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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

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.

Original Submission