9/11 Museum News

The National September 11 Memorial Memorial & Museum has been a memorial of the 2001 terrorist attacks since 2011 and a museum since 2014, both at the site of the former Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.

The New York Times, headquartered not many city blocks to the north, is a newspaper world famous for its authority and quality, and noted for its influence on the rest of the news media in the United States and abroad.

Yesterday the Times led its Arts section with a feature article geared to museum-world realities. Budgetary nightmares will prevent the non-profit from offering special exhibitions and other 20th-anniversary programming there. About 60 percent of the institution’s staff has been laid off or furloughed, in part because of lost income from months of Covid 19 restrictions.

Headline: “9/11 Museum Vexed by Cuts and Feuds.” Subhead: “New exhibitions are dropped, and critics say the institution seems frozen in time.” Byline: By Zachary Small.

For many who have challenged government and news accounts of “9/11,” the story may be tough going for the first dozen paragraphs. They include, without attribution, this standard summary of the attacks:

“[T]he terrorist group Al Qaeda hijacked several planes and used them as weapons. Two crashed into the World Trade Center towers and a third flew into the Pentagon. A fourth plane was headed toward Washington, but passengers and crew members fought back, bringing it down in a field in Pennsylvania.”

No attribution has ever been needed for the various Pulitzer or Nobel prize winners who tuck such a passage into their articles, let alone a relatively unknown writer for the Times Arts section. If he didn’t put the summary in, the copy desk would have.

Then, though, Small’s story picks up. Weaved into details of attendance figures, budget deficits, government loans, fund-raising efforts and architectural descriptions is some telling information.

The founding creative director, Michael Shulan, is among those interviewed who say the museum balked at having 20th-anniversary programming that would challenge the official government 9/11 story.

Shulan: “Twenty years marks a turning point where one begins to look at things with a certain amount of hindsight. Not asking questions just leads to further crises.”

Memorial & Museum chief executive and president Alice M. Greenwald carries out a thankless job of defending the government 9/11 line.

Some new information may be revealed in “The Outsider,” a documentary film by Pamela Yoder and Steven Rosenbloom, to be released online next month, based in part on extensive footage from years of private meetings at the museum. Rosenbloom speaks of the museum authorities’ “decision … to codify, control and limit,” at the cost of a more accurate picture of the attacks and related matters.

Many researchers see the mainstream news media as places where 9/11 truth goes to die. The Times’s report this week may presage something different.

— Mark Channing Miller