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Kent State:
Guard Ordered to Fire
Link
Excerpt:
The Ohio National Guardsmen who fired on students
and antiwar protesters at Kent State University on May 4, 1970
were given an order to prepare to shoot, according
to a new analysis of a 40-year-old audio tape of the event.
"Guard!" says a male voice on the recording, which
two forensic audio experts enhanced and evaluated
at the request of The Plain Dealer. Several seconds
pass. Then, "All right, prepare to fire!"
"Get down!" someone shouts urgently, presumably
in the crowd. Finally, "Guard!..." followed two seconds later
by a long, booming volley of gunshots. The entire
spoken sequence lasts 17 seconds.
The previously undetected command could begin
to explain the central mystery of the Kent State tragedy
- why 28 Guardsmen pivoted in unison atop Blanket
Hill, raised their rifles and pistols and fired 67 times,
killing four students and wounding nine others
in an act that galvanized sentiment against the Vietnam War.
The order indicates that the gunshots were not spontaneous, or in response to sniper fire, as some have suggested over the years...
"How do you spell bombshell?" said Barry Levine,
whose girlfriend Allison Krause was mortally wounded
as he tried to pull her behind cover. 'That is
obviously very significant. The photographic evidence and eyewitness
accounts of what took place seemed to suggest
everything happened in those last seconds in a coordinated way.
This would be the icing on the cake, so to speak.'"
How do we always end up on the wrong side of history?
When the National Guard mows down some kids walking to class,
the guilty go unpunished and the whole affair was swept under the rug.
When David Koresh set fire to his compound, they did a full investigation
that cleared Clinton & Reno
but history has recorded that "Janet the Butcher" laughed when she
heard the little children screaming.
The Republicans own the media so the truth always gets their slant.
No matter how good you are at something,
the guy keeping score will always end up winning.
Sidebar:
In the back of my mind (it was 40 years ago) I remember something
about Reagan
who was governor of California at the time of the Kent State murders.
I remember him saying something like, "If those
punks at Berkely get unruly, we'll call out
the National Guard - they know how to handle
this problem," for which he was praised as "strong and decisive."