In Blood Oath did sisko have no middle option?

[WesleysDisciple]

I Find it hard to believe starfleet has no options more severe then a stern glare and less severe then a general court martial.

or was he just afraid if he took any formal note of the fact she went awol with the intention of commiting premeditated murder starfleet would take it out of his hands.

 

[Jetboogieman]

I Find it hard to believe starfleet has no options more severe then a stern glare and less severe then a general court martial.

or was he just afraid if he took any formal note of the fact she went awol with the intention of commiting premeditated murder starfleet would take it out of his hands.

Her abandoning her post essentially to go on a mission of revenge on its face, not something a Starfleet Officer should probably be permitted to do.

But given the situation as it was, the fact that the Albino had committed murder and crimes against the Klingon Empire and extreme crimes against individual Klingon Military Officers and that Dax’s former host was intimately involved with the situation, it was a tough call for Sisko and my sense of it was, yes Sisko basically let it go as a friend and somewhat understanding of the reasoning, but did make it clear Jadzia was letting him down by abandoning her post.

At the end of the day, Sisko and Dax have a complex relationship, Sisko gets that Jadzia is a different person, but still can’t help showing her deference as if it was still Curzon and that obviously factored heavily into how he handled the situation.

 

[kkt]

I Find it hard to believe starfleet has no options more severe then a stern glare and less severe then a general court martial.

or was he just afraid if he took any formal note of the fact she went awol with the intention of commiting premeditated murder starfleet would take it out of his hands.

I agree with your second paragraph. If Sisko wrote up a letter of reprimand, some admiral would probably read it and investigate why Dax wasn't court martialed for murder and desertion. Sisko didn't want that, but he knew Dax was taking advantage of him and didn't like that much either.

 

[Tosk]

Technically, the only thing Jadzia was guilty of was going AWOL.
Sisko denied her leave of absence, and she went anyway. He never gave her a direct order beyond that. He invoked her oath to Starfleet, but never took it further than that.

We also don't know what punishment Sisko did or didn't give her. The end-of-episode stern look may be all that happened, or it may be that he took her to task/assigned punishment later on. We have no info one way or the other.

 

[somebuddyX]

"Dammit Old Man, reassociation is going to be created in two years for the episode "Rejoined" but let's seed it here and say if you go on this mission with the three main Klingons from the original series then I'm calling Trill Cops and we'll dump Dax in Ezri five years early. Do I make myself clear?! Dismissed!"

 

[kkt]

Technically, the only thing Jadzia was guilty of was going AWOL.
Sisko denied her leave of absence, and she went anyway. He never gave her a direct order beyond that. He invoked her oath to Starfleet, but never took it further than that.

We also don't know what punishment Sisko did or didn't give her. The end-of-episode stern look may be all that happened, or it may be that he took her to task/assigned punishment later on. We have no info one way or the other.

In the US military justice system, AWOL turns into desertion after 3 days. And she shouldn't need a specific order from her CO not to go murdering people. Klingons might find chasing down the albino who has no threat to anyone anymore to be justice, but Starfleet would not.

 

[at Quark's]

I'm wondering though what would happen, were a US military person (or of any other modern professional military) to go AWOL, and kill a citizen of another country X that the US is allied with, even if in that country X the killing of that individual for his/her specific reasons might have been considered a (somewhat) legal form of revenge. Would the US military just shrug it off and give him/her the general penalty for the AWOL offense (possible increasing it to the penalty for desertion) and nothing more?

 

[XCV330]

I like to think that Starfleet JAG was so backed up with pending cases that by the time they got around to looking at her for disciplinary review she was "dead"

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Technically, the only thing Jadzia was guilty of was going AWOL.
Sisko denied her leave of absence, and she went anyway. He never gave her a direct order beyond that. He invoked her oath to Starfleet, but never took it further than that.

We also don't know what punishment Sisko did or didn't give her. The end-of-episode stern look may be all that happened, or it may be that he took her to task/assigned punishment later on. We have no info one way or the other.

There's also nothing to state that she told him what happened. From his perspective, she asked for leave, he then finds out from Kira what its for, he denies it but she goes AWOL, then she comes back and returns to duty. Now he may have heard that two prominent Klingons died during the mission, though just how specific the reports of the incident might be are unknown. I also doubt he'd press the matter further, from what he knows of Jadzia and Curzon he may be able to piece together what he believes may have happened, as well as her going against his orders, so of course he'd be disappointed in her.

