Remaining holes in SLN intel

ldwechsler wrote: Those things would be important in a trial in the US right now. My uncle taught Lee Harvey Oswald in Junior High. Should be have been tried for something Oswald did. If Oswald went to a rifle range, would the person teaching him to shoot be charged...unless it could be shown he knew what Oswald would do?

The rifle training would be laid at the feet of his Marine DI's.

quite possibly a cat wrote:...Anton, a member of Manticore's military ...

Weird Harold wrote:Anton is a former member of the RMN.

tlb wrote:As of Crown of Slaves, Zilwicki was on half pay (so not a former officer at that time); therefore I am curious when he resigned.

Bluesqueak wrote:As of Cauldron of Ghosts, Honor was referring to him as 'Mr Zilwicki', so he had resigned by then. She called Victor by his rank in the same meeting, btw.

Thank you, but I have found the following quote in Chapter 14 of Mission Of Honor:

"Look," she said, "I know the Ballroom's never been as monolithic as the public thinks. Or, for that matter, as monolithic as people like Jeremy—and you—like to pretend. I know it's riddled with splinter factions and no one ever knows when a charismatic leader's going to take some chunk of the official organization with him on his own little crusade. But the bottom line is that someone nuked Green Pines, and the way it was done is sure as hell consistent with the Ballroom's modus operandi. Aside from the nuclear element, at least!"
"Assuming the reports out of Mesa are accurate, then, yes, I'd have to agree with that," Montaigne acknowledged in that same unflinching tone. "But you're right about the Ballroom's occasional internal divisions. For that matter, I'd have to admit some of the action leaders who'd accepted Jeremy's leadership before Torch became independent are royally pissed off with him now for 'betraying the armed struggle' when he 'went legit.' At least some of them think he's sold out in return for open political power; most of them just think he's wrong." She shrugged. "Either way, though, they're hardly likely to run potential operations by him for approval."
"Or material support?"
"Torch has made its position on actively supporting strikes like this crystal clear, Elizabeth. You've heard what they've said as well as I have, and I promise you, they mean it. Like I say, Jeremy's not stupid enough not to see all the downsides of something like this."
Elizabeth tipped back her chair, regarding her "guest" with narrow eyes and scant cheerfulness. There was a certain brittleness to the office's silence, then the queen raised an eyebrow and pointed an index finger at Montaigne.
"You've been talking in generalities, Cathy," she said shrewdly. "Why aren't you being more specific about how you know Captain Zilwicki wasn't involved in this?"

So at this point after the Green Pines incident, the Queen refers to him as Captain - is he or is he not?

There has been some posts that seem to call these arguments as merely parroting Mesan propaganda or trying to paint Manticore or Haven with the terrorist brush; I very much disagree. The point is not whether Manticore or Haven has actual liability for any of the explosions on Mesa (I do not think they do), but that Mesan propaganda can correctly tie people from Haven and Manticore to the first explosions and so indirectly to the rest; thus influencing the core world reactions to the occupation of Mesa.
I do think that in an ordinary court of law (which is not going to happen) that Zilwicki and Cachet could be convicted as accessories before the fact. Despite the fact that no one wanted the explosion to hurt civilians and that no one could stop the change in plans; every member of a conspiracy is liable by association for crimes committed by a member in a planned activity by that group. Victor and Anton wanted explosives and the seccies found them, Anton disabled the tracking mechanism so the authorities could not interfere and then a seccie was given one bomb to detonate to cause confusion when Zilwicki and Cachet made their escape.

PS (added later). To be fair, neither statement about Zilwicki's rank may mean anything more than courtesy. The Queen might be using a courtesy title for someone who had once been in the Navy and Honor might be using informal address to someone she knew and formal address to Victor, who was only known by reputation.

The talk of marksmanship instructors being accessories is joking (I hope), because you need to have knowledge of an impending crime to be guilty.

I wish that things could be clear cut, but they never are. Those kids were casualties of war, pure and simple. Should it have happened? No, of course not. And even though Anton and Victor were involved, that has to be weighed in light of their choices at the time. Further, failure to consider the larger context in which it happened such as how important it was to get Simoes and the info about the Alignment out would not be right. That motivated Haven not only to seek peace with Manticore but to actively ally itself with Manticore against both the Alignment and the League. Would Manticore survive long term without that? How many more lives would be lost without that info?

