ABSTRACT
A British Investigation of a "shoot-to-kill" policy affecting Irish Republican Party (IRA) suspects in Northern Ireland and as far away as Gibraltar is effectively hushed-up by the government without so much as a peep from the prosecutors in a land we strongly associate with the rule of law. The source of abuse furnishes only one axis on the matrix of governmental abuse. The prosecutor may need the cooperation of the highest government officials if he is to get the cooperation of lower-level officials in furnishing information and evidence about governmental wrongdoing and if he is to get the cooperation of the police in investigating such cases. The hardest question arises with regard to the most frightening form of governmental abuse in Latin America and South Africa -- abuse sponsored or supported by leaders of the military against a political element they consider dangerous even when it is not involved in armed resistance.
