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What next after To End in Fire

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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Peter2   » Thu Mar 16, 2023 6:11 pm

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The higher-level Alignment agents contain in their heads a mechanism that will kill them if they are challenged as Alignment agents. Is this suicide, or is it murder?

One aspect of the answer to this will depend on the laws of the State in which they happen to be and how those laws are interpreted – legal precedents and so on – and I don't know anything about either of those topics on the planets and in the countries of the Honorverse. I'm not sure any of us do, at least not in the detail required.

Another aspect is that it could be argued that the presence of this trigger is akin to being held at the point of a gun, and if it operates, that may well be considered murder. It's not as though the agent has any choice about the matter. It's not like swallowing a cyanide pill, where the agent has to choose to do it. Also, whereas the agent may have originally assented to having this mechanism implanted in full knowledge of what will happen if it's triggered, there is no certainty that he/she will still be feeling the same way when push comes to shove and the thing goes off. I leave aside the case where the mechanism is installed without the agent's knowledge &/or permission, although the Alignment's behaviour in other circumstances make this a distinct possibility.

Under those circumstances, I think it could be argued that Beowulf, or some other State, may consider itself morally (and possibly legally) obliged to attempt to remove the mechanism – or at least justified in trying to do so. I know this is lawyering, but at a push, lawyering is a valid system of argument.

A further aspect is that these people are agents of a hostile and actively inimical power. The GA is at war with the Alignment, and in wars spies are interrogated and then executed with very little ceremony. How much of a stretch beyond that is it to render them interrogatable? With the proviso that we would all (I most sincerely hope!) draw the line well short of torture.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by phillies   » Thu Mar 16, 2023 8:58 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Loren Pechtel wrote:Why would Beowulf not want to defuse suicide protocols?


I think that's the wrong question to ask. The one I think they would ask is "why should Beowulf operate on a patient against their wishes?" There's a greater than 90% chance of causing death or permanent damage to the subject.

If there were a non-invasive operation that could be attempted with a much greater chance of success, it would probably pass muster.

They could claim that those were spies (they are). In a time of war, spies can be shot out of hand and do not get the protections of Prisoner of War under the Deneb Convention, because they are not wearing uniforms and identifying themselves as legal combatants. But an execution is not the same as operating medically and possibly leaving a maimed person behind. The Deneb Convention probably has provisions against torture even of spies, and one could make a case that this applies.

This is of course a grey area. But what I am claiming is that the GA are The Good Guys with capital G, therefore they will steer clear of crossing that line. The closest we've seen the Good Protagonists to it is when Theisman shot OSJ in a military coup.


The victim of the protocol cannot give assent to the procedure, because doing so would trigger it. It's essentially the same as being unconscious.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat Mar 18, 2023 12:25 am

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phillies wrote:The operation is to preserve life, hence lawful. Undoubtedly the GA will 'request' extradition warrants for suspected alignment spies, with the promise that they will be returned to Mesa for trial or given political asylum.


That's splitting hairs and I believe the Beowulfers would err on the side of caution.

It's preserving life after an action that intentionally endangered it, plus it's against the express wishes of the patient. If the patient had a Do Not Resuscitate form in their record, the physicians would be compelled to honour that request and not resuscitate -- i.e., let the patient die. How is this different?
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sat Mar 18, 2023 2:03 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
phillies wrote:The operation is to preserve life, hence lawful. Undoubtedly the GA will 'request' extradition warrants for suspected alignment spies, with the promise that they will be returned to Mesa for trial or given political asylum.


That's splitting hairs and I believe the Beowulfers would err on the side of caution.

It's preserving life after an action that intentionally endangered it, plus it's against the express wishes of the patient. If the patient had a Do Not Resuscitate form in their record, the physicians would be compelled to honour that request and not resuscitate -- i.e., let the patient die. How is this different?

This is also splitting hairs -- but it's not clear that all the folks with suicide nanos consented to them (or even knew about them). An DNR you know the patient (or maybe their medical power of attorney) consented to. But with the nanos there's no way to confirm consent because asking will kill them.

I guess you could always de-nano them and then afterwards tell them what you did and offer them a cyanide pill to take if they object <j/k>
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Brigade XO   » Sat Mar 18, 2023 9:46 am

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How many people who have been subjected to the murder/suicide nano even know it's existence? How many are Alignment operatives -knowingly- and how many are non-alignment individuals who have no idea who they are passing information too?