Pursuing righteousness is all very well and we must do that! But at the same time we must be keenly aware of how rarely we actually achieve it. In the meantime, the best that we can do is the best we can do.

Don

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Brigade XO wrote:Before we attempt to paint both Haven and Manticore with the Terrorist Brush for the involvement with what led to Green Pines and screaming about how bad they are, can we kindly consider what exactly the Mandarins, various past and current Sr. officers in the SLN, OFS and the Alignment are in the process of doing?

Other people being bad doesn't excuse Manticore nor Haven. There are plenty of Star Nations that are able to get by without these sorts of misdeeds. See: Grayson. Although they do have an ongoing misogyny problem, but that's not the same level of supporting nuclear terrorists.

One more thing. Soldiers don't pretend to be civilians when going into battle. You don't get to justify bombings as part of a war effort when you deliberately feign civilian status.

ldwechsler wrote:Essentially they knew of neither before the explosions went up. McBryde used one to cover his tracks and the other guy did the explosion on his own.

You are forgetting the third nuke; the one Anton placed and detonated to fake their "death while escaping." There is no way to weasel-word Anton's involvement with that explosion and the second was also planned as a diversion to cover their escape. That the second was diverted to Green Pines Park when McBride's nuke destroyed the Gamma Center and damaged the air-car delivering the nuke to an abandoned stadium. Anton prepped that nuke and disabled the tracking on both -- the only thing "on his own" was the choice of target when the driver had to abort the planned delivery due to damage.

n7axw wrote:I wish that things could be clear cut, but they never are. Those kids were casualties of war, pure and simple. Should it have happened? No, of course not. And even though Anton and Victor were involved, that has to be weighed in light of their choices at the time. Further, failure to consider the larger context in which it happened such as how important it was to get Simoes and the info about the Alignment out would not be right. That motivated Haven not only to seek peace with Manticore but to actively ally itself with Manticore against both the Alignment and the League. Would Manticore survive long term without that? How many more lives would be lost without that info?

Pursuing righteousness is all very well and we must do that! But at the same time we must be keenly aware of how rarely we actually achieve it. In the meantime, the best that we can do is the best we can do.

Don

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Your sentiment smacks up against "The lesser of two evils."

n7axw wrote:I wish that things could be clear cut, but they never are. Those kids were casualties of war, pure and simple. Should it have happened? No, of course not. And even though Anton and Victor were involved, that has to be weighed in light of their choices at the time. Further, failure to consider the larger context in which it happened such as how important it was to get Simoes and the info about the Alignment out would not be right. That motivated Haven not only to seek peace with Manticore but to actively ally itself with Manticore against both the Alignment and the League. Would Manticore survive long term without that? How many more lives would be lost without that info?

Pursuing righteousness is all very well and we must do that! But at the same time we must be keenly aware of how rarely we actually achieve it. In the meantime, the best that we can do is the best we can do.

Don

cthia wrote:Your sentiment smacks up against "The lesser of two evils."

I always thought it was reasonable to go with the lesser of two evils and I thought what n7axw wrote was eloquent and true: "the best that we can do is the best we can do". I paraphrase that as we need to do the best that we can.
I need more explanation to know what exactly you are trying to say.

tlb wrote:

n7axw wrote:I wish that things could be clear cut, but they never are. Those kids were casualties of war, pure and simple. Should it have happened? No, of course not. And even though Anton and Victor were involved, that has to be weighed in light of their choices at the time. Further, failure to consider the larger context in which it happened such as how important it was to get Simoes and the info about the Alignment out would not be right. That motivated Haven not only to seek peace with Manticore but to actively ally itself with Manticore against both the Alignment and the League. Would Manticore survive long term without that? How many more lives would be lost without that info?

Pursuing righteousness is all very well and we must do that! But at the same time we must be keenly aware of how rarely we actually achieve it. In the meantime, the best that we can do is the best we can do.

Don

cthia wrote:Your sentiment smacks up against "The lesser of two evils."

I always thought it was reasonable to go with the lesser of two evils and I thought what n7axw wrote was eloquent and true: "the best that we can do is the best we can do". I paraphrase that as we need to do the best that we can.
I need more explanation to know what exactly you are trying to say.

