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WASHINGTON (AP) Republican lawmakers from New York on Wednesday threatened to bring Congress into the growing controversy about designs for the World Trade Center site.
Questioning the use of billions of dollars in federal money for the project, Rep. John Sweeney said, "There may be a need for Congress now to clarify its position on what that $2.5 billion was supposed to be for."
Some Sept. 11 family members say current plans for an International Freedom Center would overshadow plans for a memorial to the 2,749 victims of the 2001 terror attack and would include exhibits on slavery, the Holocaust and the history of freedom that would be inappropriate for the site.
Leaders of the center _ including the widow of a Sept. 11 victim _ have said the museum will be respectful of the victims but would also place the story of Sept. 11 in context with other world events.
Sweeney said Wednesday morning he will request congressional oversight hearings to determine whether the federal money is being spent as legislators intended if the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. doesn't drop its current plan for an International Freedom Center on the site.
The LMDC, the rebuilding agency created by Gov. George Pataki and former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani after the attack, has given the Freedom Center until Friday to provide more detailed plans before it reconsiders whether the center belongs at the site.
But the LMDC won't see the Freedom Center's plan until Friday.
"Any comment regarding that submission would be premature at this point," said John Gallagher, spokesman for the LMDC.
Later Wednesday, Sweeney said in a press release: "It's now or never for the IFC. The museum can do what is right or face the consequences of their actions."
The center responded in a written statement: "We continue to believe that a living memorial at the World Trade Center site, including the International Freedom Center, would be most consistent with the mission of the memorial itself and would most effectively honor those lost."
Steve Cassidy, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, representing 22,000 active and retired firefighters, stood with the lawmakers in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday and reaffirmed his organization's stance that the planned museum has no place on the grave site of the victims of the terrorist attack.
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