We do know she didn't eat the Albino's heart, after all Worf (her Klingon husband) was worried she wasn't in Sto-Vo-Kor (the entry for which includes eating the heart of one of her enemies and she was said to be "squeamish").

 

[Jetboogieman]

I like to think that Starfleet JAG was so backed up with pending cases that by the time they got around to looking at her for disciplinary review she was "dead"

50% of which are sexual harassment cases against Bashir.

 

[Farscape One]

Nothing major happened on her record because she got promoted to Lt. Cmdr. a year and change later.

(Another thing I always liked about Sisko... when he got promoted, he made sure he wasn't alone. Dax got one, Bashir became a full Lt.)

 

[Finn]

I always wondered if Worf wasn’t told about this. This should have earned her place in Sto'Vo'Kor, before having met Worf.

 

[Tosk]

This should have earned her place in Sto'Vo'Kor, before having met Worf.

It doesn't fulfill either of the conditions that were mentioned. Jadzia didn't eat the heart of one of her enemies (that we know of...it's possible, but seems unlikely given the context), and she didn't die in glorious battle. I'd be willing to bet Jadzia told Worf all about it.

 

[Finn]

I’m aware, but I’m betting lot of the Klingons wouldn’t meet that criteria. Worf bought into the warrior heart BS more than the others IMO.

 

[XCV330]

I’m not cool with them eating Clem Fandango’s son’s heart

 

[Timo]

Interestingly, Albino's so-called crimes were services to the Federation at the time of him committing them. So he killed a few of the Federation arch-enemies? Big deal. Too bad he didn't seek asylum at the nearest UFP embassy back then. I mean, the Federation has some of the finest asylums ever created and all.

But yeah, Sisko is doing a fine dance here, making denial as plausible as humanly possible. I wonder if this would have played any differently had Sisko not personally wanted the Albino dead, too. Picard also went for the stern-look treatment when Worf helpfully murdered an inconvenient Klingon politician... Perhaps using domesticated Klingons or Klingon-analogues this way is actual if unwritten Starfleet policy?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[kkt]

Targeting children for revenge after the conflict is over was not a service to the Federation.

 

[Timo]

...How so? The conflict was hardly "over": TNG "Aquiel" tells us that Klingons were still happily slaughtering Earthlings decade before that series. And Hitler was somebody's child, too. Klingons become warrior monsters at eight; nothing establishes the offspring of our geriatric trio as younger than that when the Albino removed them from the UFP threat list.

Kirk would have agreed that the only good Klingon is one well on his way to Sto-Vo-Kor. The whole deal happened on Kirk's watch. And while the Albino was a possible adversary, Kor, Kang and Koloth definitely were Kirk's foes.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[kkt]

DAX: Eighty years ago, there was a band of depredators, led by an Albino, raiding Klingon colonies. Three Klingon warships were sent to stop him. One of the captains was a close friend of Curzon's. The mission was successful. Most of them were captured. But the Albino escaped. In his last message to the Klingons, he promised to take his revenge on the firstborn of each of the three captains. A few years later, he kept his word. Somehow, he infected three innocent children with a genetic virus that killed them. One of them was my godson.
​

The timeline according to Memory Alpha puts the Albino infecting the children in the mid 2290s, when Kirk is commanding the Enterprise-A, same time or shortly after the Praxis disaster. The Federation wasn't at full war with the Klingon Empire, although there was tension. But regardless, infecting children is not the way the Federation or Klingons make war. The Albino was trying collect treasure, not help the Federation win a war.

 

[Timo]

...We really don't know when the Albino made good his threat. All we have is Dax calling one of the victims a "boy" - but that's how folks address Alexander, too, even when he's a fully mature warrior of eight years.

We also don't know how the UFP would feel about pirates. Most of the "good guy" empires of old (that is, the ones that came on top in the end) were fine with it, and would have rewarded the Albino for what he accomplished. Especially if there was no declared war (although we also don't know if the Klingons believe in such things to begin with).

How Sisko feels about Klingons at the time of the episode is another unknown. He defended the Albino, that is, he opposed murdering him - but he also never suggested trying to bring the Albino to Federation justice, or even to the type of Klingon justice that is not delivered on the spot. The bottom line there being, Sisko made only a half-hearted attempt at best in bringing the Federation viewpoint into this. So he might have been fine with Klingon justice in the end, or disgusted by it, but clearly he wasn't officially obligated to do much about it, which makes him never doing much about it not just a circular argument but actually a point for consistency.

Timo Saloniemi