New Delhi, Sept. 24 -- On September 30, the UN Security Council will decide whether to keep paying for the mission built to save Haitians from their gangs. Nobody on that council has to reckon, in the same vote, with what the United Nations' own human rights office has already concluded: that the state the mission is propping up has been killing people too.

gangs now control most of Port-au-Prince and have pushed north into the Artibonite and Centre departments, extending a war that has emptied entire neighborhoods. What the renewal request does not mention is a finding buried in the UN Human Rights Office's own March report, one that complicates the story of who is doing the killing.

The police account for a specific slice of that gap....