40 Years Since Kent State

[Ed Jewett]

From http://antiwar.com/

40 Years Since Kent State Kent State Massacre - 40 Years Later
Kent State Shooting Divided Campus and Country
Forty Years After Kent State Massacre, Shootout Still a Mystery
Does Kent State Shooting Resonate With Students Today?
Students Organize May 4 Kent State Remembrance Day
May 4 Shootings Still Follow Former Kent State Football Players
'Four Dead in O-Hio-O': The Kent State Massacre

[Ed Jewett]

Commentary Last Updated: May 5th, 2010 - 00:44:00
Forty years later, four still dead in Ohio
By Bob Fitrakis
Online Journal Guest Writer


May 5, 2010, 00:14

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Back when "tin soldiers and Nixon" were "cutting us down" in 1970, a group of Ohio State University students and campus activists started an underground newspaper in Columbus. Driven mostly by the murder of four students at Kent State -- Allison Krause, Jeff Miller, Sandy Scheuer, and Bill Schroeder -- shot during a demonstration that was opposing President Nixon's illegal attack on Cambodia and the Vietnam War, the Columbus Free Press was born.
Not surprisingly, the Free Press was the first Western newspaper to expose Cambodia's killing fields, thanks to international law Professor John Quigley's reporting from Southeast Asia.
In the first issue of the Free Press, the October 11, 1970, issue, a Free Press opinion attacked a special grand jury's decision not to indict Ohio National Guardsmen for the Kent State killings. The Free Press wrote at the time: "The jury conveniently disregarded the FBI report which stated that the guardsmen were not 'surrounded,' that they had tear gas, contrary to claims of guardsmen following the shooting."
The Free Press went on to point out the obvious facts: " . . . a film of the shootings shown on a northern Ohio TV station on the night of May 4th shows the guardsmen retreating up the slope, then turning, kneeling, firing a volley, and rising to fire a few more scattered shots before regrouping and going over the hill. Panic may have aided in the shootings, but it was not the cause. THE GUARDSMEN FIRED ON ORDER, and the men who gave the order and the others who carried it out are free."
Of course, the same could be said of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who waged an illegal war against the people of Iraq and murdered over a million civilians, yet still walk free. And the war endures under President Obama. The Kent State precedent of letting known murderers move among us set the stage for the smiley-face pro-torture policies of the Bush years.
Former Free Press Editor Steve Conliff did his best to bring Governor Jim Rhodes to justice for inciting the National Guard to violence against peace demonstrators. At the 1977 Ohio State Fair, Conliff pied Big Jim, exemplifying the underground press motto: If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own. Hardly the people's tribunal longed for by the Free Press staff, but nevertheless, great political theater.
Local Free Clinic physician Pete Howison performed an experiment at Conliff's trial, proving that pie-ing did not constitute a violent assault. Conliff was found not guilty.
Rhodes was pied by proxy again in 1990 on the 20th anniversary of the shootings, when his statute, then on the Ohio Statehouse grounds, took a direct hit to the face by a strawberry cream pie, thrown by Dr. Pete Howison. A photo of the red goop symbolically dripping down Rhodes' face appeared in the next Free Press issue.
In 1992, the Free Press moved into an East Broad Street office that had an unusual wall in the back erected only three-quarters of the way up to the ceiling. When the office started leaking after a rainstorm, I climbed over the wall to determine the damage. Ironically, I found the original ACLU legal files containing documents from their lawsuit against the National Guardsmen at Kent State. The morgue photos of the dead students are seared into my brain.
When Jim Rhodes died, the Free Press made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for his FBI file. Here we learned the dirty truth of Rhodes' ties to the mob and the FBI's use of that information, some would call it blackmail, to win concessions from the governor. As the Free Press wrote in 2003, a January 14, 1963, memo noted that: "He [Rhodes] is completely controlled by an SAC [Special Agent in Charge] contact, and we have full assurances that everything we need will be made available promptly. Our experience proves this assertion."
The FOIA file revealed that the SAC contact was none other than Robert H. Wolfe, publisher of the Columbus Dispatch.
Dispatch reporter Bob Ruth had earlier disclosed to the Free Press that Rhodes had run a gambling operation in the OSU campus area. His headquarters during the 1930s was allegedly Gussie's State Tavern, across the street from the law school. Serendipitously, the building would later house the shop Tradewinds, one of the early headquarters of the Free Press.
The FBI would cut the corrupt numbers man Rhodes all the slack he needed because: "He is a friend of law enforcement and believes in honest, hard-hitting law enforcement. He respects and admires [the] FBI."
In 2007, the Free Press decried "The lethal media silence on Kent State's smoking guns" in an article I co-wrote with Harvey Wasserman. When tape-recorded evidence surfaced 37 years after the fact proving the original Free Press editorial to be correct, the mainstream for-profit corporate media, including the Dispatch, ignored it.
Rhodes' good friends in the FBI had in their possession a tape that documented that the guardsmen were ordered to fire. Prior to the shootings, Terry Strubbe, a Kent State student had hung a microphone out of his dorm window and captured 20 seconds of sound, including the gunfire. In an amplified version of the tape, a Guard officer is heard shouting: "Right here! Get set! Point! Fire!"
Those, like the Free Press, who argued that there was an order to shoot the students were dismissed per standard mainstream media protocol as "conspiracy theorists."
It's never too late to embrace the truth. Rhodes was a mobster being blackmailed by the FBI who agitated his guardsmen against the students and was in the middle of a heated primary campaign for U.S. Senate. The day before the shootings, Rhodes is on record stating that student peace demonstrators were the "strongest, well-trained militant revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America. They're worse than the brown shirts and the Communists and the nightriders and the vigilantes. They are the worst type of people that we harbor in America."
The Free Press demands a Truth Commission on the Kent State shootings. Let all sides present their evidence, even the well-trained propagandists and coincidence theorists who specialize in blaming the victims, usually for political or monetary gain. Four remain dead in Ohio and justice remains unserved.
Bob Fitrakis has been of the Free Press since 1992.
Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal


http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/...5837.shtml

[Peter Lemkin]

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Kent State shootings. On May 4, 1970, national guardsmen opened fire on hundreds of unarmed students at an anti-war rally at Kent State University in Ohio. The students were protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, which was announced by President Nixon on April 30th. The guardsmen fired off at least 67 shots in roughly 13 seconds. Four students were killed and nine others wounded. The four students shot dead were Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, William Schroeder, and Sandra Shoyer, all between the ages of 19 and 21. To this day no one’s been held accountable for what happened. For the survivors of Kent State, the events of May 4, 1970 remain unresolved even four decades later.

AMY GOODMAN: To mark the anniversary, commemoration events are being held at Kent State including a candlelight vigil and march in the commons, as well as a truth tribunal, which we’ll talk about in a few minutes. But first we want to go back to May 4, 1970 and hear from the survivors about what happened on that day. Alan Canfora was a student at Kent State forty years ago and took part in the anti-war protest. He ended up being shot in the wrist. Last year I spoke with Alan Canfora as he took me around the campus. I asked him what happened.

ALAN CANFORA: My name is Alan Canfora. I was a member of the Kent State Students for a Democratic Society in 1968, ’69. Forty years ago, we raised hell on this campus. We planted the seeds of revolt, which blossomed a year later, when four days of protests culminated with the shootings by the National Guard. Only bullets could silence our voices here at Kent State in 1970.

AMY GOODMAN: What did you do?

ALAN CANFORA: Well, we protested vigorously for four days, including turmoil in downtown Kent, where forty-three bank windows were broken on Friday night, May 1st. Saturday night, the ROTC building was burned to the ground. That brought in 1,200 National Guardsmen.

And on Monday, May 4th, they attacked a peaceful gathering of students, about 300 of us gathered on the commons. And they fired teargas. They chased us over a hill, and they marched back up the hill. And at the peak of the hilltop is where there was a verbal command to fire. One guard officer shouted, “Right here! Get set! Point! Fire!” And they fired sixty-seven gunshots down the hill that killed four students, and they wounded nine, including me. I got shot through my right wrist 225 feet away.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what you saw when you were standing there.

ALAN CANFORA: Well, I saw the Guardsmen reach the hilltop, and we expected that they were just retreating. It looked like they were going away, back over the hill where they had come from. But suddenly, at the hilltop, out of seventy-six Guardsmen, only about a dozen from Troop G stopped, turned. They began to fire. They continued to fire for thirteen seconds. The closest student was sixty feet away. He was wounded. Another student ninety feet away was wounded. I was near the bottom of the hill with my roommate. We were both shot and injured. And then, behind us, in a parking lot, is where all of the four students were killed, at distances of between 265 and 400 feet. So it was nothing but a slaughter. They fired into the distant parking lot, because that’s where the most radical and vocal students were gathered.