The Alignment, effectively, doesn't care what happens to these people if they are compromised. That would be any kind of compromise that MIGHT alow them to disclose something that MIGHT lead to some sort of damage to Alignment plans. These are disposable tools. Fire and forget weapons if you will, that are deployed with an auto-destruct system that is a fail-safe for the Alignment. Remember the version of the nano that will activate if too much time elapses since the subject's last update... like the Alignment security guy that discovered Jack McBride's contact with Manticore/Have and died in the tower under siege because it was too long before he could come in for a "regular" debrief and so missed whatever non-invasive reset he should have gotten?

Is it murder (or manslaughter) to set off an enemy agent's auto-suicide device (known or unknown implant to the individual) in time of war? Or is it enemy action? Heck, it could also be hooked up to some chemical release that will kill people in the room of the compromised enemy agent? Like the perfume salesman with "gifts" to Barry on Torch.

Great legal discussion (when we are applying various present day Earth alternatives) into the far future with so many interesting legal systems (including Beowulf). And then there is the Alignment which is- at best- amoral and at what appears to be normal is treating almost anybody as expendable ammunition.

All those people -we are told about both with Manticore and Earth- who "just die" in the preliminary conversation that trips their kill-nano? The Alignment's response that we are told about is.......All sorts of conduits and sources of info have vanished, it is going to be difficult to replace them..... great people, the Alignment.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat Mar 18, 2023 12:58 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:This is also splitting hairs -- but it's not clear that all the folks with suicide nanos consented to them (or even knew about them). An DNR you know the patient (or maybe their medical power of attorney) consented to. But with the nanos there's no way to confirm consent because asking will kill them.

I guess you could always de-nano them and then afterwards tell them what you did and offer them a cyanide pill to take if they object <j/k>


Ah, that's a good one: most infected people have not consented to having suicide nanos and many (though not all) would probably ask for and welcome a procedure to remove them. So the Beowulf physicians could very much perfect the operation with those people, with the patients' knowledge that the operation itself is dangerous and could trigger said nanites. This would be an informed decision and something I believe would be on the right side of the Code of Ethics.

The problem is operating on spies and Inner Onion members, as was suggested, who know they have nanites and want to suicide to keep their mission's OpSec. Those people often have control over their nanites, as we've seen many of them suicide on demand. They would not ask for a Beowulf physician to remove their nanites and therefore this operation would be against their will -- i asked.

You cannot subject any opponent, whether legal combatant or not, to torture and unusual punishment. This is my argument: operating on spies without their consent and possibly causing death-by-nanites might be just that violation. The question to that, though, is what happens if Beowulf has already perfected the art to a 99% success rate?
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat Mar 18, 2023 1:09 pm

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Brigade XO wrote:Is it murder (or manslaughter) to set off an enemy agent's auto-suicide device (known or unknown implant to the individual) in time of war? Or is it enemy action? Heck, it could also be hooked up to some chemical release that will kill people in the room of the compromised enemy agent? Like the perfume salesman with "gifts" to Barry on Torch.


There's a big difference between activating a suicide device to protect other lives in immediate danger or during combat, versus activating it on a captured combatant with no danger to other lives. Whether this big difference is enough of a difference we can discuss, and my opinion is that it is.

Wrinkle in the discussion you've thrown in: what happens if you know that your captured prisoner will die anyway after some time has elapsed? The difference between a 100% certainty of death if not operated and a 20% success rate if operated might be enough to convince the physicians.

Great legal discussion (when we are applying various present day Earth alternatives) into the far future with so many interesting legal systems (including Beowulf). And then there is the Alignment which is- at best- amoral and at what appears to be normal is treating almost anybody as expendable ammunition.


I can just see them adjusting the tactics to force the physicians' hand, like making the suicide nanos also explode and cause death to by-standers (including the physicians), but also tempting them with having people arbitrarily or randomly not have timeouts.

