But of course you can guarantee that there'll be a nice little firebreak between the killers and their immediate controls and the higher-ups, especially the politicians.

My belief is that the people at the top should always carry full moral and legal liability for whatever the people below them get up to - there should be no possibility of escaping blame on the grounds that they never asked and noone told them. But I can't see that happening in a hurry.

There's some black humour in this - from today's earlier Guardian story:
The reality was brought home when the inquiry's officers arrested more than 100 people and found that the majority of them were agents of or informers for either the police or the army.

Here is the later story from the Guardian website, after the report was actually published - :Security forces aided Ulster murders

An interesting example of how different countries operate - the British felt it necessary to keep this kind of thing under wraps and pretend it wasn't happening. Meanwhile in Israel it's all official policy. And in America they seem to have a sort of in-between system. Either way, its state terrorism.

I wonder if Brian Nelson, the agent who gets the spotlight in this, and who was supposed to have died of a "brain haemorrhage" a couple of days ago, was actually smuggled off to some safe hideaway, or was he liquidated by his former colleagues to ensure his silence? I'd put my money on the latter.