AMY GOODMAN: And were you shot first?

ALAN CANFORA: I think I was. I think was the first student shot. I was waving a black flag of protest that day. I carried that black flag as a symbol of my despair and my anger, because only ten days earlier I attended my friend’s funeral. He was killed in Vietnam at age nineteen. So that was very fresh in my memory, and that’s why I joined the protests and I helped lead the protests May 1st through 4th in 1970. And that’s what led to me being shot.


AMY GOODMAN: That was Alan Canfora, one of those shot at Kent state. To tell the story of what happened 40 years ago, we to a documentary that includes interviews with students and national guardsmen who were there. This is an excerpt of “Kent State: The Day the War Came Home.” It begins with former Kent State student, Joe Lewis.

JOE LEWIS: Suddenly and without any warning, several of them in the lead wheeled and leveled their rifles back towards my direction. I took it to be a threatening gesture and so being 18 and foolish, I gestured back at them by raising the middle finger of my right hand.

PROTESTER: And at this point it’s like a film playing in slow motion for me.

FIRST GUARDSMAN: I heard the word “fire.” I believe that that was a situation of, “Hold your fire, do not fire.”

SECOND GUARDSMAN: At that point, the Guardsman on my right fired his weapon.

FIRST GUARDSMAN: Within, again, milliseconds of that single report, the volley itself began.

PROTESTER: I started screaming, “They’re shooting their guns! They’re shooting their guns!”

MARY VECCHIO: It hit us all, I’m sure, at that moment. They’re trying to kill us.

FIRST GUARDSMAN: I had a person targeted. I pulled the slack out of the trigger—

SECOND GUARDSMAN: I assumed that we were firing warning shots, and I fired my weapon in the air.

JOHN CLEARY: I jumped on the ground, praying I wouldn’t get hit.

FIRST GUARDSMAN: Hundreds of people were falling on the ground. And I believe that many of them were being hit.

ALAN CANFORA: There was one tree near me, which was right in the line of fire, and as I got behind the tree at the last second before my arm reached the safety of the tree, that’s when I was hit.

JOHN CLEARY: The next thing I know, I got hit just below the shoulder blade in the back on the left side.

FIRST GUARDSMAN: That person that I had targeted was standing in front of me yelling, “Shoot me, mother [bleep], shoot me!”

SECOND GUARDSMAN: Everybody else is running away, and there’s this one male coming towards us. His right hand was in the upward position giving an obscene gesture, and his left hand was somewhat behind his back.

FIRST GUARDSMAN: My mind was racing. My mind was telling me that this is wrong, that this is not right.

JOE LEWIS: I was giving an obscene gesture for the first time that day, but I wasn’t screaming, and I wasn’t moving.

FIRST GUARDSMAN: This is not right. This is not right. This is not right.

SECOND GUARDSMAN: At that point, I felt that I was in jeopardy, and I fired on the individual, and he dropped.

JOE LEWIS: And I believe someone said that they heard me say, “Oh, my god, they shot me.”

SECOND GUARDSMAN: Next thing that I remember was there was an order from the rear of where we were, someone yelling, “Cease-fire!” which stopped immediately.

NARRATOR: The shooting lasts a total of 13 seconds. A total of 67 bullets are fired. One of those bullets has passed through the wrist of Alan Canfora.

ALAN CANFORA: It was kind of an eerie calm, just for a split second. We waited to hear if there were any more bullets that were going to be fired, and there were none. And then, all you could hear in the air after that was screaming, crying, people shouting for ambulances.

PROTESTER: Stay back! Stay back!

SECOND GUARDSMAN: And we were told to return to the commons area, and that’s when we went back down the hill and back across the commons to where we originally started at our staging point.

FIRST GUARDSMAN: We had no clue as to how many people were hurt. Our fear was that it was awful.

NARRATOR: Dean Kahler lays face down on the practice field. A bullet has passed through his spine, paralyzing him for life.

