A "Museum Review" in the New York Times pondered the museum's "trifurcated identity:"
Was it going to be primarily a historical document, a monument to the dead or a theme-park-style tourist attraction? How many historical museums are built around an active repository of human remains, still being added to? How many cemeteries have a $24 entrance fee and sell souvenir T-shirts? How many theme parks bring you, repeatedly, to tears?
Because that's what the museum does. The first thing to say about it, and maybe the last, is that it's emotionally overwhelming".
Despite that overwhelming ad hominem character, emphasizing the emotional impact of the lives of the living and dead, the Museum defines itself with a contradictory pose of academic detachment: "The National September 11 Memorial Museum serves as the country's principal institution concerned with exploring the implications of the events of 9/11, documenting the impact of those events and exploring 9/11's continuing significance." More credibly, the Museum defines its mission as bearing witness to the World Trade Center attacks of 1993 and 2001. Most compellingly, the 9/11 Museum seems to be a guardian of the official 9/11 story.
Omission can also be a form of bearing witness
Among the 9/11 Museum artifacts on display (its collection numbers more than 10,000 items, mostly small and personal), there are parts of the Boeing 767 airliners that hit the twin towers. The larger artifacts include a charred piece of fuselage with a missing window and the "World Trade Center Cross" (that a federal judge has ruled an "artifact," not a violation of the First Amendment separation of church and state). The Museum also has a collection of unidentified or unclaimed human body parts, some 14,000 of them, stored in an underground repository not open to the public.
Without apparently intending to do so, the 9/11 Museum's body of evidence that tends to reinforce the official 9/11 story in New York, also tends to reinforce longstanding questions about the official 9/11 story at the Pentagon. That story is that the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 (a Boeing 757 carrying 58 passengers and 6 crew) flew into the Pentagon at almost ground level, killing all aboard as well as 125 in the building (all but five of whom were, eventually, officially identified).
From the beginning, the official 9/11 Pentagon story caused cognitive dissonance, since the visual evidence suggests that nothing as big as a 757 have hit the outside wall of the Pentagon and disappeared even more completely than the planes that hit the World Trade Center, where they burned until the WTC collapsed around them. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
3
2
