I personally don't ascribe to the "Bashir was a Changeling since Rapture" theory. The uniform is just an easy way of saying, look at the different guy! It's not (IMO) supposed to be taken so literally.
Even if it is improbable that he was wearing the old-style uniform when he was asleep, it is pretty obvious it was a visual cue to show that Bashir's abduction was not very recent.
In "Inquisition," Bashir says he was in the Dominion prison camp for 37 days. If the uniforms are at all indicative, that means "Rapture," "The Darkness and the Light," "The Begotten," and "For the Uniform" all have to fit in that span of time. Kira says she's supposed to carry Kirayoshi for three more weeks in "The Darkness and the Light," and she gives birth in "The Begotten," so that's reasonably consistent.
Just glancing at dialogue... Bashir says he was missing for four weeks. There are at least two weeks between For the Uniform and In Purgatory's Shadow. (O'Brien says it will take at least this long to fix the Defiant. There are at least three weeks between The Darkness and the Light and The Begotten. And The Begotten takes place over more than a week. Therefore, Bashir was the real deal in Rapture, uniform/pajamas that look like a uniform be damned. He was replaced some time around The Begotten or even as late as For the Uniform.
I have a better question that I don't think has ever been asked. HOW did they get Bashir from that conference to the Gamma Quadrant?
Cloaked ships? I mean, we never saw a Jem'Hadar ship that could cloak. Shouldn't that be proof enough? There was also the incident of the vanishing Eris. At the time of "Jem'Hadar", we might have bought into the concept of a Vorta being so selflessly devoted to the Dominion cause that she would commit suicide with a transporter. But every other episode dealing with the Vorta contradicts that one! Having her beam to a cloakship makes good sense, especially as we never learned of a Dominion transporter that would work without a starship or a building at the other end... Abducting people with transporters without anybody noticing seems to be banal as such - Picard derides "Ardra" for doing that simple parlor trick in "Devil's Due". And the Dominion does it right in front of the heroes' nose ridges in "In the Cards". Timo Saloniemi
I feel like the Dominion was shown consistently to have longer range transporters than the Federation. They talk about it explicitly in "Covenant", after Kira has been abducted from the station. And they always had those great beam-away escapes where it was immediately clear they'd gone further than our characters could track... Eris in "The Jem'Hadar", the Female Changeling in "Heart Of Stone", the Romulan Changeling in "The Die Is Cast."
On the other hand, while Worf seems to believe in Dominion long range transporters, supposedly due to the evidence you cite, the baddies themselves make no such claims. And short range beaming into ships (cloaked or innocuous-looking) would cover all the evidence, too - especially the "Covenant" case! Getting a transporter beam through the wormhole is unlikely to be within the Dominion's capabilities, or it would have been employed while the minefield was in place. Sneaking a cloakship through, possibly alongside other traffic, seems doable, though, especially as Sisko and Starfleet kept on going to Gamma till the very end (and I can't believe the Klingons would hold back, either!). Timo Saloniemi
Long range transporting is shown to be within the Dominion's capabilities, yes. But certainly not transporting half a galaxy away, or they would have had more people and ships brought over with the minefield in place. The Dominion never showed cloaking ability, or they would have used it during the war.
Ah, we never saw any Dominion long range transporters in action. That is, at no time did a Dominion transporter explicitly move the victim across a great distance - either we saw both endpoints and they were close to each other, or we only saw one endpoint and had no solid proof that the other would be far away. If Mad Dukat really had access to long range transporters, surely he would have been a greater threat than he was, putting the equipment to more sinister use? But lying about what he has would be right down his dark alley. In turn, not seeing cloaked ships is not particularly good proof of their nonexistence... Really, no cloakship should ever be seen, because what's the point of having one if the enemy can see it? Remember that the Jem'Hadar themselves (and their uniforms and guns and whatnot) can be invisible. Surely their ships can, too! It's just that this type of invisibility has no combat applications, as it's mandatory to decloak before engaging in a fight. But it has lots and lots of, well, cloak-and-dagger applications... Timo Saloniemi
Oh, my assumption was that the transport of Bashir from conference to Dominion prison wasn't all in one step -- transport him to a ship, then get that ship through the wormhole. In "To The Death" we have Jem'Hadar forces secretly traveling through the Alpha Quadrant in civilian transport ships, so we know that was a trick in their wheelhouse, and it's before the minefield, so there was still traffic through the wormhole. It's not from claims Dukat is making in "Covenant", it's a discussion our station characters are having after discovering Kira's abduction and theorizing who is behind it. Just grabbed this from the transcript: O'BRIEN: Sir, I'm picking up traces of tachyon energy. ODO: A transporter beam? O'BRIEN: With a Dominion signature. ODO: Any chance of tracing it? O'BRIEN: Afraid not. The signal's already dissipated. SISKO: Their transporters operate over longer distances than ours. What's their maximum range? WORF: If the homing transponder was in place, up to three light years. O'BRIEN: There was a homing transponder, all right. It was wrapped in this. ODO: Three light years. For all we know, she could be deep inside Dominion space by now.
But where is Worf getting that intel? We never see any onscreen suggestion that the Dominion would have that capability. Worf in this show has no onscreen adventures involving long range transporters, Dominion or otherwise. And nobody we'd know of transports from DS9 to Bajor or vice versa, say. Heck, if the Dominion transporter really can do 3 ly, then there should be a direct transporter link between Bajor and Cardassia, with just one relay station in the middle! Timo Saloniemi
Do they need direct evidence? They could observe Jem'hadar beaming from distant areas into battlefields. That would be enough to suggest the ability.
We saw a lot of wrecked Dominion ships, but we never saw one decloak. We never saw weapons fire coming from a cloaked ship. The Federation had the Dominion ship from The Ship to take apart and they never mentioned a cloak. Even in scenes talking among themselves, we never saw Weyoun or the Female Shapeshifter or a Jem Hadar talk about using a cloaked ship to accomplish a mission. I conclude that if the Dominion had a cloak, it must have been both much MORE effective than the Romulan/Defiant cloak, and much LESS used, which seems contradictory to me.
A weapon like that would suffer a major inflation in strategic value if exposed through overuse. The Dominion might simply be much smarter than the Alpha Axis, and treat its cloakships like the Allies treated their Ultra intel decrypts in WWII, putting a lot of effort into hiding the very existence of the capacity. (In contrast, the Defiant was probably given the crappiest cloak in the Romulan inventory, so that there would be little chance of the ship hiding from Romulans. Swapping that for a more capable Klingon unit might not have been worth the effort when it turned out Sisko did not have infiltration of the Romulan Star Empire topmost in his mind after all.) Timo Saloniemi
Who knows? Do we really need every minor detail spelled out that tediously? We have seen plenty of examples of Dominion characters escaping by long-range transporter (O'Brien after Eris beams out in 'The Jem'Hadar': "I'm picking up a transporter signature but I can't trace it. She didn't rematerialize anywhere on the station. There are no ships nearby.") Then we're told explicitly they have this capability. We can infer that the vast intelligence gathering apparatus of Starfleet has acquired all sorts of information about the Dominion's technological capabilities during the course of this war. The Federation would obviously be collecting this information and making sure it's disseminated to the appropriate Worf-type officers. We don't need to see our characters individually establishing the foundation for every scrap of technobabble to understand there's a lot of off-camera work transpiring here.
All true. But the flip side is that the Dominion never makes use of a long range transporter. Only Dukat does, or claims to. If the tech does exist, why do our heroes worry about Changeling infiltrators but not about the Jem'Hadar beaming in at will? Explaining this is no easier going than explaining why we don't see invisible ships. Timo Saloniemi