JOHN CLEARY: That’s one thing I will never forget about that day, just seeing the looks on the faces of the students who were standing over me, not knowing that there was 12 other people out there shot, four of them bleeding profusely, lying dying on the ground.

NARRATOR: Joe Lewis lays bleeding with two bullet wounds, one through his abdomen and one through his left leg.

JOE LEWIS: I thought to myself, “Well, this could be it.” And I was afraid that I was going to die, and so I made an act of contrition, to say that I was sorry for my sins, and—

MARY VECCHIO: And I saw a girl being carried into the yard at Prentice Hall, and I ran over there with this rag thinking I could help someone, and I looked down, and it was Sandy. Sandy was a friend, and she was so blue and gray. She had been shot in the jugular vein, and I didn’t even recognize her.

ALAN CANFORA: And she was killed within seconds as she walked to her class, 400 feet away from the triggermen.

PROTESTER: I remember the first person I saw was Jeffrey Miller, and he was lying very still.

NARRATOR: One of the first to reach Jeff Miller’s body is 14-year-old runaway Mary Vecchio, who only a short time earlier had been protesting with him on the commons.

MARY VECCHIO: I thought it was Alan. I mean, I will never forget running toward the body of Jeff Miller, thinking it was Alan. And how I felt when I looked down and saw Jeff lying in this pool of blood, and there was so much blood.

PROTESTER: And we walked over toward another cluster of people, and they were standing around Bill Schroeder.

ALAN CANFORA: Bill Schroeder was an ROTC military science student. He was the all-American boy. He was not a protester. Not a radical. Not part of the demonstration. He was just there watching.

BARRY LEVINE: She (Allison Krause) said, “Barry, I’m hit.” And I had no idea what that meant at the time. I mean, in split seconds, I knew but I didn’t know. “It couldn’t be, it’s impossible, what do you mean, you’re hit?” As I went to stroke her cheek, I saw a smudge of blood on her cheek. And it had come from my hand, which was underneath her. I realized at that point she had been shot in the back and she was bleeding. And as it turns out, she was dying.


SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: An excerpt of the documentary “Kent State: The Day the War Came Home,” directed by Chris Triffo and produced by Ron Goetz. That was Barry Levine talking about Allison Krause, one of the four students killed that day.

AMY GOODMAN: We go now live to Kent State where we’re joined by Laurel Krause, Alison’s sister. She is the Director of the Kent State Truth Tribunal which has been taking place on the campus for the last three days and convened by family members of students killed at Kent State in order to record and honor the stories of those directly affected by the shootings. Laurel Krause, you’re right there on the campus of Kent state. Can you describe what you have been doing over these last few days, this Kent State Truth Tribunal?

LAUREL KRAUSE: Well, we’ve been welcoming the original participants and witnesses of the 1970 Kent State shootings. They’ve been coming forward and we’ve been live casting as well as asking them to answer questions at laptops. We have questions that were created with the help of the Greensboro, North Carolina tribunal related to the KKK and the Killing of Five as well as The Center for Transitional Justice. They helped us come up with questions that were neutral so that we could get to the truth of what really happened because we don’t know.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Laurel, how old were you when your sister Allison was killed and talk about the legal battle that your family fought for for years.

LAUREL KRAUSE: Well, I was in ninth grade, coming home from school when some neighbors came up to me and said that I should call my parents because there had been news reporters on the street and that Allison had been hurt at Kent. And so I immediately called my mom and I learned that she was on her way home immediately. She whisked home and we then spent a long time on the phone, she did, trying to find out but all the phone lines were blocked. There were no cell phones or anything like that then. We later learned from the Robinson Memorial Hospital that she was D.O.A. and that’s how they said it to us. The next day my father, Arthur Krause, and my mother, Doris Krause, went forward and started a legal fight to learn, actually against the State of Ohio, the governor, the national guard, and everyone responsible for what happened, and that court battle lasted, went all the way through and up to the Supreme Court in order to have the right to sue Ohio and then back at the beginning again, over 10 years. We finally took it to the Ninth Circuit Court, and settled with a statement of regret and our family received $15,000 related to the death of my sister Allison.

AMY GOODMAN: Laurel, what are you calling for now?

