Three Republican congressmen from New York yesterday called for hearings over plans for an international freedom center at ground zero, criticizing recently released plans for a cultural center that they say will not focus squarely on the events of September 11, 2001.

Citing the potential use of federal funds for the proposed freedom center, Reps. Peter King, Vito Fossella, and John Sweeney said they aim to open the public dialogue with hearings in front of a House appropriations subcommittee on which Mr. Sweeney serves as vice chairman.

Some family members of September 11 victims, along with city police and firefighters’ unions, have said they fear that the proposed museum at ground zero will inappropriately display offensive or disrespectful material. Their dissent prompted the state agency managing the development of ground zero, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, to ask last month that the freedom center submit more detailed plans.

Those plans, released yesterday, a day before the deadline, include a detailed description of a visitor’s experience. A tour will begin with an exhibition that highlights the show of support for Americans around the world in the aftermath of 9/11, including a moment of silence observed by 60,000 spectators at a Tehran soccer match.

Several exhibits aim to connect September to a historic continuum of a global movement towards freedom. One gallery will be a tribute to “great documents of freedom” including the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, and the South African constitution.

Another gallery highlights the four “essential freedoms” President Franklin Roosevelt identified when America fought and defeated Nazi Germany.

Mr. King said the focus of the center missed the mark. “Somewhere along the line, it appears the project was hijacked,” the congressman said in a telephone interview with The New York Sun. “The intelligentsia, the social elite – I don’t know where this came from.”

Mr. King advocated a narrower focus on the events of September 11 and criticized the plan to portray it as part of a larger “historic and ongoing struggle for freedom.”

“Is that the PLO? Is that FARC? I don’t know who they are talking about,” Rep. King said, referring to the Palestine Liberation Organization and a Marxist terrorist group in Colombia.

Mr. Fossella said he feared a repeat of the Brooklyn Museum controversy in 1999 and 2000, when he said the museum tried to boost attendance by showing a painting of Mary daubed with elephant dung.

“I don’t see how five to 10 years down the road safeguards can be put in place that won’t allow the museum to deviate from those that lost their lives,” Mr. Fossella told the Sun. “Maybe in five or 10 years they will blame America for what happened on 9/11.”

A spokesman for Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the Democrat whose district includes ground zero, said the congressman would like to read the proposal before commenting on it.

Several family members of September 11 victims held a conference call yesterday afternoon and plan to release a statement criticizing the plans today.

The sister of a pilot of the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pentagon and an outspoken opponent of the museum, Debra Burlingame, called the new plans “the same ugly dog in a different outfit.”

She said that the freedom center is attempting to sanitize September 11 by avoiding the topic of terrorism and focusing instead on freedom.

“Osama bin Laden was not trying to take away our freedom, he was trying to kill us,” Ms. Burlingame said. “Bush talks about freedom because he is also trying to do a sales job, an ideology. This isn’t the George W. Bush center. … This is something that is supposed to put the story of 9/11 in a historical context.”

Ms. Burlingame said she would not support a cultural center on the site because cultural institutions will be protected by the First Amendment and could potentially exhibit offensive material that belongs on a site other than ground zero. She said the museum was intent on the ground zero site because they hoped to tap into the steady stream of tourists that is likely to visit every year.

The freedom center also announced an expanded board of directors that now includes an Israeli politician and former Soviet dissident, Natan Sharansky; the director of the Holocaust museum in Washington, Sara Bloomfield; a former director of the Reagan Library, Richard Norton Smith, and the editor of Newsweek International, Fareed Zakaria. The plans come attached with letters of support from directors of several American cultural institutions, including the Gettysburg battlefield museum, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the National Constitution Center.

The LMDC’s next scheduled meeting is October 6.