle/nc:742

Tue Jun 21, 5:59 AM ET

Folks who lost loved ones on 9/11 rallied near Ground Zero yesterday to let the world know that they will not permit a memorial to those who died that day to be politicized.
 
The official response was hardly a comfort.

At issue is the International Freedom Center — a project in grave danger of being stolen by left-leaning academics and other historical revisionists.


Scarcely was the demonstration over when two of Gov. Pataki's representatives — John C. Whitehead, interim chairman of the board for the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, and John Cahill, czar for Ground Zero reclamation — met the press themselves.


Cahill said that the IFC is meant to "celebrate man's march to freedom and how 9/11 played an important role," promising it would not be a place for "political polemics."

Whitehead had even less to say.

And even if he did, there's no reason to believe that he can deliver: As chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., Whitehead has presided over the descent of Ground Zero reconstruction into total farce.

So why would any reasonable person take on faith alone his assertion that IFC head Richard Tofel will be forbidden from effecting a similar outcome for the Ground Zero memorial?

Tofel, to be sure, has assembled some solid citizens to oversee the memorial center; too bad he has also brought into the picture a gaggle of folks who seem bent on assigning ultimate responsibility for the 9/11 attacks to the United States of America.

Yesterday, according to the Associated Press, Tofel said the center would not bar criticism of America and its actions:

"Part of the way we celebrate freedom is to acknowledge that even the greatest societies in the world and those that have made the greatest contribution to freedom are not perfect."

That sort of nonsense is what brought Debra Burlingame (sister of a pilot of one of the 9/11 hijacked planes and author of the Wall Street Journal op-ed that blew the whistle on the project) to Liberty and Church streets yesterday.

"9/11 Memorial Only! 9/11 Memorial Only!" the crowd chanted — prompting the tepid Cahill-Whitehead response.

There is, of course, no guarantee that either Cahill or Whitehead will be around in two years — given the increasing doubt that Pataki himself will be.

Thus, Cahill needs to bring the full weight of his office to bear now.

Words — promises — are not enough.

Cahill needs to get the revisionist termites out of the IFC woodwork before it's too late — and if that means dismissing Tofel and any others who resist, fine.

So be it.

And he needs to make it abundantly clear that the Ground Zero memorial will become nobody's political hobby horse.

Ultimately blame — or credit, as the case may be — will devolve to Pataki.

He's well on his way to leaving one gaping pit at Ground Zero.

Will there be two?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nypost/20050621/cm...i39sotherpit/nc:742

I guess the question remains for Mayor Bloomberg, who have they pleased?

Ground Zero museum panned
 
Focus on attack, kin urge
 
BY NANCY DILLON
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
 
 
Matthew Sellito of Harding Township, N.J., whose son Matthew died at WTC, at yesterday's protest.
 
Families of 9/11 victims warned yesterday that a Ground Zero museum highlighting worldwide freedom fights will detract from what should be the site's true focus - the 2001 terror attack.
"We think that Martin Luther King deserves to be honored ... but not on the site where 20,000 body parts of 2,749 innocents were recovered," said Edie Lutnick, 45, whose brother, Gary Lutnick, was a managing director for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the north tower.

"Instead of being immersed in 9/11, we'll be discussing world politics."

Still, officials defended the planned International Freedom Center as a celebration of the liberties the hijackers tried to crush. The center will serve as a buffer between the surrounding commercial buildings and the 9/11 memorial.

"We were attacked that day because of our values, because of our freedom," said John Cahill, Gov. Pataki's point man on Ground Zero development. "So to the extent the Freedom Center reflects those values and freedoms, it would be appropriate to have on the site."

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and President Abraham Lincoln likely would fit into the freedom center's mission, Cahill said.

But outraged kin said they're worried the center will draw attention away from 9/11, and invite political debates and protests unbecoming the hallowed, 16-acre site.

"If you want to debate, go to Columbia or NYU. Don't do it on the ashes of all these people," said Debra Burlingame, who lost her pilot brother on 9/11.

Rosaleen Tallon, who lost her firefighter brother Sean Tallon, pictured a day when her now 2-year-old daughter Judey visits the museum and sees photos of overseas atrocities.

"Will she think 9/11 is something to be ashamed of?" Tallon asked. "If we put the wrong [institutions] here, the 9/11 memorial will be lost in the abyss."

The demonstration by a group calling itself "Take Back the Memorial" drew about 100 family members.

Construction of the $350 million underground memorial - which will include displays of artifacts from the 2001 terrorist attacks - is set to begin next year.

"You are never going to please everybody," Mayor Bloomberg said.

 
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/320900p-274422c.html

Families of Sept. 11 victims call for cancellation of museum
 
 
By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN
Associated Press Writer

June 20, 2005, 9:48 PM EDT


NEW YORK -- Dozens of relatives of people killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks called for the cancellation of plans for a freedom museum at Ground Zero, saying it would spoil the site's solemnity with controversy and political debate.

Officials charged with the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site said the International Freedom Center will place the Sept. 11 attacks in the context of a centuries-old global movement toward freedom encompassing events ranging from the U.S. civil rights movement to the signing of the Magna Carta. It will host discussions on historical and current events, exhibits on global freedom movements and a service program encouraging activities that could range from joining the Peace Corps to enlisting in the U.S. military, they said.
 
"Our generation's task is to defend freedom and advance freedom and we're going to help do that," center president Richard J. Tofel said.

But the center's use of advisors that include some critics of U.S. policy has prompted criticism from conservative commentators in recent weeks. The criticism broadened Monday to include a call by victims' families to avoid any political content at Ground Zero. Relatives representing 14 family groups gathered at the site to condemn the freedom center plans and call for their cancellation.

"It doesn't matter whether it's going to be left or right. It doesn't belong at a memorial," said Charles Wolf, whose wife, Katherine, died in the World Trade Center collapse. "You wouldn't put a debate about Nazism and authoritarianism at Dachau."

The center has recruited dozens of advisers including the executive directors of Human Rights First and the American Civil Liberties Union, who have criticized U.S. domestic and foreign policy in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Critics have said they worry that as a result the center will ignore Sept. 11 victims in favor of critiquing U.S. actions, including alleged abuses of people suspected of involvement in terrorism.

Officials in charge of the center and the broader Ground Zero rebuilding effort agreed that the events of Sept. 11, 2001 would be condemned as attacks on freedom, not discussed and debated. But they offered different takes on how other historical and current events would be depicted.

John Cahill, whom Gov. George Pataki last month placed in charge of Ground Zero rebuilding efforts, said at a press conference responding to the families' critiques that the center would not be used, "in any way in an anti-American fashion." He said all facets of U.S. history, including slavery, would be dealt with positively. "It's a tribute in a positive way of man's march to freedom," Cahill said.

A spokeswoman for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation said Cahill meant that positive developments such as the end of slavery would be emphasized over negative aspects such as the experiences of slaves.

Tofel said that while the causes of the Sept. 11 attacks would not be up for debate, the center would not bar criticism of the U.S. and its actions.

"Part of the way we celebrate freedom is to acknowledge that even the greatest societies in the world and those that have made the greatest contribution to freedom are not perfect," he said.

The center would be part of an as much as 250,000-square-foot cultural complex set to open in 2009 at the northeast end of the trade center site.

When asked whether the museum would depict the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as part of global progress toward liberation, Cahill declined to answer directly but implied that they would, saying, "Man's march to freedom is continuing."

LMDC chairman John C. Whitehead said that the wars should be avoided by the museum because they remain topics of controversy and debate.

"We are basically a history museum," he said. "I think Iraq is still too much in the political arena."
 
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/new...ny-region-apnewyork