LAUREL KRAUSE: Actually, I’m calling for the truth to be known for the first time. It’s my feeling and the feeling of everyone that’s joining us in our truth tribe, that’s what we’re calling it. Basically we want to hear from the people that were on that hill because we know that they know what happened and that includes national guard, state, federal, and civil servants related to making decisions, bad decisions. We’d like to hear their stories as well. I’m personally calling for any national guardsman to please come forward in our final day, May 4th. Please come and share your truth. You’ll be respected. We want to hear your truth. You can have anonymity. We have a wonderful setup. It’s a healing environment. We’d like you to share your truth and let us know what happened and what made you pull that trigger and kill my sister and three others and wounding of nine on May 4th, 1970.

AMY GOODMAN: Laurel Krause, I want to thank you very much for being with us, standing in the parking lot where her sister was killed forty years ago today, Allison Krause.

[Dawn Meredith]

"Tin soldiers and Nixon coming....

....four dead in Ohio"

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.

That song was on my mind all day on the 4th...as I was working non stop...from 3 am til 7 pm....

Never any justice. Not for them - (Kent State)- not for JFK, MKL, RFK, JFK Jr...9-11 victims, millions murdered for drugs, oil, lies, greed.

Oh America ....America the beautiful....the myth of America....it can overwhelm.

Dawn

[Magda Hassan]

Experts re-examine audio from Kent State shootings

May 8, 2010 CLEVELAND—A new analysis of a 40-year-old audio recording reveals that someone ordered National Guard troops to prepare to fire on students during a deadly Vietnam War protest at Kent State University in 1970, two forensics experts said.


The recording was enhanced and evaluated by New Jersey-based audio experts Stuart Allen and Tom Owen at the request of The Plain Dealer newspaper. Both concluded that they hear someone shout, "Guard!" Seconds later, a voice yells, "All right, prepare to fire!"

"Get down!" someone shouts, presumably in the crowd. A voice then says, "Guard!..." followed two seconds later by a booming volley of gunshots.

Four Kent State students were killed and nine were wounded.

"I think this is a major development," said Alan Canfora, who was shot and wounded in the right wrist during the protest on May 4, 1970. Canfora, who has long believed that the troops were ordered to fire, located a copy of the tape in a library archive in 2007 and has urged that it be professionally reviewed.

The original reel-to-reel audio recording was made by Terry Strubbe, a student who placed a microphone in a window sill of his dormitory that overlooked the anti-war rally.

Allen, president and chief engineer of the Legal Services Group in Plainfield, N.J., removed extraneous noises -- wind blowing across the microphone, for example -- that obscured voices on the recording.

Without a voice sample for comparison, the new analysis can't determine who might have issued such a command or why.

Most of the senior Ohio National Guard officers directly in charge of the troops have died.

Ronald Snyder, a former Guard captain who led a unit that was at the Kent State protest but was not involved in the shootings, said the prepare-to-fire phrasing does not seem consistent with how military orders are given.

The FBI investigated whether an order had been given to fire and said it could only speculate. One theory was that a guardsman panicked or fired intentionally at a student and others fired when they heard the shot.

In 1974, eight guardsmen tried on federal civil rights charges were acquitted by a U.S. judge. The surviving victims and families of the dead settled a civil lawsuit for $675,000 in 1979, agreeing to drop all future claims against the Guardsmen.

The significance of the new audio analysis may be more historical than legal, said Sanford Rosen, one of plaintiffs' attorneys in the civil lawsuit.

------

Information from: The Plain Dealer, http://www.cleveland.com

[Keith Millea]

Well,I guess this means that those trying to get the JFK case re-investigated,will get NO HELP from OBUMMER and team......

May 19, 2011

Obama Justice Department Refuses to Investigate New Evidence

Who Ordered the Kent State Shootings?

By LINN WASHINGTON, Jr.
Three days after President Barack Obama visited Ground Zero in New York City on May 5th with his message of "justice being done" with the slaying of terrorist Osama bin Laden, disturbing news broke about this administration's blocking of a quest for justice in the infamous May 1970 killing of four Kent State students.

Those four students fell in a barrage of gunfire on May 4, 1970 by Ohio National Guardsmen who opened fire during a peaceful protest against the Vietnam War on Kent State's campus. That lethal fusillade of 67 shots during a 13-second period also wounded nine others, some seriously.

That blocking action by Obama officials includes an apparent unwillingness to investigate new evidence providing damning insights about that shooting orgy forty years ago, which heightened criticism about U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam and about the abuse of domestic political dissidents.

