Free Republic

In a recent piece in The Atlantic, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow with the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, urged the United States to confront Turkey. According to Gerecht, Turkey has emerged, under the presidency of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “as perhaps the greatest danger to Israel in the Middle East, escalating the threat of a conflict he won’t be able to avoid.” Gerecht charges Erdogan with setting the stage for a clash with Israel as a key tactic in his power projection strategy abroad. To reduce the risk of “yet another regional war,” Gerecht urges President Donald Trump...

Fourteen House Democrats dispatched an emphatic letter Wednesday to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, demanding the immediate release of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate who has been arrested and detained based on accusations stemming from his campus advocacy for Palestinian rights. A legal resident of the United States who holds a green card and is married to a US citizen, A legal resident of the United States who holds a green card and is married to a US citizen, Khalil was arrested Saturday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, and detained in Louisiana, as a part of a crackdown...

U.S. officials were acutely aware that Beijing was trying to obtain America's premiere nuclear reactor technology, including through illicit hacking, months before Hunter Biden and his business partners sought to arrange a quiet sale of an iconic U.S. reactor company to a Chinese firm, according to court records and national security experts. Hunter Biden's unsuccessful efforts to help CEFC China Energy acquire Westinghouse, one of America's most famous electricity and appliance brands, and its state-the-art AP1000 nuclear reactor began in early 2016 while Joe Biden was still a sitting vice president, memos published Wednesday by Just the News show. Just...

Should execution be on the table for Americans who allegedly spill nuclear secrets? Former CIA Director Michael Hayden appeared to endorse the idea late Thursday after new allegations accused former President Donald Trump of storing highly classified documents with nuclear information at Mar-a-Lago. What is the background? After Attorney General Merrick Garland admitted on Thursday that he personally approved the FBI raid on Trump's south Florida residence, the Washington Post reported, citing anonymous sources, that FBI agents raided Mar-a-Lago to retrieve documents with nuclear information. The sources with whom the Post spoke "did not offer additional details about what type...

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs…… ” So goes the opening sentence of Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar, referring to the Jewish American couple, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and sent to the electric chair exactly 68 years ago today. Their execution casts a morbid shadow over Plath’s book, just as it did over the United States, and it is seen by many as the nadir of America’s engagement with the cold war. The Rosenbergs are still the only Americans ever put to death in...

To some any comparison between the Clintons and the Rosenbergs is a bridge too far, yet both gave aid and comfort to a strategic enemy, Russia, aid that enhanced the capability of America’s enemies to make nuclear war on the United States. The Rosenbergs trafficked in the design of nucler weapons while the Clintons trafficked in the raw material for nuclear weapons – uranium. It is a distinction without a difference not lost on former deputy assistant to President Trump, Sebastian Gorka: Gorka spoke during an interview with Fox commentator Sean Hannity on his show Hannity. The two discussed Secretary...

Former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka said on Thursday that if the Uranium One deal took place in the 1950's, those involved would have been subject to the electric chair.  "If this had happened in the 1950s, there would be people up on treason charges right now. The Rosenbergs, okay? This is equivalent to what the Rosenbergs did, and those people got the chair. Think about it. Giving away nuclear capability to our enemies, that's what we're talking about," Gorka told Fox News' Sean Hannity.Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 after being convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union.Gorka's comments come after...

The confirmation this week that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid an opposition-research firm for a “dossier” on Donald Trump is bombshell news. More bombshells are to come. The Fusion GPS saga isn’t over. The Clinton-DNC funding is but a first glimpse into the shady election doings concealed within that oppo-research firm’s walls. We now know where Fusion got some of its cash, but the next question is how the firm used it. With whom did it work beyond former British spy Christopher Steele ? Whom did it pay? Who else was paying it? The answers are...

After Pope Francis early in his papacy decried capitalism as "trickle-down economics" — a polemical phrase coined by the left during the Reagan years that Francis frequently borrows — radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh commented, "This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope." Talk show host Michael Savage called him "Lenin’s pope." Pope Francis took such comments as a compliment. "I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people, so I don’t feel offended," he told the Italian press. Pope Francis grew up in socialist Argentina, an experience that left a...

DeBlasio’s New York, amirite? No, seriously, this is shameful: Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed with her husband for treason in 1953, was honored Monday by the City Council on what would have been her 100th birthday. Three council members joined Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer in issuing two proclamations lauding Rosenberg, a Lower East Side resident, for “demonstrating great bravery” in leading a 1935 strike against the National New York Packing and Supply Co., where she worked as a clerk. The proclamations also said she was “wrongfully” executed for helping her husband, Julius, pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union....

Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed with her husband for treason in 1953, was honored Monday by the City Council on what would have been her 100th birthday. Three council members joined Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer in issuing two proclamations lauding Rosenberg, a Lower East Side resident, for “demonstrating great bravery” in leading a 1935 strike against the National New York Packing and Supply Co., where she worked as a clerk. The proclamations also said she was “wrongfully” executed for helping her husband, Julius, pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. “A lot of hysteria was created around anti-communism and...

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. No government has the blood of more American soldiers on its hands today than the government of Iran. From Lebanon to Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia to Iraq, Iran has been killing American soldiers for decades. 241 in Beirut. 19 at the Khobar Towers. Over 500 in Iraq and Afghanistan. The last time the United States officially fought Iran was under Reagan. But Iran has never stopped killing Americans. There is no reason to believe that it will stop once it...

Here's what we know: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 for selling U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union after one of the most sensational Cold War-era espionage trials. They were convicted in 1951 owing, largely, to the testimony of David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg's brother. Here's what we don't know: How credible Greenglass' testimony was in court. Greenglass himself spent nearly a decade in prison for his role in the conspiracy. The Army sergeant stole nuclear intelligence from Los Alamos, N.M., and said he passed it on to the Rosenbergs. At the trial, he said Ethel Rosenberg typed...

"I love him like a brother. David Greenglass." --Woody Allen's character in "Crimes and Misdemeanors" David Greenglass was a prominent member of the supporting cast in a real-life spy story that shook the country in the 1950s -- the Rosenberg case. Indeed, it was his testimony that sent his ill-fated sister Ethel, the wife of Julius Rosenberg, to the electric chair along with her husband in 1953. David Greenglass' death at 92 should have been big news, at least on the obituary pages. For he was as much a part of American history as Benedict Arnold or Alger Hiss,...

January 26, 2009 Why we are helpless dealing with enemies on our own soil From the Cold War to the current Islamofascist threat--do we ever learn? By Wes Vernon "With a stroke of the pen, he [President Obama] effectively declared an end to the 'war on terror,' as President George W. Bush had defined it." So reads a front-page story in Friday's Washington Post. Stop right there. That is a snapshot of the wishful rose-colored-glasses mentality that opinion leaders in academia, media, big-money foundations, entertainment, etc., have foisted on Americans (with varying degrees of success) for decades. It lasted throughout...

Julius Rosenberg, who recruited his brother-in-law David Greenglass to steal atomic secrets, also enlisted a second spy to penetrate the Manhattan Project, snip... The authors conclude that the spy nicknamed in decoded Soviet cables as Fogel or Persian was not the scientists Robert Oppenheimer or Philip Morrison, as some investigators have speculated, but Rosenberg’s recruit, Russell W. McNutt, a relatively obscure engineer who helped build the uranium processing plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., that was part of the Manhattan Project. Mr. McNutt, a graduate of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and a former assistant Manhattan borough engineer, died a year ago at...

I was surprised to see a major FoxNews report on the Rosenberg trial the other day. Every once in a while, the treasons committed by notorius leftists such as Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs are exhumed, and some present-day leftists try to cast doubt on their guilt. One of the witnesses, who himself was a spy for the Soviets, recently recanted his 55 year old testimony against the Rosenbergs; and their sons, who spent their lifetimes arguing the innocence of their parents, have gone in the other direction. We should always remember that all communists, socialists and modern liberals lie...

We are the sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. We were young children — 10 and 6 years old, respectively — when our parents were put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing for passing the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. For many years after that, we believed our parents to be wholly innocent of the charges against them. But over the years, and especially as further evidence became available at the end of the Cold War, we began to question that belief. Now, 55 years after their execution, two recent revelations in our...

Aaron Katz, who for more than 50 years relentlessly and publicly sought the exoneration of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the central figures in the nation’s most controversial spying case, died on Sept. 28 in Venice, Fla. He was 92 and lived in North Port, Fla. The death was confirmed by his wife, Cynthia. Mr. Katz was director of the National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case for 42 years, repeatedly leading demonstrations outside the federal courthouse on Foley Square in Manhattan on the anniversary of the couple’s execution in Sing Sing’s electric chair on June 19, 1953. They had been...

As a historian, I know it's nearly impossible to get everything right. No sooner does one write a chapter in a book than new research disproves at least some of the details of the "Corrupt Bargain"; new science, such as DNA testing, provides a clearer picture of who Jack the Ripper was or was not; and new techniques, such as mapping spent cartridges with metal detectors, allows for a different interpretation of "Custer's Last Stand."