Flight 93 Memorial

The Flight 93 National Memorial protects the site of the crash of United Airlines Flight 93, that was hijacked in the September 11, 2001 attacks, in Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania, about 2 miles north of Shanksville, Pennsylvania and 60 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.  A temporary memorial to the 40 victims was established soon after the crash, with a permanent memorial slated to be constructed and completed by 2011.  The current design for the memorial is a modified version of the entry Crescent of Embrace by Paul and Milena Murdoch.

Flight 93 Memorial Design

The commission decided to select the final design for the memorial through a multi-stage design competition funded by grants from the Heinz Foundations and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.  The competition began on September 11, 2004.  More than 1,000 entries were submitted.  In February 2005, five finalists were selected for further development and consideration.  The 15-member final jury included family members, design and art professionals, and community and national leaders.  After three days of review and debate, they announced the winner on September 7, 2005: Crescent of Embrace by a design team led by Paul and Milena Murdoch of Los Angeles.

The design featured a "Tower of Voices," containing 40 wind chimes -- one for each passenger and crew member who died.  Two stands of red maple trees would line a walkway following the natural bowl shape of the land.  Forty groves of red and sugar maples and eastern white oak trees were to be planted behind the crescent.  A black slate wall would mark the edge of the crash site, where the victims are buried.

The Murdochs' design and its bureaucratic defense has been controversial since its beginning.

The Controversy

The design drew its immediate criticism because it was entitled the "Crescent of Embrace" and the crescent is a symbol of Islam, the terrorists who hijacked the aircraft were Muslim and conducted the attacks in the name of Allah.

The crescent that Muslims face into is called a mihrab, a niche in a mosque, indicating the qibla, the direction in which a Muslim shall perform his salat.  The mihrab is the position of the person leading the congregation in prayer, and is by most Muslims considered the most holy place in the mosque.  It is the central feature upon which every mosque is built and the central feature of the Flight 93 Memorial.

 

The original Crescent of Embrace Site-Plan (.pdf) was drawn on a topographical map that the Memorial Project provided to all participants in the design competition.  A topographical map is the epitome of a geo-referenced map.  North marked on the map is true north, which is the only piece of information needed to calculate the orientation of the crescent.  Just connect the tips of the crescent, form the perpendicular bisector, and calculate how many degrees it points from north (53.4).

Also known are the crash-site coordinates, which is all that is needed to calculate the direction to Mecca (55.2° clockwise from north).  All of this is trivially easy to verify.  Just use the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com to get a graphic of the direction to Mecca from the crash site and place it over the crescent site plan:

Somerset PA is ten miles from the crash-site. The "qibla" is the direction to Mecca, the direction that should be faced when a Muslim prays.  Red lines show the orientation of the crescent.  The crescent points 1.8° north of Mecca.

44 dead people, 44 translucent blocks on the flight path

If the Crescent of Embrace is not a memorial to the terrorists who downed Flight 93, why does it contain 44 translucent blocks, instead of just the forty inscribed to memorialize the forty murdered Americans?

Take a look at this graphic of the Crescent’s Memorial Wall:

 

 

Passengers and flight crew are memorialized with the translucent blocks on the left.

The lower portion of the wall, on the left, contains forty translucent blocks, backlit at night, and inscribed with the names of the forty murdered Americans.  There is also an an upper section of wall, continuing up the flight path that Flight 93 followed as it came into the crash site.  Notice that this section of wall also contains a strip of translucent blocks, a shorter strip, just long enough to memorialize a small handful of people, like maybe the four terrorists who also died in the crash.

Confirmation comes from noting that the center point of the upper section of the memorial wall lies exactly (to the pixel) on the line that bisects the red maple crescent, establishing  that this upper wall is indeed a separate sub-memorial to the terrorists.

The Re-Design

In response to criticism, Murdoch agreed to modify the plan.  The architects believe that the central elements could be maintained to satisfy criticism.  "It's a disappointment there is a misinterpretation and a simplistic distortion of this, but if that is a public concern, then that is something we will look to resolve in a way that keeps the essential qualities," he said in a telephone interview to the Associated Press.

These "essential qualities"  that Murdoch references are not just the crescent design or its orientation, but all the other terrorist memorializing features in the design, or the numerous proofs of intent that architect Paul Murdoch included so that his accomplishment will be undeniable once it is a fait accompli.

The National Park System's Fraudulent Investigation
 

In April 2006, Park Service Director Mary Bomar ordered an internal investigation into claims that the planned Flight 93 Memorial is actually a terrorist memorial mosque, built abound a giant Mecca-oriented crescent.  Bomar's investigation was a total fraud, concluding, for instance, that it isn't possible to calculate the orientation of the crescent because the site-plan has not been geo-referenced.

In fact, it is the director's office that has been covering up the Mecca-orientation of the crescent.

In addition to claiming that topographical maps are not geo referenced, Mary Bomar's internal investigation cites a small number of academic experts, all of whom spout nothing but the most absurd non sequiturs.  One is Dr. Daniel Griffith, professor of "geo-spatial information" at the University of Texas.  About the analysis of the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent, Dr. Griffith writes:

 

... Mr. Rawls's arithmetic calculations appear to be correct ... [but] ... just because calculations are correct does not make the resulting numbers meaningful.

Dr. Griffith's point, it seems, is that the mere fact of Mecca orientation does not imply intent.  But intent is not the only thing that matters. Even without terrorist memorializing intent, it is inappropriate to plant a giant Mecca oriented crescent on the crash site.

The Memorial Project knows this, but it is committed to defending the crescent design, so it keeps using its doubts about intent as an excuse for denying the facts.  Dr. Griffith, for instance, is telling every reporter who will listen that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca.  "Anything can point toward Mecca," he told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, "because the earth is round."  One billion Muslims face Mecca five times a day to pray, and Griffith pretends there is no such thing as facing Mecca!

Of course he knows better.

Another Bomar expert, Dr. Kevin Jaques, who is a specialist in Islamic Sharia law from the University of Indiana, acknowledges that the Mecca-oriented crescent is similar to the mihrab around which every mosque is built, but says:
 
           ...just because something is "similar to" something else does not make it the "same."
 
Yes, well, similar -- very, very similar -- is exactly the problem.
 

In fact, Patrick White is fully aware of the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. At the Memorial Project's public meeting in July he argued that the almost-exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent cannot be intended as a tribute to Islam because the inexactness of it would be "disrespectful to Islam."

Joanne Hanley has done the same:

 

"Alec Rawls bases all of his conclusions on faulty assumptions," said Joanne Hanley, the superintendent of the Flight 93 National Memorial. "In addition, the facts are twisted and people are misquoted, all to serve his intended purpose."

 

But she too has admitted the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent, telling Mr. Rawls in a 2006 conference call that she wasn't concerned about the almost-exact Mecca orientation of the crescent because: "It isn't exact.  That's one we talked about.  It has to be exact."