And Sisko didn't ask Garak to kill him either, Sisko had no idea Garak was going to do it. All Sisko is guilty of is covering up the events./ In regards to Sisko poisoning the planet, IIRC no one would have died right away, it would have taken a while. I'm not defending his actions, it was pretty bad.
So the Maquis are ISIS now? False equivalency. I don't think "Maquis colony" meant secret Maquis base. I think it meant a colony in which the Maquis had a serious foothold. It makes more sense that these are two proper former-Federation/Cardassian colonies that are acting up against each other, post treaty. DS9 is the "gray" show, right. Let's not make it black and white for them.
Sisko brought in a former member of the Obsidian Order for a covert-op. Garak himself in the episode said that Sisko wanted him because he knew what Garak was capable of. Then he covered up (lied, bribed, erased & falsified records, etc) the murder of the data-rod forger, imperial senator and his guards (and pilot(s)), and brought billions of Romulans and their subjects into [his] ugly war, with everything that implies too. He's not "clean." That's the episode.
I didn't say he was clean. He also wasn't directly involved with the Murder of the Data Forger, that was also Garak without his knowledge.
That's what I'm saying. Garak didn't do it without his knowledge. Sisko brought him in knowing Garak wouldn't follow the rules. Sisko was culpable.
Not literally, no. My point is simply that revolutionary groups generally don't take rejection well. I admit this is supposition, because we never actually saw what happened when the Maquis approached someone to join their "revolution" and were turned down. But if Eddington is any indication, they wouldn't like it.
Of course Garak did it without Sisko's knowledge. Julian would have had a better idea of what Garak would have gotten up to, but it took him years to train himself to think deviously enough.
The original question in this thread was whether what Sisko did was a war crime. With Vreenak, clearly no, since there was no war with the Romulans. The worst things you could say about him were accessory after the fact to murder, both regarding Senator Vreenak and his hapless crew, and Tolar. Plus hushing up Odo's investigation, probably offscreen the investigation into the shuttle's explorsion, and supplying biomimetic gel illegally. (I don't think they said so, but I'd bet Sisko got the biomimetic gel back or made sure it was destroyed after Tolar's death, so it didn't end up on the black market.)
Sisko is guilty by association and indirectly responsible. If he hadn't asked Garak to help bring the Romulans into the war, then the senator, the forger and numerous other Romulans wouldn't have died. He was responsible for an entire empire going to war over a lie. It's not a million miles away with the debate that's been raging here in the United Kingdom for years. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair allegedly led us into war in the Middle East based on information that he, again allegedly, knew to be inaccurate, exagerated or downright false.
There's an interesting scene in this episode. When Sisko gets the forger out of prison, the forger kinda brushes him off. When he mentions Garak, the forger guy is instantly terrified. I get the impression that Garak has done some pretty horrific, dark, ugly things in his life.
Garak is a secret operative and someone who was stated to enjoy interrogation. He wasn't "evil" per se but he was certainly capable of doing awful things if he was ordered to or he believed it benefited him. For ITPM, its not just being an accessory to murder and doing dirty things Sisko is indirectly responsible for every dead romulan, every romulan that was either wounded or otherwise traumatized. According to memory alpha(and as I understand it in the books),the Romulan Front in the war was a particularly brutal part of the war-no mercy to prisoners, torture, etc... Sisko led the Romulans into a war that wasn't ever justified to them on their own self interests. Sure in a dominion victory the romulans would fall as well or be basically vassalized but as Dax admitted that was a self serving argument that was astropolitical realities aside hypothetical. When Sisko really committed a war crime was when he loosed a bioweapon to get one man-Eddington. Now the writers went out of their way to say "all the non-combatants got out" I don't believe that. There is no way a Maquis colony could have been evacuated so quickly. Sisko didn't go after Eddington because he was a security threat, or he threatened the peace, or he gave the federation(and Cardassians) a bloody nose but because he fooled Sisko personally. As Eddington himself said Sisko couldn't let it go. It was personal to him. I do admit I am a bit of an Eddington fan however.
Once you start picking and choosing what to believe of what the characters say, it becomes possible to justify anything.
I'd say the Federation got very lucky. Even the Jack Pack were were convinced that they would lose. For the Federation to win, they needed every bit of help they could get. They needed the Romulans to enter the war. They needed the Prophets to make the Jem Hadar fleet go away. They even needed that nasty business from Section 31. And they needed Odo. It was Odo curing the other changeling that finally convinced her of the Federation's peaceful intentions. (How's that for irony.) So, maybe they needed some war crimes. Sisko admitted he crossed a line. And he said he could live with it.
Of course, Sisko is a war criminal and should be treated as such. Question is: would people here have reacted in the same or similar manner in a similar situation? I likely would have.
Might have been more interesting if Sisko had had to act against an allied (or even neutral) power rather than a hostile one. What if it had been the Klingons who were reluctant to commit their forces to the war?
And... Eddington was already running around poisoning planetary atmospheres and killing a lot more innocent people. Sisko tried other means for Eddington to stand down and Eddington just laughed. What's he supposed to do, take the Arnold Rimmer course in warfare (wearing glasses, wearing t-shirts that say "Give quiche a chance", and coming up with groups such as "The Committee for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society"?) "At what point do conventional means fail" is one of the issues of the story and it was spelled out.
And the other reason this story is so awesome is that "Traken II" is mentioned. Nice in-joke to "Doctor Who".