It was simply an observation, not a judgement. At any rate, I concur. If, first, we establish that there were only two choices, and both were evil. Or if there were several choices, that they all were evil.

The stakes were high. Spies are waging their own brand of war. The stakes that were on the poker table was the possible fall of an entire home system, be it Havenite or Manticoran. The wages of that kind of war is the death of thousands.

Collateral damage is something the Demon Murphy throws into the pot. It is completely out of human hands.

I'm honestly not sure why people are getting so fixated on Green Pines: it's clear to me from textev that it was an unplanned event. Yes, it was used by the MAlign as a propaganda ploy -
but why this concentration on Cachat and Zilwicki instead of the local resistance/terrorist (pick one - me, I pick 'resistance') group they were working with? It was the local group who stole the nuke; the local group who wanted to use nukes rather than smaller explosives.

There's also a lot of concentrating on the event and not the context - it was incredibly important for Zilwicki and Cachat to get the evidence out that Manticore and Haven were the targets in a secret war - how could those Star Nations defend themselves against a war if they didn't even know it was happening?

Zilwicki and Cachat made plans that tried to minimise civilian casualties; despite Torch having declared war on Mesa, despite discovering that Mesa was conducting an undeclared war against their Star Nations of birth (and against Torch) they still tried to minimise casualties. They failed because of a) Jack McBryde's own nuke, which they didn't know about and b) David Pritchard wanted to kill and hurt as many full citizens as possible.

The other context that is not being considered is why David wanted to kill as many full citizens as possible, and wasn't bothered whether those deaths also included innocent (if privileged) children.

That context is the nature of Mesan society. Possibly this is RFC's fault - he did such a good job of showing us the 'nice Nazi's' with Herlander Simoes and the McBrydes that we forget that Mesa doesn't consist entirely of their nice middle class full citizen lifestyle, but is basically the moral sinkhole of the universe.

Mesa is a society run on apartheid, Nazi, racist, slave-holding lines. It is a society that keeps 60% of its population as slaves, and 10% as legally second class citizens. It is a society that murders sick children, or children who aren't sick - but simply fail to reach some ideal of 'genetic uplift'. Its businesses include an 'industry' where it's considered a valid tactic to eject four year olds into vacuum without a spacesuit.

It is a society where Collin Detweiler can sadly tell his Dad that he has to attend a memorial service for the dead children one day, then approve a plan for the nuking of more children the next.

David Pritchard (one of the 'second class citizens') has been used and abused by this society - and Green Pines happens because he loses it, completely and utterly, at a moment when he's holding a nuclear bomb. RFC has made it very clear with the revolution on Torch - if you treat people like objects all their lives, use them, torture them and throw them away, don't expect them to treat you any different when the tables are turned and they get their chance to resist or defeat you. Don't expect them to be reasonable. Don't expect them to care for your children when you killed theirs.

David is a very graphic demonstration of that - and kids were killed in the Torch revolution, as well. It's heartbreaking - but that's what happens when people have seen their own kids being treated as disposable. It's wrong: but it's a natural human reaction.

Every full citizen on Mesa is an 'accessory before the fact' to slavery and murder. They don't think of those things as crimes, of course. But what their planet runs on is slavery. Apartheid. Murder.

The children were innocent. The Mesans were not.

Bluesqueak wrote: I'm honestly not sure why people are getting so fixated on Green Pines: it's clear to me from textev that it was an unplanned event. Yes, it was used by the MAlign as a propaganda ploy -
but why this concentration on Cachat and Zilwicki instead of the local resistance/terrorist (pick one - me, I pick 'resistance') group they were working with? It was the local group who stole the nuke; the local group who wanted to use nukes rather than smaller explosives.

Statements removed for brevity.

Bluesqueak wrote:The children were innocent. The Mesans were not.

I agree with all that you say about Mesa and its citizens, but that is all backstory to the galaxy. It is the possible involvement of Manticore and allies in a indiscriminate terror campaign against adults and innocent children that has the potential to be a massive propaganda blow in the war. Whether you say Manticore and allies or Torch and the seccies, the result is sympathy for Mesa that we know is unwarranted.
Militarily it might not matter, but it can impact diplomacy.