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Howard Lisnoff reports via CounterPunch:
Stuart Allen died on November 22, 2016. I learned of his death by way of an email from Laurel Krause, whose sister Allison was gunned down by the National Guard on May 4, 1970, just after the noon hour during a demonstration against the U.S. incursion into Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
Stuart Allen would not like to be called a hero, although he certainly was one. Stuart was both an audio and video expert, with degrees in both fields and worked out of his lab and business in New Jersey that offers expert [analysis] of that kind of data. Stuart often worked for law enforcement, including the Justice Department and the FBI.
In 2010, both Stuart and another forensic audio expert, Tom Owen, provided information at the request of the Cleveland Plain Dealer (New analysis of 40-year old recording of Kent State shootings reveals that Ohio Guard was given an order to prepare to fire May 9, 2010) about a new analysis of the famous Strubbe tape, a recording of the events that led up to the death of four students and the wounding of nine others during a demonstration against the U.S. incursion into Cambodia.
[...] "Guard"... "All right, prepare to fire!"... "Get down!"... and finally "Guard!"...is followed by the fusillade of lethal bullets. It took seventeen seconds for those words to change history forever.
[Continues...]
The 2010 article by the The Plain Dealer notes:
The original 30-minute reel-to-reel tape was made by Terry Strubbe, a Kent State communications student in 1970 who turned on his recorder and put its microphone in his dorm window overlooking the campus Commons, hoping to document the protest unfolding below.
[...] The Justice Department paid a Massachusetts acoustics firm, Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., to scrutinize the recording in 1974 in support of the government's ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prosecute eight Guardsmen for the shootings. That review, led by the company's chief scientist, James Barger, focused on the gunshot pattern and made no mention of a command readying the soldiers to fire.
[...] Using sophisticated software initially developed for the KGB, the Soviet Union's national security agency, Allen weeded out extraneous noises - wind blowing across the microphone, and a low rumble from the tape recorder's motor and drive belt--that obscured voices on the recording.
He isolated individual words, first identifying them by their distinctive, spidery "waveform" traces on a computer screen, then boosting certain characteristics of the sound or slowing the playback to make out what was said. Owen independently corroborated Allen's work.
For hours on Thursday, first in Allen's dim, equipment-packed lab in Plainfield and later in Owen's more spacious, equally high-tech shop in nearby Colonia, the two men pored over the crucial recording segment just before the gunfire. They looped each word, playing it over and over, tweaking various controls and listening intently until they agreed on its meaning.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 07 2016, @04:05PM
An alternative interpretation that may change things a bit: "Guard" could have been a verb, as in a command to take up some sort of defensive posture.
Another factor here: The officers and guardsmen were not equipped properly (for instance, they didn't have the shields now issued to riot police, nor rubber bullets or police batons or any of the other non-lethal equipment that is now commonly used in riot control situations), and had no training or experience dealing with civil disturbances. They were put into a situation where they didn't know what to do, and it's no surprise that they screwed up.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 08 2016, @02:00AM
Except, a contemporary officer in another unit performing the same duties at the same time in the same place has said the he has never heard orders passed in such a manner.
See, I'm allowing for the fact that over time, doctrine and methodology change. If this other officer were a fresh-faced boot officer on duty today, we might discount his claims. But, he was contemporary with the officer directing this particular unit.
You, and other people, may dismiss my own experiences, because I didn't even enter the service until 1975. I entered a different service than these officers, so a lot of things could be very different. But, when you get down to the nitty gritty, an officer or NCO must be intimately familiar with his troops. "Guard" is so very generic. Any officer shouting "Guard" in an environment with a lot of National Guard around could and would be mistaken as another unit's CO. It just doesn't make sense.
As I stated, I believe that the Guardsmen fired under orders. But, the details of this newly discovered order are simply wrong. Mistakes have been made, and I've cited technological reasons as well as personal reasons that this may be so. The order, as published by these two techs, just doesn't make sense.