Has anyone been claiming that? If so, I must've missed it.
I apologize, I was being unclear. This is essentially a continuation of a debate that's been touched upon in other threads by
kkozoriz1 and I.
Bacco knows about Ross and his part in removing Zife from office. That's why she forced him to resign.
No, it's not. You are mis-remembering
A Time for War, A Time for Peace and
Articles of the Federation.
Bacco knew about the role Ross played in forcing Zife to resign before she even came into office. It was why she allowed him to serve as Starfleet Liaison to the Office of the President -- that whole "keep your enemies closer" thing. If he's nearby, she can keep an eye on him and all that. That exposing his coup would risk triggering a war with the Klingons was also why she didn't act against him for it.
She forced Ross to
retire --
not resign, as she noted that a resignation could be revoked or lead to continued employment in a position of authority, but retirement means he'll be in no position to wield any power or authority -- because journalist Ozla Graniv uncovered the fact that Ross forced Zife out at gunpoint
and believed, erroneously, that Ross killed him. So far as we know, this is what Bacco believes as well. Graniv and Bacco both remain unaware of the role Section 31 played in Zife's assassination.
Again, because in her judgment the costs of a potential war with the Klingons outweighed the benefits of a full investigation and trial, Bacco and Graniv both forced Ross's retirement, with the provisio that he never ever put himself in any position of power or influence again.
She accepts his resignation and sweeps the whole thing under the rug.
That's a decidedly un-charitable interpretation of events. You might as well complain of Captain Picard allowing an admitted murderer to serve as his chief of security aboard the
Enterprise-D -- you're only presenting half the stor and doing so in a deeply unfair manner.
Imagine that happeing a 21st century democracy and tell me that its acceptable. If she doesn`t investigate then she`s guilty of dereliction of duty at the least and of being an accomplice after the fact at worst. Either way, she should be doing something. If the Federation cannot stand the truth of it`s actions then it is a corrupt organization. As my parents told me when I was growing up, if you make a mistake, you stand up and you accept the concequences of your actions.
Meanwhile, in the real world, leaders understand something: Millions of innocent lives depend on situations of
political stability and peace. And political stability is often a much more precarious thing than it is ever given credit for; spending any amount of time studying societies undergoing or which have recently undergone major civil wars, genocides, government repression, or other instances of major conflict will make it abundantly clear that society is often never more than a few irresponsible decisions by political elites away from utter instability and anarchy.
And leaders -- good ones, anyway -- understand that lives depend on avoiding that sort of instability and anarchy. That lives depend on maintaining the peace. That it is fundamentally immoral to risk upsetting stability sometimes when millions of lives are at stake.
Just look over the WikiLeaks trove of U.S. State Department cables, and you'll see why rational political actors tend to favor stability over war.
It's all well and good to talk about what they "ought" to do, but when you're talking about getting millions killed, that's a fundamentally irresponsible thing to do.
Starfleet has known of their existance since at least the time of Archer.
In the time of Archer, Section 31 is a hell of a lot more benign. And bear in mind that we don't know how events will play out in the ENT Relaunch -- it's entirely possible that Archer, Trip, T'Pol, and Reed will come to believe that Section 31 has been disbanded by the time the Federation is founded. We probably shouldn't presume continuous knowledge of the existence of Section 31 outside its ranks from the 22nd Century onwards.
If they can`t at least put a dent into Section 31 in 225 years then how seriously are they taking it?
It's the United Federation of Planets. It's a society that's been so honest and so successful, the overwhelming majority of its citizenry probably literally wouldn't know how to react to real corruption of the sort Section 31 represents and likely wouldn't believe it exists anymore. (Seriously, Federates are
awfully quick to rant about how much more evolved they are than those awful corrupt societies that neighbor them.)
If the roaches are so bad that they`re in your walls then you can strip the walls down the the bare wood and exterminate them from there.
That is, indeed, what the foreshadowing in the
Section 31 miniseries seems to be implying will eventually happen. And I would suggest you would enjoy the framing sequence of
ENT: The Good That Men Do.
The former President of the United Federation of Planets disappears and there isn't a massive society-rocking investigation and years of malaise and conspiracy-theorizing afterward?
Well, up until the Borg Invasion, at least, only one journalist is known to have gone looking for him. That doesn't mean that any others didn't though -- it would be relatively simple for someone to fake Zife's continued existence for the purposes of P.R. Have a hologram of him appear at the opening of the Min Zife Federation Presidential Library or what-have-you. (David Mack posted once on the Psi Phi BBS saying that if he were to re-write anything of his already published, he would re-write
A Time to Heal to make it clear that Section 31 or one of their allies has been making fake Min Zife public appearances. Because I agree that the idea of no one noticing that the former President hasn't been seen since he resigned, I tend to accept that as "canonical" for the purposes of the Destinyverse novels.)
Could you imagine what would happen if Obama resigned tomorrow and disappeared shortly thereafter?
To be fair, Min Zife seems to have become almost universally despised within the Federation by the end of his time in office, so it would actually be more akin to George W. Bush resigning and then never appearing in public again. And given how rarely he's appeared in the media since, I do wonder if anyone would even notice.
Post
Destiny, though, I think we can probably assume that Min Zife's continued disappearance would go unnoticed in the wake of the Borg Invasion and would probably be attributed to that.
