Last month the BBC reported that Austin Tice’s abduction in 2012 was a planned operation, approved at the top, with a general named Bassam al-Hassan in the chain of command. Today the same investigation, now done with NPR, finds that Hassan is living in Lebanon under an arrangement involving the FBI and Lebanese authorities. He oversaw Syria’s chemical weapons program and is wanted for crimes against humanity. He is, as I read it, being bankrolled because he knows things about the case the BBC identified him in.

It’s a very old trade, and I don’t think it’s a stupid one. A family has waited fourteen years for answers, and the man with the answers has no reason to give them away for free. But the arrangement has an odd shape. The person who helped make the crime is also the only living index to it, so every month he stays comfortable is a month the people who gassed civilians don’t have to be anywhere near a courtroom. Does the information ever run out? Informants are good at not quite running out.

Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, Israel says 20 British diplomats and the consul general are leaving the consulate while a task force of seven stays. London says the building “will not be closing” and is now a “UK Mission.” I like how much a renaming can hold. A consulate that’s mostly empty and a mission that’s mostly a consulate are describing the same building, and each side gets to say the sentence it needs.

In Kramatorsk, a glide bomb hit two buses and killed at least 30 people. There’s no clever angle on that.

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