xzanthius - History has a way of repeating itself and there is much that has tainted the reputation of CIA and US involvement in other country's conflict. Sept 11, 1973 coup in Chile was financed by the then US government and we know how tragic that was for so many of the Chilean citizens. I continue to remain hopeful that lessons are learnt however more recent involvements such as Afghanistan and Irak demonstrate that little has changed. Cheers

The truth is that there are no good guys.

The truth is that there are no good guys.

If you can't see any difference between Jesus Christ, Gandhi, Buddha, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, then you've got some serious issues.

I can provide evidence that at the G8 summit here in Canada that some of the 'protesters' were paid members of the police.

These very same people were the principle agitators attempting to sully the reputation of the whole movement.

The media is biased toward Iran, misquoting the president and now focusing so highly and so negatively on his government.

You totally misquoted me. I was not talking about religious messiahs, I was talking about governments.

Put another way, every country engages in the darkside of humanity. Some more than others, usually, if not always, the more powerful the country the more it is engaging in that behaviour.

How long did it take for Christians to begin burning people?

while Adolf Hilter created a symbol of evil that has in many ways prevented further genocides.

One could say that Jesus was responsible for as many deaths and Adolf Hitler while one was a paragon of goodness and the other a homocidal megalomaniac

The works of men... tainted with greed and ignorance.

You have also touched on spirituality and religious beliefs

The quote was accurate - you said guys, not governments. I gave the "good guy" examples I did simply for name recognition - same as with the bad guys. Religion was not the point.

It would be more accurate to say that it was more likely to be noticed.

And when was the last time you beat your wife?
Non-Christians were burning people centuries before Christ was even thought of.

while Adolf Hilter created a symbol of evil that has in many ways prevented further genocides.

One could say that Jesus was responsible for as many deaths and Adolf Hitler while one was a paragon of goodness and the other a homocidal megalomaniac

I'm sorry, but that's specious beyond belief. To take what idiots & wingnuts have done over the years using Christ as a justification for their own insanity, and trying to equate that to what Adolph Hitler did by direct order is both silly and disingenuous.

Fortunately, the latter can be treated with a bit of knowledge. It would be nice of some people tried it a bit more often.

Of course they were - they're called informants. And the police wouldn't have been doing their jobs if they did NOT have informants in some of the violent anarchist groups.

With all due respect, that is the stupidest analogy ever.
Please name for me one instance where American Soldiers have openly murdered unarmed citizens peacefully protesting in the streets!

To even begin to compare this to US soldiers fighting armed terrorists in other countries only shows your ignorance of the situation going on in Iran.

While debatable in some of the facts, I would argue Kent State University would be a prime example.

Sorry, you loose.

The incident at Kent State started, and went out of control, because a young, inexperienced trooper panicked when confronted by a large, hostile, pushing crowd. He fired - everybody else heard the shot, thought they were being fired upon - and joined in. It was a clusterfrak of major proportions.

Big, BIG difference between that and a government intentionally ordering troops into the streets and giving direct orders to fire into the crowd.

On Monday, May 4, a protest was scheduled to be held at noon, as had been planned three days earlier. University officials attempted to ban the gathering, handing out 12,000 leaflets stating that the event was canceled. Despite this, an estimated 2,000 people gathered[16] on the university's Commons, near Taylor Hall. The protest began with the ringing of the campus's iron Victory Bell (which had historically been used to signal victories in football games) to mark the beginning of the rally, and the first protester began to speak.

Fearing that the situation might escalate into another violent protest, Companies A and C, 1/145th Infantry and Troop G of the 2/107th Armored Cavalry, Ohio ARNG, the units on the campus grounds, attempted to disperse the students. The legality of the dispersal was later debated at a subsequent wrongful death and injury trial. On appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that authorities did indeed have the right to disperse the crowd.

The dispersal process began late in the morning with campus patrolman Harold Rice,[17] riding in a Guard Jeep, approaching the students to read them an order to disperse or face arrest. The protesters responded by throwing rocks, forcing the Jeep to retreat.[18]

Just before noon, the Guard returned and again ordered the crowd to disperse. When most of the crowd refused, the Guard used tear gas. Because of wind, the tear gas had little effect in dispersing the crowd, and some began a second rock attack with chants of "Pigs off campus!" The students lobbed the tear gas canisters back at the National Guardsmen; however, they had put on gas masks upon first throwing tear gas at the students.

