The lethal media silence on Kent State's smoking guns

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/7296

The lethal media silence on Kent State's smoking guns
by Harvey Wasserman | May 7 2007
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

The 1970 killings by National Guardsmen of four students during a peaceful anti-war demonstration at Kent State University have now been shown to be cold-blooded, premeditated official murder. But the definitive proof of this monumental historic reality is not, apparently, worthy of significant analysis or comment in today's mainstream media.

After 37 years of official denial and cover-up, tape-recorded evidence, that has existed for decades and has been in the possession of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), has finally been made public.

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But meaningful analysis of the implications of this tape has been mysteriously missing from the American media. The Associated Press did carry a widely-runstory about the surfacing of this evidence, as did National Public Radio. But the Columbus Dispatch, in Ohio's capital, buried the report on page A-5 under the innocuous headline "Victim shares audio tape of Kent State shootings." Virtually absent from the major US media has been a concerted examination of the fact that the keystone in this monumental American saga has been re-set.

For we now know that a premeditated, unprovoked order was indeed given to National Guardsmen to fire live ammunition at peaceful, unarmed American students, killing four of them. The illegal order to arm the Guard with live ammunition in the first place could only have come from the governor of Ohio. The very loud, very public nod to shoot some "brown shirt" students somewhere in order to chill the massive student uprising against the Southeast Asian war was spewed all over the national media by the second-highest official in US government.

Now the magnitude of Kent State's impact on American politics and culture, already immense, has been significantly deepened.

Alan Canfora intends to use this tape to re-open investigations into what happened at Kent State 37 years ago.

But the media's apparent unconcern about confirmation of the official order to carry out these killings may bear a simple message: that we should be prepared for them to happen again.

How did the news media back then report about this?

The portrayal at the time was a conflicting mass of dissembling: the troops were scared, they disobeyed their commanders, etc. etc. Don't expect any public admissions of the truth now either, or ever.

People in opposition to the war at the time had no doubts as to what to expect from their government, it reached the point of being a low-grade civil insurrection. Nothing that has occurred so far in the current overseas debacles even gets close.

themselves, that the students were throwing bricks and rocks...my reasoning at the time was that throwing rocks still didn't constitute deadly force, and that the NG should have been trained to deal with that without killing their own...

Remember Viet Nam had oil too.

There is no confirmation of an order to fire because the tape is almost completely fucking inaudible. What *is* audible would be incorrect protocol if in fact it came from the Guard ("Point?" They don't say "point," they say "aim"), but there's no way to determine who's yelling what. And NOBODY can be heard at anytime saying "Fire," contrary to Mr. Canfora's assertions. So zero proof that anyone in authority over the Guardsmen that day gave any fire order.

And anyway, it was James Rhodes' fault, period. Blaming the Guard is beside the point.