DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... 43 years ago today

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Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.

I got to meet Alan Canfora (one of the 9 shot who survived) last year. He gave a presentation with hundreds and hundreds of pictures of the entire weekend and the day of the shootings. It was really intense. You've never so many people so quiet for so long while just seeing the whole thing build up.

New light shed on Kent State killings

By James Rosen
The Washington Times
Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Previously undisclosed FBI documents suggest that the Kent State antiwar protests were more meticulously planned than originally thought and that one or more gunshots may have been fired at embattled Ohio National Guardsmen before their killings of four students and woundings of at least nine others on that searing day in May 1970.

As the nation marks the 40th anniversary of the Kent State antiwar protests Tuesday, a review of hundreds of previously unpublished investigative reports sheds a new — and very different — light on the tragic episode.

The upheaval that enveloped the northeastern Ohio campus actually began three days earlier, in downtown Kent. Stirred to action by President Nixon's expansion of U.S. military operations in Cambodia, a roving mob of earnest antiwar activists, hard-core radicals, curious students and others smashed 50 bank and store windows, looted a jewelry store and hurled bricks and bottles at police.

Four officers suffered injuries, and the mayor declared a civil emergency. Only tear gas dispersed the mob.

An exhaustive review later concluded that this unrest on the streets — the worst in Kent's history — was "not an organized riot or a planned protest."

But the FBI's investigation swiftly uncovered reliable evidence that suggested otherwise. Among the strongest was a pre-dawn conversation — never before reported — between two unnamed men overheard inside a campus lounge later that night. Their discussion was witnessed by the girlfriend of a Kent State student and conveyed up the FBI chain of command 15 days later.

"We did it," one man exulted, according to the inquiry. "We got the riot started."

The second man expressed disappointment at being excluded from the riot's planning. "Wait until tomorrow night," the leader replied excitedly. "We just got the word. We're going to burn the ROTC building."

This was 20 hours before the ROTC headquarters on the Kent State campus, an old wooden frame building, was, in fact, burned to the ground.

"What about the flare?" the second man asked before the leader spotted the coed listening to them and abruptly ended the conversation. Dozens of witnesses later told the FBI they saw a flare used to ignite the blaze.

Now largely forgotten, the torching of the ROTC building was the true precursor to the killings at Kent State because it triggered the deployment of the National Guard to the fevered campus.

That deployment climaxed in bloodshed on the afternoon of May 4, 1970, with the guardsmen, clad in gas masks and confronted by angry, rock-throwing students, firing their M-1 rifles 67 times in 13 seconds, killing Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder.

A report submitted to Attorney General John Mitchell in June 1970 stated "there was no sniper" who could have fired at the guardsmen before the killings.

Numerous witnesses corroborated this.

A female freshman provided the FBI with a sworn statement that "there was no shot before [the guardsmen's] volley, and there were no warning shots fired." The Justice Department's internal review cited statements by six guardsmen who "pointedly" told the FBI that their lives were not in danger and that "it was not a shooting situation."

Yet the declassified FBI files show the FBI already had developed credible evidence suggesting that there was indeed a sniper and that one or more shots may have been fired at the guardsmen first.

Rumors of a sniper had circulated for at least a day before the fatal confrontation, the documents show. And a memorandum sent to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on May 19, 1970, referred to bullet holes found in a tree and a statue — evidence, the report stated, that "indicated that at least two shots had been fired at the National Guard."

Another interviewee told agents that a guardsman had spoken of "a confirmed report of a sniper."

It also turned out that the FBI had its own informant and agent-provocateur roaming the crowd, a part-time Kent State student named Terry Norman, who had a camera. Mr. Norman also was armed with a snub-nosed revolver that FBI ballistics tests, first declassified in 1977, concluded had indeed been discharged on that day.

Then there was the testimony of an ROTC cadet whose identity remains unknown, one of the pervasive redactions concealing the names of all the FBI agents who conducted the interviews and of all those whom they interrogated. Although presumably angry over the demonstrators' destruction of the campus ROTC building, the cadet's calm, precise firsthand account nonetheless carries a credibility not easily dismissed.

Before the fatal volley, the ROTC cadet told the FBI, he "heard one round, a pause, two rounds, and then the M-1s opened up."

The report continued that the cadet "stated that the first three rounds were definitely not M-1s. He said they could possibly have been a .45 caliber. … [He] further stated that he heard confirmed reports of sniper fire coming in over both the National Guard radio and the state police radio."

The cadet also told the FBI he observed demonstrators carrying baseball bats, golf clubs and improvised weapons, including pieces of steel wire cut into footlong sections, along with radios and other electronic devices "used to monitor the police and Guard wavelengths."

Separately, a female student told the FBI she "recalled hearing what she thought was [the sound of] firecrackers and then a few seconds later [she] heard noise that to her sounded like a machine gun going off, but then later thought it may have been a volley of shots from the Guard."

Absent the declassification of the FBI's entire investigative file, many questions remain unanswered — including why the documents quoted here were overlooked, or discounted, in the Justice Department's official findings.

At a minimum, the FBI documents strongly challenge the received narrative that the rioting in downtown Kent was spontaneous and unplanned, that the burning of the ROTC headquarters was similarly impulsive and that the guardsmen's fatal shootings were explicable only as unprovoked acts.

The FBI files provide, in short, a hidden history of the killings at Kent State. They show that the "four dead in Ohio" more properly belong, in the grand sweep of history, to four days in May, an angry, chaotic and violent interlude when a controversial foreign war came home to American soil.

• James Rosen, a Fox News correspondent, examined previously undisclosed FBI files on the Kent State shootings while researching his biography "The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate."