The inaction on this case comes as opposition grows to Obama's escalation of the unpopular war in Afghanistan and its expansion into Pakistan.

Ongoing U.S drone attacks inside Pakistan, seen by Pakistan as a violation of its sovereignty, have provoked outrage throughout that country. The country's parliament recently passed a resolution calling for an end of drone attacks and a "review of the country's relationship with the U.S." The U.S., according to CNN's Pakistan bureau, unleashed at least four drone attacks since the raid that killed bin Laden. It was just one of two dozen such attacks inside Pakistan this year alone.

One of those students injured during the Kent State shooting, Alan Canfora, met with U.S. Justice Department officials last Fall requesting a new federal investigation based on an analysis of an audio tape conducted early last year which revealed what two forensic audio experts say is a military-style order to open fire on student protesters.

Evidence of an order to open fire contradicts Guard commanders who have consistently maintained that no such order was ever given to troops who were said to have spontaneously unleashed their gunfire in reaction to alleged sniper fire.
Analysis of the audio tape, which was recorded on May 4, 1970 also uncovered an altercation and four pistol shots prior to the Guard gunfire.

Those gunshots are believed to have been fired by a then Kent State student frequently referenced since that incident as an FBI informant, who was involved in the altercation. The alleged informant maintains he fired his pistol after being attacked by another student.

During that late 1960s and early 1970s, the FBI was involved in COINTELPRO, secret and blatantly illegal campaign to disrupt the anti-Vietnam War movement as well as the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, which involved not just the FBI, but also the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and other government units, as well as Nixon's own secret and illegal "Plumbers unit" inside the White House.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper, which commissioned the audio analysis by the two forensic experts, reported on May 8th that eight months after that Fall 2010 meeting between Canfora, his legal advisors and federal officials, "a seeming dearth of paperwork documenting" any Justice Department review of the new audio evidence "has raised some doubts about the Justice Department's level of interest."
That Plain Dealer account cites a Freedom of Information Act request by an author of a book on the 1970 Kent State massacre which confirms that "Justice Department officials have produced no reports, memos, legal analyses or other documents concerning the new audio tape evidence."

The now-documented Justice Department inaction in this case has incensed many, including Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich who, according to the Plain Dealer, is pressing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

Kucinich, in an April letter to Holder, stated that the Kent State audio findings, if verified, would contradict "the official record…and may shed light on whether any effort was made to prevent justice from being served."

Obama Administration inaction on the Kent State audio evidence is another reminder of the pattern of persistent refusals by federal, state and local officials to forthrightly ferret out the truth to serve justice in ugly incidents involving alleged misconduct by law enforcement and/or military personnel.

Eight days after President Obama's Ground Zero wreath-laying Philadelphia, witnessed the 26th Anniversary of the worst terroristic incident in that city's long history: a bombing and subsequent blazing inferno that killed 11 people, including five children, and destroyed 61 homes, leaving 250 people homeless.

That horrific May 13, 1985 incident occurred when Philadelphia Police, using a helicopter, dropped a powerful satchel bomb on the rooftop of a house occupied by members of a black radical organization known as MOVE. The bomb sparked a fire, which was the goal of the action, but Philadelphia's then Police Commissioner ordered fire fighters not to battle the blaze, which roared out of control becoming a destructive inferno.

The Police Commissioner justified his unconscionable order, saying he was using the fire as a 'tactical weapon' to force the barricaded radicals out of their fortified row home. However, evidence indicates that police fired upon MOVE members trying to flee the blaze, driving them back inside their home, where temperatures reached 2,000-degrees.

The lone surviving MOVE adult and one MOVE child who successfully fled the fire, reported hearing gunshots, a contention indignantly rejected by police and prosecutors, including federal prosecutors, who refused requests to pursue civil rights law violation charges for the deaths of the five children trapped in the burning house.

The deaths of those five MOVE children in the inferno were characterized as unjustified homicides by a blue-ribbon, but non-bindin,g citizens' investigative panel appointed by Philadelphia's then mayor Wilson Goode.

But that homicide finding was rejected by Philadelphia's then Republican District Attorney who deliberately distorted legalities to justify not pursuing any charges against any governmental employee involved in that 1985 clash, even against policemen (including the police commissioner) caught lying to a grand jury.

