By Debra Burlingame
Democratic lawmakers want to establish a “9/11-style commission” to investigate the siege of the Capitol on Jan. 6. “I would like to see Jan. 6 burned into the American mind as firmly as 9/11, because it was that scale of a shock to the system,” commentator George Will said recently. The attempt to reconfigure the “domestic terrorist” narrative to fit the horrifying story of Sept. 11 is profoundly disheartening. These two events are fundamentally different in nature, scope and consequences. Mentioning them in the same breath not only diminishes the horror of what happened on 9/11; it tells a false story to the generation of Americans who are too young to remember that day nearly 20 years ago.
My brother, Charles “Chic” Burlingame, was the pilot of American Airlines flight 77. He was murdered in his cockpit at age 51 in a 6½-minute struggle for control of the airplane. Here is what I want these young people to know:
Members of Congress might have had a frightening day on Jan. 6, but on 9/11 some 200 people in the World Trade Center towers chose to jump from 80 to 100 floors above the ground rather than be consumed by fire. A woman waiting at a lobby elevator bank was burned over 82% of her body when jet fuel from the first plane sent a ball of fire down the elevator shaft and into the lobby. She spent three months in a hospital burn unit and was permanently disfigured.
There are countless harrowing stories like this—of death, destruction and heartbreaking loss. More than 3,000 children lost parents. Eight young children were killed on the planes. Recovery personnel found 19,000 human remains scattered all over lower Manhattan from river to river, including on rooftops and window ledges. Victims’ remains were still being recovered years later by utility workers and construction crews. Some families received so many notifications of remains that they couldn’t take it any more and asked for them to stop. More than 1,100 families received nothing. Their loved ones went to work that morning and disappeared.
The attack brought down our nationwide aviation system, shut down the New York Stock Exchange for days, destroyed or rendered uninhabitable 16 acres of Lower Manhattan including underground subway and commuter train lines and destroyed a section of the Pentagon. Rebuilding at ground zero is still incomplete, and U.S. troops are still in Afghanistan.
On Jan. 6, Congress resumed its session that evening.
It is deeply offensive and sad that the brutal and harrowing memories of the worst terrorist attack in American history are being deployed by political partisans. They are using 9/11 not as an example of what the American people endured and overcame together, but explicitly to divide, to stoke hatred and to further a political agenda aimed at stigmatizing the other party and marginalizing ordinary Americans from participating in the political process. That is the real threat to democracy.
It should matter that the vast majority of the people who went to the Capitol protest that day didn’t believe they were there to overthrow the U.S. government, or, it must now be said, to kill anyone.
There have been real terrorist attacks on the Capitol. But those must be forgotten because they came from the political left. In 1971 the Weather Underground, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group whose goal was the overthrow of the U.S. government through violent, armed revolution, blasted a hole through the ceiling on the Senate side of the complex. It also bombed the Pentagon in 1972 and the State Department in 1975.
In 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire with automatic weapons from the House visitors gallery with members in the chamber for a quorum call.
The Capitol riot was a few hundred, out of hundreds of thousands, of Trump supporters going stupid and breaking the law.
From there, we have cops opening doors and antifa film-men. This was expected as the kind of “false flag” the Dems keep pushing, and it’s right out the Communist Play Book.
In light of the thousands of organized and viscous antifa/BLM terrorists, we all knew the projection and hate of the Left would fully exaggerate and mis-frame anything bad from the Right.
And that’s all this is.
Continued pushing of The Big Lie is simply a hate crime against all those who are non-Leftists.
It’s wrong.
The establishment wants to make the January 6th riot more than what it actually was because it attacked THEIR world. They are like divas that has someone bust out laughing during one of their silly little songs, far more outrage and insult than necessary. Of course, Democrats have the added incentive to exploit it to justify crushing civil liberties and spreading fear they can use to implement their police state, but the “attack” seemed much worst to those in the politics business.
They don’t even remember or know what 9/11 was. Now, it is just something, like Nazis or fascism, to hit someone over the head with. To them, nothing has meaning but as a political weapon.
Filthy Dirty Democrats lower then snake in a wagon rut comparing 9/11 to Jan 6th? and they can get the M.S. Media to Parrot their load of Malarkey. Someone take whip to that Jackass
joseph Goebbels noted the following 1. create a franticly/fictional event. 2. propaganda it until the people believe it, 3. induce mass mass panic, 4. send in the military to control the mass and enslave the mass.
A “9/11-style commission” isn’t a comparison of the two events. It’s a description of a proposed investigative processes.
To anyone with a grasp of history, December 6th WAS a shock. It was our own constitutional election process under direct assault by a violent mob of our own citizens, incited by an egomaniac who refused—and STILL refuses—to acknowledge or accept the will of the American people.
THAT deserves a full investigation.