Does 9/11 Make You Proud?

Then why celebrate it with a new "freedom" holiday?

Robert A. George | September 8, 2005

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The evidence is manifest in multiple detailed congressional and independent commission reports detailing the failure to prevent the awful plot. (And that's not even counting the recent, and disputed "Able Danger" allegations.)

It is beyond dispute that America's institutions failed because of multiple "missed opportunities." As Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine said in July, the FBI was responsible for a "a significant failure that hindered...chances of being able to detect and prevent the September 11 attacks."

Among the oversights noted in a recent independent panel report, the CIA failed to recognize the importance of the arrest in mid-August 2001 of so-called "20th hijacker," Zaccharias Moussaoui.

Other CIA gaffes were left classified for more than a year in an internal report that has yet to be released, as current CIA director Porter Goss tries either to minimize embarrassment to his predecessor George Tenet or to prevent Tenet from spreading embarrassment to either the agency or the administration.

Considering the actual history, linking 9/11 to support for the military borders on being an insult to America's soldiers and Marines—who certainly weren't responsible for governmental failure on an historically catastrophic level.

You want to identify a day bonding America to the accomplishments of its men and women in uniform? Consider October 7 when Operation Enduring Freedom was launched in Afghanistan: A united nation stood in near-total support of an action that led to the eviction of the Taliban government that had provided a base of operations for al Qaeda.

"Freedom Walks," ironically, does precisely the opposite of what America is historically supposed to be about. Even following its worst moments, America always seeks to look and move forward. If America is hit, it gets up and moves ahead—as the America of the 1940s did after it suffered an attack on its bases at Pearl Harbor.

There was no desire to transmogrify a day of death and destruction into an argument that "this is what America is all about." Pearl Harbor was a sad moment in the history of the country—correctly termed by President Roosevelt as "a date that will live in infamy." Yes, we said "Remember Pearl Harbor"—but as a temporary exhortation that passed with the moment.

The intended legacy of 9/11 will apparently be something different. Administration literature claims that, "Next year, on the fifth anniversary," it is "hopeful that every state will conduct a Freedom Walk, which will begin an important tradition in our country of commemorating 9-11 and also highlighting the importance and cost of Freedom."

That is a plan to institutionalize, no, immortalize 9/11. Instead of allowing the date to remain consigned to infamy, it is being elevated into a great "celebration." Making America's worst day synonymous with freedom—in essence, putting it on a level with the day when our Founding Fathers first crafted a sacred document that identified certain Creator-endowed unalienable rights—seems almost Orwellian.

In New York, several 9/11 families, the firefighters union and many others have protested a proposed "International Freedom Center" in a museum next to Ground Zero out of a fear that the site's hallowed nature would end up being besmirched from an academic and ultimately disturbing celebration of "freedom."

Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles Burlingame, pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, wrote that the IFC will produce: "a slanted history lesson, a didactic lecture on the meaning of liberty in a post-9/11 world..."

For Burlingame, a Ground Zero memorial with an adjacent freedom "celebration" that features "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," misses the point.

It is an inappropriate juxtaposition telling precisely the wrong lessons about post-9/11 America—suggesting that freedom can only truly be understood in the context of America's failure to uphold its ideals.

The "Freedom Walk" makes the same mistake in the opposite direction—suggesting that freedom can only truly be understood in the context of the role of the military in America's existence.