Philly prosecutors, for example, claimed reckless endangerment and risking a catastrophe charges were not applicable against the Police Commissioner because he possessed no 'criminal intent' when making the decision to fire-bomb the house. Bombing and burning, they claimed, are not in themselves reckless actions even if they did cause a fatal catastrophe.

Mimicking the non-prosecution posture of Philadelphia prosecutors, federal prosecutors incredibly found no fault with the FBI agent who improperly supplied the Philadelphia Police Department with military grade C-4 high-explosive, months before Philly cops used that explosive in the May 1985 incident, clearly suggesting that the plan was to incinerate MOVE from the outset.

That 1985 bombing marked the second deadly aerial assault on an African American community in U.S. history. On May 31, 1921 during a race riot in Tulsa, Ok white bigots dropped dynamite from an airplane on the all-black Greenwood section of North Tulsa.

The bloody two-day Tulsa riot, sparked in part by efforts among blacks to prevent a lynching, completely decimated the Greenwood section, including the prosperous financial district then referred to as "The Negro Wall Street" of America.

Typical of the racism pervasive in Tulsa at that time, a grand jury convened to investigate the riot blamed the incident on blacks. That grand jury claimed "no mob spirit" by whites existed during the riot, listing one indirect cause of the holocaust as agitation among local blacks for social equality.

In the 1970 Kent State incident, federal prosecutors charged eight low-ranking Guardsmen, but a federal judge later dismissed the case in 1974. As noted in the recent Plain Dealer article, "There has never been a completely satisfactory explanation for why the Guard fired."

LINN WASHINGTON, JR. is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent, collectively-owned, journalist-run, reader-supported online alternative newspaper.

http://www.counterpunch.org/washington05192011.html

[Jan Klimkowski]

From Linn Washington's article posted by Keith:

Evidence of an order to open fire contradicts Guard commanders who have consistently maintained that no such order was ever given to troops who were said to have spontaneously unleashed their gunfire in reaction to alleged sniper fire.
Analysis of the audio tape, which was recorded on May 4, 1970 also uncovered an altercation and four pistol shots prior to the Guard gunfire.

Those gunshots are believed to have been fired by a then Kent State student frequently referenced since that incident as an FBI informant, who was involved in the altercation. The alleged informant maintains he fired his pistol after being attacked by another student.

If the Kent State slaughter was led by an agent provocateur and COINTELPRO infiltrator, then the elites have a strong reason for continuing the coverup. They hate any mainstream confirmation that a key historical event was actually a false flag or agent provocateur incident.

Meanwhile, Prez Obama just opined in his keynote "Middle East" speech:

And I would not be standing here today unless past generations turned to the moral force of non-violence as a way to perfect our union organizing, marching, and protesting peacefully together to make real those words that declared our nation: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal."

Real reform will not come at the ballot box alone. Through our efforts we must support those basic rights to speak your mind and access information. We will support open access to the internet, and the right of journalists to be heard whether it's a big news organization or a lone blogger.

In the 21st century, information is power, the truth cannot be hidden, and the legitimacy of governments will ultimately depend on active and informed citizens.

Obama has to be judged not by his words, but by his actions.

Such as blocking the investigation of new evidence around the Kent State massacre.

[Peter Lemkin]

Obama has to be judged not by his words, but by his actions.

Based on words alone, I'd almost like Obama. Based on actions...I find him little different that his predecessors - VERY little, indeed!

[Gary Severson]

I have a photo in a book on Kent State showing the said student "agent provocator" firing his pistol . He is not being attacked by a student but is within the group of guardsmen.

[Magda Hassan]

DOJ Denies Bid to Reopen Probe of Kent State Shootings

The Justice Department is refusing to reopen an investigation into the Kent State shootings just weeks ahead of its 42nd anniversary. On May 4th, 1970, National Guardsmen opened fire on hundreds of unarmed students at an antiwar rally at Ohio's Kent State University. Four students were killed, and nine others wounded. Survivors of the massacre had called for a new federal probe two years ago following the discovery of an audiotape from the day of the shootings. The survivors say a National Guard officer can be heard issuing a command to fire followed by gunshots. But on Tuesday, the Justice Department rejected the request, saying the new audiotape is inconclusive. A group of Kent State survivors say they plan to respond by bringing the case to an international court.
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/25/he...wTQ.reddit