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/may/4/new-light-shed-on-kent-state-killings/#ixzz2SLGTef21

The building I work at is right by where the MURDERS took place. The parking lot I park in is where the dead bodies laid and there are markers set up for each one Going up to get a BBall work out in with my daughter at the MAC center, so will stop by and pay respects to the dead. Most of which were not even involved in the protest, they were students and professors on their way to classes and such.

King

That article is not worth the electrons contained in it.

My memory has not failed me. Everyday we would see 15 minutes of war reporting on the TV at night and people trying to explain why the war was necessary. The escalation of the war into Cambodia was seen as dragging America deeper into a war with no winnable outcome.

Kent State was not the only protest, but it changed things as Americans because it was viewed as the tipping point. No, we would not take arms up against each other...

Jim Rhodes was the governor of Ohio at the time. His words about the protestors

"They're worse than the Brownshirts, and the Communist element, and also the Night Riders, and the vigilantes. They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America."

They were none of that.

There has been a lot written about Kent State, it is a sad tragedy in our history.

For the longest time my feelings were they got exactly what they asked for.I've since realized they were just as innocent as I and none of us deserved what was forced upon us.
Eh,it was a different time and a different culture.A tremendous toll was taken from the country and it's citizens.

Iconic events like the Kent State shootings are never as black-and-white as some people want to portray them. I feel the article presented some perspective that is lacking from a narrative that usually tends to begin and end with CSNY's "Ohio".

The closest victim was 71 feet away. That's nearly 25 yards.
The four fatalities were 265-290 ft (88 - 96 yards away).
The further person hit was 750 ft (250 yards away).

Nixon's Scranton Commission on the events:
"Even if the guardsmen faced danger, it was not a danger that called for lethal force. The 61 shots by 28 guardsmen certainly cannot be justified. Apparently, no order to fire was given, and there was inadequate fire control discipline on Blanket Hill. The Kent State tragedy must mark the last time that, as a matter of course, loaded rifles are issued to guardsmen confronting student demonstrators."

2007 Strubbe tape:
In 2007 Alan Canfora, one of the wounded, located a copy of a tape of the shootings in a library archive. The original 30-minute reel-to-reel tape was made by Terry Strubbe, a Kent State communications student who turned on his recorder and put its microphone in his dorm window overlooking the campus. A 2010 audio analysis of a tape recording of the incident by Stuart Allen and Tom Owen, who were described by the Cleveland Plain Dealer as "nationally respected forensic audio experts," concluded that the guardsmen were given an order to fire. It is the only known recording to capture the events leading up to the shootings. According to the Plain Dealer description of the enhanced recording, a male voice yells "Guard!" 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. Further analysis of the audiotape revealed that four pistol shots and a violent confrontation occurred approximately 70 seconds before the National Guard opened fire. According to The Plain Dealer, this new analysis raised questions about the role of Terry Norman, a Kent State student who was an FBI informant and known to be carrying a pistol during the disturbance. Alan Canfora said it was premature to reach any conclusions

It's more black and white than people want to admit.

If you're asking me to believe that the Guardsmen panicked and fired on a hostile, but manageable crowd of protesters, I'm with you. If you're asking me to believe that this was a choreographed, intentional assault on American citizens exercising their right to assemble and protest, then I am not buying it.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/04/970759/-New-Evidence-in-Kent-State-Shootings

This is a pretty deep look at the situation that raises more questions than answers, and examines the role or non-role of Terry Norman.

Some conspiracy-type stuff in there, but lots of information, and not just a black-and-white viewpoint.

There's always two sides and when you're given rifles to protect yourself, that is probably what you'll use when you feel the need to protect yourself. In 1770 British soldiers were given rifles to protect themselves against Boston protestors and much like Kent the protestors started throwing rocks and other items when the Boston Masacre occured.

Does that mean use bullets? You hope not but in both cases it ended that way. Why, because young men were given rifles to protect themselves and they did. Overreaction? It's easy to say as a Monday morning quarterback but no one can really say what those folks felt at the time.

It was a stressful situation and folks reacted either the way they were trained or the way they felt, neither of which seems appropriate after the fact.

Regardless of the circumstances, the fact that we choose to remember this day, the senseless loss of life, the incompressible words of a governor, means that we should think before acting.

What some did before the events was wrong, no doubt, but those who died were innocent victims. We can talk solace in the fact that they did not die in vain.

If they had fired into the crowd that was throwing rocks at them, ok I could buy the way they were trained as an excuse. That's not what they did. They sprayed bullets over a very large area, in an attempt to kill as many people in that are as they could. Which is what they were told to do.

I cant say, if I was in that place, I wouldn't have done the same thing. But if I did, I would be a MURDERER, just like they are. Just like the person in charge who gave the order to fire is, just like anyone above them in the chain of command who gave the approval to open fire on a crowded AMERICAN campus.



KING

Quote:

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If you're asking me to believe that the Guardsmen panicked and fired on a hostile, but manageable crowd of protesters, I'm with you.

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Yes, this is what I was getting at because it's what I believe. I also imagine that some of those Guardsmen were a bit trigger happy and were looking to "show who's the boss" but that's just my own speculation.

If killing as many people possible was the goal as you say then they failed miserably . Only 29 guardsmen claimed to have fired weapons so if they were instructed to fire on the students the majority disobeyed a direct order to do so . I was always of the opinion that there was probably a small core of NG 's that just wanted to shoot people who they felt were traitors to thier country . All in all it is a small wonder the body count wasn't much higher and it would have been if those firing guns were in the hands of regular Army or worse yet the State Police .