PeterZ wrote:
Sorry to disagree, but Thandi was caught up in the tower as Houdini began. Began long before Mike showed up. I recall children's soccer fields blown up during games. Buildings with supposed conferences blown up and blamed on Seccies and the Ballroom. Whatever or whoever was doing this evaded the authorities and managed to plant bombs repeatedly all over Mesa. They had agents planting those bombs after the authorities were looking for them. Yet, when their supposed leaders were cornered by those authorities, those agents which had successfully evaded capture could not plan bombs to relieve their leadership.
That's what I was referencing. O'Hanrahan knew this to be true because she was there.
So, now that Mike arrives, more bombs go off. It strikes me as illogical that a different culprit MUST be at fault for these bombs than the bombs leading up to Mike's arrival. So, if the Ballroom was at fault for the initial bombings, they are at fault now. If they were at fault for the initial bombings why did they not also bomb the forces attacking Palane? If the Ballroom was neutralized by Mesan authorities prior to Mike's arrival, why did they not reveal that fact to O'Hanrahan and other Newsies? The most believable reason is that those agents were not apprehended. If they were not apprehended, then why did not help Thandi?
Taking the bombings that happened before Mike arrives as a completely separate series of events doesn't make sense. Taking all the bombings as part of a single series of events to further a group's goal is the best explanation for them. There are too many inconsistencies to make the culprit demonstrably the Manties.
Yes, I believe that blaming the Manties is believable. I also think that immediately blaming the most recent bombings on Mike despite the ongoing bombings prior to Mike's arrival is a leap to judgement that is inconsistent with O'Hanrahan's modus operandi. Is it too large a disconnect for me to believe, no. It is, however, evidence that I believe should be questioned by Mike's intel weenies.
When Oyster Bay is considered in the context of the Manty claims for these atrocities, I can see opinion going both ways. The bastards responsible for the Yawata Strike earned severe punishment and deserved what Mike did to them or any organization cold blooded enough to kill millions of Manties to harm them would also kill more millions of people to further harm the Manties on Mesa.
So, an immediate opinion formed by a true muckraker would sound odd to me in this context.
The entire siege of Neue Rostock lasted about three weeks — less than a month — before Mike arrived to relieve them. Now, three weeks is a hell of a long time for a bunch of insurgents to hold out against the organized military forces of a planet even fighting from a “natural fortress” like one of the seccy towers. Despite that, though, it’s only three weeks, and the official position of the Mesa security forces is that the terrorists responsible for the nuclear bombing campaign are now all penned up inside Neue Rostock. That’s the reason there aren’t being more explosions elsewhere. Besides, how many nukes did they have? Remember that the only ones which were captured — after being deliberately designed as squibs — were jury rigged out of Mesan “commercial” nuclear materials. There was zero evidence that the explosives used had been smuggled in from off-planet. One can therefore legitimately assume that the bad guys (whoever they are) have only a limited supply of them. Couple that with the fact that the supposed perpetrators are now under siege and unable to get out to continue their bloodthirsty campaign, and it’s not that surprising that there weren’t scads of nuclear explosions going off all over Mesa.
In fact, the sheer quantity of explosions which occur after Tenth Fleet’s arrival and the precision of their timing is the strongest possible evidence that it wasn’t the same people as the sloppy jerks who managed to plant at least two nukes that didn’t even go off prior to Mike Henke’s conquest of the star system.
I’m sorry, but the difference between the sporadic, scattered attacks that were part of ongoing Operation Houdini operations are obviously totally different from the cascade of explosions which completed Houdini. O’Hanrahan never really believed that the nuclear attacks all over the planet were Manticore’s handiwork to begin with. She made that abundantly clear in her coverage from Mesa. She didn’t suggest that they were the work of the Mesan government, either, of course . . . and they weren’t. She didn’t know who’d carried them out, and that’s what she said.
But when you have something like 40-plus nuclear detonations, spread through an entire star system — including orbital structures, not on the planetary surface where all of the other “terrorist” attacks occurred — and all of them occurring simultaneously, not spread out and sequenced the way the “terrorist” attacks were, you are clearly talking about a far more sophisticated operation. And the only people reasonably in place to carryout that operation are the Manties and their Havenite allies.
It is totally reasonable for O’Hanrahan — and a whole stack of other newsies — to follow exactly that chain of logic, and there would be absolutely no legitimate grounds for Mike Henke or anyone else to single Audrey O’Hanrahan out of all the other background noise for following a completely logical perspective on the story. And she didn’t exactly shift her theories overnight, either. It’s an ongoing process, and the last thing she said is that there are unanswered questions, that she is no longer certain of anything, and that she intends to follow the story wherever he goes.
Please point me at something suspicious in that.
