Free Republic

In 399 BC, Athens, the cradle of democracy and philosophy, tried and killed a seemingly innocent man in one of the most controversial trials in history. The defendant, Socrates, was a 70-year-old philosopher whose teachings profoundly influenced the city’s youth and intellectual landscape. His execution by drinking poison hemlock remains a poignant episode in Western philosophy. Understanding why Athens killed Socrates reveals much about its sociopolitical and cultural dynamics. The charges: impiety and corrupting the youth Athenians charged Socrates with two primary offenses: impiety, or not believing in the gods recognized by the state, and corrupting the youth of Athens....

Socrates Â… took occasion of the presence of a whole company and of Euthydemus to remark that Critias appeared to be suffering from a swinish affection, or else why this desire to rub himself against Euthydemus like a herd of piglings scraping against stones. The hatred of Critias to Socrates doubtless dates from this incident. He treasured it up against him, and afterwards, when he was one of the Thirty [Tyrants] Â… he framed the law against teaching the art of words merely from a desire to vilify Socrates. He was at a loss to know how else to...

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency on Friday formally declassified an image then-US President Donald Trump tweeted in 2019 of a highly classified satellite photograph depicting the site of a failed Iranian rocket launch. NPR reported that the NGA declassified the image after a “grueling Pentagon-wide review to determine whether the briefing slide it came from could be shared with the public” in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the radio network. Many details on the original image remain redacted – a clear sign that Trump was sharing some of the US government's most prized intelligence on social media,...

Soviet Agent Award for Mother Jones Reporter Cliff Kincaid — April 12, 2013 David Corn, the liberal writer and MSNBC analyst who based a story about Republican Senator Mitch McConnell on a secret and possibly illegal tape recording, is scheduled to accept an award named for Soviet agent of influence I.F. Stone. The identification of Stone as a Soviet agent is not in serious dispute, except among his most loyal and sycophantic followers.Equally scandalous, Corn is being presented the award by Jeff Cohen, who has started a petition through his radical organization, RootsAction, to give accused traitor Bradley Manning the...

The American Spectator reports on I.F. Stone, charging as others have that he was an agent -- at least for a time -- of the Soviet Union: < SNIP> But we now know that Stone was not always so honest. At one time, he was a paid Soviet agent. In their latest work, published by Yale University Press, historians John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev conclude that Stone was a "Soviet spy." In an article excerpted from the book and published in the April 2009 online version of Commentary magazine, they wrote: "To put it plainly, from 1936...

When new information about Americans who had cooperated with the Soviet KGB began to emerge in the 1990s, no individual case generated as much controversy as that of the journalist I.F. Stone, who had long been installed in the pantheon of left-wing heroes as a symbol of rectitude and a teller of truth to power before his death in 1989.

Publisher Peter Osnos, who admits to personally working with former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan on his new book, What Happened, began his career as an assistant to I.F. Stone, the pro-communist "journalist" named as a Soviet agent of influence who was the uncle of Weather Underground communist terrorist Kathy Boudin. But the connections don't end there. Boudin's son Chesa was raised by Barack Obama associates Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were Boudin's comrades in the communist terrorist group, after Kathy Boudin went to prison for her involvement in an armed robbery and assault that took the...

Romancing I. F. Stone By Ron Radosh | Volume 25, November 2006 By the time he died in 1989, the once outcast and radical journalist I. F. Stone, fondly called “Izzy” by all who knew him, had become an icon. The blurbs on the back of Myra MacPherson’s new look at Stone’s life are from the likes of journalistic establishment dons like Craig Unger, Helen Thomas, Richard Reeves, and others—all of whom try to tell us that, were he alive, Stone could wake up today’s “lapdog” reporters.[1] He would, as Thomas writes, “lead our country to its greatest ideals...