So we know right off the bat that Uhura is recording this hearing for the official record. Kirk & co. are in their dress uniforms, and they're going all out with the pomp and circumstance. And McCoy confirms that Kirk is acting within his authority as a starship Captain.
...All appropriate in the presence of a Prince of Millions. I bet they had a good laugh after the transporter stopped whining.
The thing is, Kirk carefully and officially dictated a number of logs that clearly never reached Starfleet. These official recordings need not be any different. If nothing else, Kirk is entitled to second thoughts, as from the log examples we know that his records often (always?) get sent out at a significant delay.
(Although personally I think the likeliest scenario here is that Kirk was a typical example of Starfleet thinking, and quietly discussed Khan with his like-minded superiors, who agreed to bury the knowledge in insignificant footnotes so that their hero could live the rest of his tormented life in peace. Too bad that Terrell was not the type to read the footnotes.)
The planetary debris of Celta Alpha VI would've certainly created a navigational hazard for Reliant, passing through the system, towards their destination planet. And what that implies is that the system is already known to be unstable. Planets may not find themselves routinely being torn apart by collisions, but Asteroids of Unusual Size are common as are Colossal Comets. Such stark conditions would also significantly lower expectations of Khan's survival on Ceti Alpha V, in the first place.
The thing here is, nothing is unexpected in outer space in Trek. None of the above would be remarkable, and none would pose a danger to a mighty starship - a vessel that by definition can ignore orbital parameters and fly beelines or figure-eights as she pleases.
Makes more sense to me to put the warning beacon close to the planet, like in orbit.
We know how they do it in TNG. At the conclusion of "Identity Crisis", Picard orders warning beacons to be placed "in orbit and on the surface", for a hazard that is confined to the surface and has no ability reach up even to low orbit.
Different situations would warrant different warning schemes, though. For Talosians, beacons several lightyears away might not be far enough, as their powers apparently reached all the way from Talos to Starbase 11, two locations that had little plot justification for being even in neighboring systems, let alone closer. And Khan could not be provided with surface beacons because those would quickly be turned into transmitters that Khan would use for evil.
As noted above, we have at least 2 confirmed deaths from Khan in WOK. Spock no doubt thought his own sacrificial death was a "great cost." Most here thought so. Maybe you didn't. Actually, more than 2 confirmed deaths. We know for a fact everyone on Regula 1 except for those who beamed down to the Genesis cave were murdered. On screen dialog verifies this.
It hinges on what is "cost" to Spock. NOMAD was stopped at the great cost of hundreds of millions of lives, in one interpretation. In another, those hundreds of millions had nothing whatsoever to do with the stopping, and only Kirk's redshirt deaths should count.
The Regula scientists did no stopping. The
Reliant crew, whether alive or dead, did their fair share of failing to stop, but they weren't Spock's people, or the
Enterprise's. That Khan was a menace is undeniable, and that he had a body count is clear. But Spock Prime is making the mistake of equating personal with important: if Khan killed him, that doesn't yet make the superman an exceptionally big threat objectively speaking.
Basically, we can assume that Prime is lying. He's good at it, after all. He knows that falsely painting Khan as a bogeyman will have the desired effect on his younger self's actions, while a calmly logical analysis would leave Junior ill equipped to cope - Vulcans have difficulty grasping the possibility of defeat, as shown many times.
Alternately, we can assume that Prime is more knowledgeable than the audience. After the first encounter with Khan, Spock could have done some digging and realized that the human view of the 1990s was badly biased; Alex Marcus could be factually correct, having come up with the knowledge through personal involvement and a suitably perverse mindset, but the rest of mankind would be blind.
We also have to remember that mankind in the 24th century is more paranoid than ever about the Augments. Perhaps the 2260s were a time of odd revival where every Nazi was a Rommel and every Augment was a Khan, and nobody wanted to consider that Rommel was a swine (if not a Nazi) and Khan was a monster (if not a particularly bad 20th century tyrant)?
Ah, you got me there. However, those crimes against humanity weren't considered worth prosecuting until the 2nd Gulf War. Had the same opportunity to arrest him in the 1st Gulf War. Nobody was interested in prosecuting him until the government was completely overthrown. Instead, everyone is still more interested in blaming Bush for waging a war of aggression on trumped-up motivations for the invasion.
...Indeed, history is full of "courts" that have sentenced US Presidents in various ways for war crimes or worse. It
would take an invasion of US mainland for the sentences to carry weight.
Timo Saloniemi
