The Kent State update: what many suspected

For what you have read, heard or were taught about the "Kent State Massacre" you would tend to nod your head that this,

Charlie Peppers said students learn to fire off one of the most important words in the human language: Why?

"We don't learn to fire guns, but we learn to question the people who do," the Plattsburgh State Student Association president said Tuesday at a college commemoration for the 40th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State.

"We're all here today because students from Kent State and Jackson State were gunned down for standing up," Peppers said. "Each of those students wanted to change the world before one bullet changed them all."

In the back of your mind though, if you are always suspect about the Left and their actions you always wondered if there was more to the story. After all, American soldiers, much less National Guardsmen, do not fire into their citizens without just cause. They just don't.

But .... as with many thing from that era - a story was told over and over enough - unchallenged - that is started to become truth. Well, truth changes now and then.

Now, it all makes sense, thanks to James Rosen.

We should all feel sorry for those who were killed or wounded at Kent State, and grieve with their loved ones. The anger, resentment, and cause of the deaths though are not the National Guardsmen, the military, or anyone BUT those who organized, led and enabled the riot - and specifically the person who first fired the shots at the Guardsmen. Somewhere out there someone knows who it was.

Some day we will know. For now though we know who is to blame. Again, the Left.

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.

Forward to today.

... 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."

Here is the question I want to know.

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.

More answers are needed. How many lives were ruined. How many good men smeared. We can perhaps send some blame the FBI's way as well; for allowing smears to go forward - and for what?