Forty years later, four still dead in Ohio
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5837.shtml
By Bob Fitrakis
May 5, 2010
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.
.
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