A charmer? Yes. James Jesus Angleton? No

There is probably something otherworldly, if not quite cosmic, about legendary intelligence operatives. This may have been what Oliver Stone wanted Matt Damon to convey in the film "Good Shepherd". Or maybe not.



Damon looked nothing like James Jesus Angleton, but for spy buffs who saw the film, that was clearly the role he was playing. Angleton's ouster as the CIA's head of Counterintelligence in 1974 led to the effective end of U.S. counterintelligence, in his own view at least. Witness Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.

We and a few other journalists made Angleton's acquaintance while he was alive but he was so obsessed with secrecy that it was the bad guys like Seymour Hersh who, during the gloomiest days of the Cold War, got him ousted in disgrace in 1974. The Church Committee then continued with the castration of U.S. intelligence to the point that with Plame-gate, elements in the CIA arguably got away with undermining a U.S. president in the midst of a war. How surreal is that?



Angleton described his espionage world as a "wilderness of mirrors" in which the KGB too often mesmerized naive Americans. Hollywood is now trying to get wise. "The Good Shepherd" starring Matt Damon comes pretty close to telling the real story of James Angleton except for a few major changes in substance and style.

A newer film, "Breach ", about one of the worst espionage diasters in U.S. history probably came closer to facts than Good Shepherd. But the hero of that movie, we are told at the conclusion, ditched his budding career as an FBI agent to become a lawyer in Washington. How much further down to earth, can one get?


Published by the editors of www.CosmicTribune.com

The Founding Fathers: Not just God-fearing but, horrors, out-and-out Christians

The invaluable American Spectator has as its cover story in the February issue a special by M. Stanton Evans on the subject of the religious orientation of our Founding Fathers. You will have to buy the magazine because the article is not available online. It's well worth the price.

The non-stop secularist propaganda may have convinced us that these lamentably male and pasty non-ethnics were, thankfully, hard-headed rationalists and secularists as well if one could strip away the temporal cultural trappings of the day (which modern historians have).

Evans offers inconvenient facts and quotes that should be common knowledge:

George Washington's 1778 directive [What if the following had been said by our current George W.?]: "The commander in chief directs that Divine service be performed every Sunday at 11 o'clock, in each brigade which has a Chaplain . . . . While we are duly performing the duty of good soldiers, we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion. To the distinguished character of a patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of a Christian."

And this from Washington's successor John Adams, a decade after the First Amendment was adopted: "[Citizens should] acknowledge before God the manifold sins and transgressions with which we are justly chargeable . . . beseeching Him at the same time of His infinite grace, through the Redeemer of the world, freely to remit all offenses and to incline us by his holy spirit to repentance and reformation."

Evans cites similarly shocking utterances by Jefferson and Madison as well as the following description of a key framer of the First Amendment, Roger Sherman:

"He objected to traveling on Sunday, was a leader in the ecclesiatical doings of New Haven, and engaged in theological correspondence even while tending to his worldly oblications. One of his writings is entitled, A Short Sermon on the Duty of Self-Examination Preparatory to Receiving the Lord's Supper."

Nor does Evans overlook that enlightened Benjamin Franklin, a Unitarian (the modern versions of which are well known to believe in absolutely nothing). But, Evans notes:

"[I]t was Franklin who at the Constitutional Convention called for prayer to aid the drafters in their efforts, saying that, the longer he lived the more he was convinced 'God governs in the affairs of men'."

Could such men be elected to public office today?



Published by the editors of www.CosmicTribune.com

Have I got a great UFO picture for you

Seeing is believing. UFOs exist. Just ask Hollywood and the American public.

Nearly 50 years since an alleged UFO was sighted at Roswell, New Mexico, a new CNN/Time poll released Sunday shows that 80 percent of Americans think the government is hiding knowledge of the existence of extraterrestrial life forms.

50 years of grainy photos and unconfirmable testimonies, not to mention the movies "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "ET" have conclusively proven to the satisfaction of most Americans that "we are not alone."

Still, there is a nagging uncertainty lurking just beneath the surface of rational minds: namely, those grainy photos. Voila! In a burst of initiative that vaporizes all remaining congitive dissonance, a netizen has provided a high-res image of a UFO .

The pendulum is swinging back from the extreme rational end of the human perception spectrum where it hovered late last century. Facts, logic, even common sense are less important than a good cinematic story line. Thus, for example, China (think panda bears) only wants to get along with the rest of the world and its military buildup is just as benign as were Idi Amin's intentions in Uganda.

Oh, and there were no WMDs in Saddam's Iraq. Evidence to the contrary was ignored by the big media and so didn't exist.

Case closed and if you'll wait while I get my coat, I'll take you to my leader.