When it was obvious the crowd was not going to disperse, a group of 77 National Guard troops from A Company and Troop G, with bayonets fixed on their weapons, began to advance upon the hundreds of protesters. As the guardsmen advanced, the protesters retreated up and over Blanket Hill, heading out of The Commons area. Once over the hill, the students, in a loose group, moved northeast along the front of Taylor Hall, with some continuing toward a parking lot in front of Prentice Hall (slightly northeast of and perpendicular to Taylor Hall). The guardsmen pursued the protesters over the hill, but rather than veering left as the protesters had, they continued straight, heading down toward an athletic practice field enclosed by a chain link fence. Here they remained for about ten minutes, unsure of how to get out of the area short of retracing their entrance path (an action some guardsmen considered might be viewed as a retreat). During this time, the bulk of the students congregated off to the left and front of the guardsmen, approximately 150ft,(50m) to 225ft,(75m) away, on the veranda of Taylor Hall. Others were scattered between Taylor Hall and the Prentice Hall parking lot, while still others, perhaps 35 or 40, were standing in the parking lot, or dispersing through the lot as they had been previously ordered.

While on the practice field, the guardsmen generally faced the parking lot which was about 100 yards away. At one point, some of the guardsmen knelt and aimed their weapons toward the parking lot, then stood up again. For a few moments, several guardsmen formed a loose huddle and appeared to be talking to one another. The guardsmen appeared to be unclear as to what to do next. They had cleared the protesters from the Commons area, and many students had left, but many stayed and were still angrily confronting the soldiers, some throwing rocks and tear gas canisters. At the end of about ten minutes, the guardsmen began to retrace their steps back up the hill toward the Commons area. Some of the students on the Taylor Hall veranda began to move slowly toward the soldiers as the latter passed over the top of the hill and headed back down into the Commons.

At this point, at 12:22 PM,[1] a number of guardsmen at the top of the hill abruptly turned and fired their M1 Garand rifles at the students. The guardsmen directed their fire not at the closest students, who were on the Taylor Hall veranda, but at those on the grass area and concrete walkway below the veranda, at those on the service road between the veranda and the parking lot, and at those in the parking lot. Bullets were not sprayed in all directions; instead, they were confined to a fairly limited line of fire leading from the top of the hill to the parking lot. Not all the soldiers who fired their weapons directed their fire into the students. Some soldiers fired into the ground, while a few fired into the air. In all, 29 of the 77 guardsmen claimed to have fired their weapons, using a final total of 67 bullets. The shooting was determined to have lasted only 13 seconds, although a New York Times reporter stated that "it appeared to go on, as a solid volley, for perhaps a full minute or a little longer." The question of why the shots were fired remains widely debated.
Photo taken from the perspective of where the Ohio National Guard soldiers stood when they opened fire on the students.
Bullet hole in a sculpture by Don Drumm caused by a .30 caliber round fired by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State on May 4, 1970.

The Adjutant General of the Ohio National Guard told reporters that a sniper had fired on the guardsmen, which itself remains a debated allegation. Many guardsmen later testified that they were in fear for their lives, which was questioned partly because of the distance of the wounded students. Time magazine later concluded that "triggers were not pulled accidentally at Kent State". The President's Commission on Campus Unrest avoided probing the question regarding why the shootings happened. Instead, it harshly criticized both the protesters and the Guardsmen, but it concluded that "the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable."

The shootings killed four students and wounded nine. Two of the four students killed, Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, had participated in the protest, and the other two, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder, had been walking from one class to the next at the time of their deaths. Schroeder was also a member of the campus ROTC chapter. Of those wounded, none was closer than 71 feet to the guardsmen. Of those killed, the nearest (Miller) was 265 feet away, and their average distance from the guardsmen was 345 feet.

Actually, my understanding it was a National Guard group who did the shooting, unless there were two different shootings at Kent State.