For those of you in or near Somerset, Pennsylvania

I just received this press release:

Alec Rawls and Tom Burnett Sr. (father of Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett Jr.) are traveling to Somerset PA to condemn the crescent/broken-circle memorial at the Memorial Project’s public meeting this Saturday, August 2nd. The meeting will run from 10-am to 1pm at the Somerset County Courthouse.

Immediately after the meeting Mr. Burnett and Mr. Rawls will host a press conference in the Master’s Room at the Somerset County Courthouse, next door to the public meeting room (Courtroom 1). Also on the press conference panel will be Diane Gramley, President of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, and the Reverend Ron McRae of Johnstown.

In addition to our own statements, Mr. Burnett will read a statement from Congressman John Kline (R-MN), and Alec Rawls will present statements from Rich Davis, founder of the Chester County Victory Movement, and from Khalim Massoud, President of Muslims Against Sharia Law.

After the press conference, Mr. Burnett and his supporters will host a rally to stop the re-hijacking of Flight 93. Members of our informal Western Pennsylvania Compatriots group (who spoke out at the last public meeting) will be in attendance, and some out of town folks will be coming as well.

To inform and invite the local populace, a half-page full-color ad will be running in tomorrow’s edition of the Somerset Daily American. (Ad copy here.) It explains how the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the Circle of Embrace redesign, which is explicitly described by the Park Service itself as a “broken” circle. That is exactly how architect Paul Murdoch described his original Crescent design.

All the redesign does is include an extra arc of trees that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. The unbroken part of the circle (the crescent), remains exactly as it was. It is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca , as your colleague Kirk Swauger verified a year ago:

Rawls maintains that the midpoint between the tips of the crescent points almost precisely toward “qibla,” the direction to Mecca, which Muslims are supposed to face for prayer.

His claims seem to be backed up by coordinates for the direction of qibla from Somerset that can be found on Islam.com. When superimposed over the crescent in the memorial design, the midpoint points over the Arctic Circle, through Europe toward Mecca.

Except for Kirk’s verification of the Mecca orientation of the crescent (which was not picked up by any other news organization), reporters have not been bothering to check the facts. When our claim that there are to be 44 inscribed translucent blocks emplaced along the flight path was reported a few months ago, Gordon Felt, President of Families of Flight 93 was quoted denying it, but despite this clear conflict of factual claims, no reporter bothered to simply open up the design drawings and count.

As will be detailed at our press conference, several of our supporters have gone to the trouble of going back to the source documents and fact-checking our basic claims about what is in the design. If reporters want to do the same, I have posted a set of fact checking guides, with links to source documents, at CrescentOfBetrayal.com.