Besides, according to Kirk and Spock, history doesn't record Khan being missing so no conviction in absentia, anyway.
That'd depend on which came first: the conviction, or the decision that Khan must be dead even when no body can be presented. Nobody convicted Hitler of anything, but a couple of other Nazis got charged even though missing and in fact dead at the time.
OTOH, all sorts of kangaroo courts around the world have been convicting, say, US political and military leaders for their Vietnam war crimes. Might well be Kirk didn't agree with the folks who accused Khan, because ShatnerKirk held opposite political views, or considered the old political views antiquated and irrelevant - but PineKirk was much less informed on the issue.
One does wonder how things played out at SB11.
Good question. Things must have started going the Talosian way either when Spock heard of the Pike thing and contacted Talos for telepathic help, or when Talos heard of the Pike thing and reached out for Spock. (At the latest, that is - perhaps a number of Talosians snuck aboard the
Enterprise in "The Cage" already, and did all sorts of other things we never got to see, because it didn't concern our heroes and because their telepathy kept everybody from finding out anyway.)
Whichever way we look at it, the Talosians are already doing so much that logically they should be running the whole show - even Starfleet Command would be but helpless puppets to them. The wholly academic question then becomes, does anybody realize this but is helpless to act, or is everybody blissfully deceived...?
Somebody like Khan is never a "good" ruler. Dictatorship is always tyranny.
But the Kims of North Korea, say, are
not guilty of war crimes. It takes a war to achieve that!
I'm sure that when Khan and all the rest of them were in power on Earth, they never allowed any of that information to get out.
But then they were defeated and gone. The people who defeated them would have it in their interests to establish and/or invent a criminal record for Khan, and ASAP.
Unless, of course, they were too deep in it themselves. Surely the Augment Project had its masters and clients separately from the products. For all we know, each and every side in that conflict had their own household Augment, right till the bitter end (and quite possibly Paperclipped on well beyond the end, too).
the "fragmentary" records
Records of the era are so detailed in every other instance of Trek that it's probably best to assume that only
shipping records were fragmentary. And
that carries on till the next century as per "Up the Long Ladder".
if he was compelled to watch, what would he do
Try and dodge the death penalty. Which his colleagues would be obligated to dish out on him anyway: there's no defense of "innocence" on this particular offense. Rather, those exposed to Talos are fatally infected and must be disposed of, even if the terminology to achieve that is legal rather than medical...
Do we really know what the entirety of the prohibition regarding Talos was?
We know the regulation keeps the cause completely secret, for obvious reasons - the secret is held by "Fleet Command", and a separate Top Secret document is presented to those in the need to know in case such a need emerges, but even that one reveals little.
But supposedly "every captain" knows the relevant bits: " no vessel under any condition, emergency or otherwise, is to visit Talos Four" and " to do so is the only death penalty left on our books". If it's that secretive, it's unlikely there would be more text to GO7...
Of course, the actual General Order is probably far more general and deals with generic planets and their quarantine regulations - it's just that GO7 applies among others to the Talosian case and in that particular case activates the death penalty option. All starship skippers no doubt idly speculate about this all, trying to divine the specifics from the general context - but they fail.
But were all the details of that report in the General Order itself and who was privvy to actually reading it?
We see the actual report text when Mendez claims it's within his authority to open a "For the eyes of Starfleet Command only" file. Since there's nothing in there but Pike's recommendation to stay the hell out of Talos, it surely follows that GO7 itself contains even less.
if a flag officer, even just a commodore, could and would consequently already know, at the least what the general thrust of the event was about
Mendez never admits to knowing, despite feeling qualified to open the report/recommendation file. Even in the shuttle he clearly indicates he cannot fathom what might be found on Talos IV. Is that pretense? Cry "Confusion!" and let slip the cats of speculation...
Timo Saloniemi
