Chris Hedges: The War in the Shadows!!

A Swedish documentary filmmaker released a film last year called "Last Chapter, Goodbye Nicaragua." In it he admitted that he unknowingly facilitated a bombing, almost certainly orchestrated by the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, which took the lives of three reporters I worked with in Central America. One of them, Linda Frazier, was the mother of a 10 year old son. Her legs were torn apart by the blast, at La Penca, Nicaragua,, along the border with Costa Rica. The admission by Peter Torbiornsson, that he unwittingly took the bomber with him to the press conference, was a window into the sordid world of espionage, terrorism and assassination that was an intimate part of the conflict I covered. It exposed the cynicism of undercover operatives on all sides, men and women who lie and deceive for a living, who betray relationships, including between each other, who steal and carry out murder. One knows them immediately. Their ideological alliances do not matter. They have the faraway eyes of the disconnected, along with nebulous histories and suspicious and vague associations. They tell incongruous personal stories and practice small deceits that are part of a pathological inability to tell the truth. They can be personable, even charming, but they are also invariably vain, dishonest and sinister. They cannot be trusted. It does not matter what side they are on. They are all the same: "Gangsters."All states and armed groups recruit and use members of this underclass. These personalities gravitate to intelligence agencies, terrorist cells, homeland security, police departments, the special forces and revolutionary groups, where they can live a life freed from moral and legal restraints. Right and wrong are banished from their vocabulary!