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Friday, September 11, 2026

Pentagon Memorial Designated National Park Area Ahead of 25th Anniversary Ceremony

Pentagon Memorial Designated National Park Area Ahead of 25th Anniversary Ceremony
Photo: PBS NewsHour

The National Park Service recently designated the Pentagon's 9/11 memorial site as an "Affiliated Area of the National Park System," highlighting its national significance. The memorial, located in Arlington, Virginia, honors the 184 victims of the 2001 attack on the Department of Defense headquarters, including those aboard the hijacked plane and inside the building. Authorized by Congress in 2001 and opened in 2008, the site features stainless steel benches for each victim arranged over a shallow pool. On the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, President Donald Trump delivered remarks during an observance ceremony at the Pentagon. Although Trump had initially sought to speak at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, organizers maintain a tradition of no speeches to preserve the event's nonpartisan nature. The military killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in 2011, but the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed remains on trial after 23 years.

Sourcespbs.orgmotherjones.compbs.orgfoxnews.combbc.co.ukmotherjones.comnpr.orgthehill.comaljazeera.comnpr.org

The takes

  • Portrait of Adam Smith

    Adam Smith

    1723–1790, Scotland (the Scottish Enlightenment: Kirkcaldy, Glasgow, Edinburgh)

    Memorials, Power, and the Proper Business of the State

    A national memorial can refine a nation’s conscience or flatter its rulers’ vanity; the same stones serve either purpose, and only moral discipline decides which.

    That a field in Pennsylvania, a scarred riverfront in New York, and the grounds of a war office in Virginia should become places of national pilgrimage, will surprise no one who has attended to human nature. We erect monuments not to instruct the dead but to steady the living. The recent decision to mark the Pentagon memorial as an affiliated area of the national park system is therefore a serious act. It does not add one bench, one name, or one drop of water; it adds, instead, a public acknowledgment that this place belongs to the whole people, and not merely to the department whose walls were struck.

    Read the essay
  • Portrait of John Locke

    John Locke

    1632–1704, England (writing amid the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution)

    Memorials Are Not Licenses for Endless War

    To honor the dead of September 11 is a rightful work of government; to use their memory as a pretext for unbounded power is a betrayal of the very trust those deaths now hallow.

    That a people should mark the twenty‑fifth year since a day of slaughter is fitting, and that they should do it with public solemnity is no usurpation but a natural act of a commonwealth mindful of its wounds. I read that a memorial by the Pentagon, long since authorized by the legislative power and set with a bench for each of the 184 who died there, is now taken formally into your national park system, to signify its common importance. I read also of observances at the site of another crashed plane, and of lights and ceremonies far from any scene of ruin. Men are not stones. They need shared signs to remember what their laws exist to prevent.

    Read the essay
  • Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli

    Niccolò Machiavelli

    1469–1527, Florence (republican secretary and diplomat, then exile, amid the Italian Wars)

    On the Twenty-Fifth 9/11 Anniversary, the State Rehearses Its Own Survival

    The memorials, the benches, the beams of light, and the carefully managed podiums are not sentiment but strategy: a republic practicing the arts that keep it from coming apart the next time fortune strikes.

    A quarter century after the attacks, your rulers are still moving pieces on that same board. The Pentagon memorial is now declared an “Affiliated Area of the National Park System,” with every stainless steel bench and shallow pool suddenly raised into the firmament of national symbols. A president speaks at the Pentagon but not at New York’s memorial, where organizers bar speeches to keep the rite nonpartisan. Meanwhile, another ceremony rises in Pennsylvania for Flight 93, and beams of light pierce the sky from a distant mountain. Do not be distracted by incense. This is the state, in many hands and on many stages, rehearsing the story by which it intends to live.

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