BTW, we do know in the case of Jessica-Milliken-who-isn't-dead-yet that real combatants don't have suicide implants. Sure, she didn't know much and the Deneb Convention also protects her right not to divulge anything she doesn't want to. And she may have been a legal combatant because the Kingdom of Torch had declared war on Manpower and thus Mesa, the fact that she was caught attempting an Eridani Violation notwithstanding. In fact, her presence and that of her CO was for the purpose of that specific legal fiction.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Brigade XO   » Sat Mar 18, 2023 4:28 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
I can just see them adjusting the tactics to force the physicians' hand, like making the suicide nanos also explode and cause death to by-standers (including the physicians), but also tempting them with having people arbitrarily or randomly not have timeouts.

BTW, we do know in the case of Jessica-Milliken-who-isn't-dead-yet that real combatants don't have suicide implants. Sure, she didn't know much and the Deneb Convention also protects her right not to divulge anything she doesn't want to. And she may have been a legal combatant because the Kingdom of Torch had declared war on Manpower and thus Mesa, the fact that she was caught attempting an Eridani Violation notwithstanding. In fact, her presence and that of her CO was for the purpose of that specific legal fiction.



Not sure the suicide implants can cause a part of the human body to explode etc with the additional effect of damaging people near by (like surgeon). IF the Alignment were to put some physical device inside the person, that would show up on scans and probably end up causing an invasive search which would set off such a device.

I would question the rationale of approaching possibly (or not approaching) of Alignment suicide nano implanted people solely on the basis of removing the nanites against their will. Asking them would trigger the nanites. Questioning them along any of a massive number of threads will activate the nanites when whatever the "kill" criteria are met. The basic problem is if this is (even as a secondary objective) a ploy by the Alignment to use the various medical codes and legal systems to shield their moles or direct agents from exposure.

That would be something along the lines of " You---the GA etc- KNEW that our agents and operatiative or cats paws have lethal anti-interrogation inserted into them and that almost any question that gets close to what they are doing or what and for whom is going to kill them....so you can't interrogate ANY suspect but MUST leave them in place or be murderers for triggering the nanites." Sure, that is about what I would expect from the Alignment. On the other hand, the The Alignment has not (Yet) notified anybody that this is an anti-interrogation device and the fact -when it finally intrudes on the Alignment that the GA and others have discovered this is being done.

This is like crying Cocodile Tears......oh, you bad people, you killed these people because we rigged them up such that if anything came close to exposing anything about us they would die by what we hoped would be considered natural causes. Yet this is exactly what they have done to bury the knowledge of their existence and eliminate traces back to them.
Meanwhile you have to cease searching for any of our agents or we will charge you with murder....humm, the Alignment wouldn't come out of the woodwork to do that so they would have to sponsor some "cough" social active "caugh" branch of the legal systems (of ever so many planetary systems and the remnants of the SL) to bring such a suit against various governments while ignoring the "fact" that these are walking dead people who WILL die if exposed in the course of committing civil crimes (like commercial espionage) or actual espionage while acting as "foreign agents" for a party that is intent on the destruction of (fill in all the blanks you want) almost every sovereign political system in the galaxy.

Like: you are not allowed to try and stop us killing you or destroying everything you believe in because that would be unfair of us!
A bit much but what have we seen going on in things much closer to our time. Very BIG SIGH :)
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Brigade XO   » Sat Mar 18, 2023 4:28 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
I can just see them adjusting the tactics to force the physicians' hand, like making the suicide nanos also explode and cause death to by-standers (including the physicians), but also tempting them with having people arbitrarily or randomly not have timeouts.

BTW, we do know in the case of Jessica-Milliken-who-isn't-dead-yet that real combatants don't have suicide implants. Sure, she didn't know much and the Deneb Convention also protects her right not to divulge anything she doesn't want to. And she may have been a legal combatant because the Kingdom of Torch had declared war on Manpower and thus Mesa, the fact that she was caught attempting an Eridani Violation notwithstanding. In fact, her presence and that of her CO was for the purpose of that specific legal fiction.



Not sure the suicide implants can cause a part of the human body to explode etc with the additional effect of damaging people near by (like surgeon). IF the Alignment were to put some physical device inside the person, that would show up on scans and probably end up causing an invasive search which would set off such a device.

I would question the rationale of approaching possibly (or not approaching) of Alignment suicide nano implanted people solely on the basis of removing the nanites against their will. Asking them would trigger the nanites. Questioning them along any of a massive number of threads will activate the nanites when whatever the "kill" criteria are met. The basic problem is if this is (even as a secondary objective) a ploy by the Alignment to use the various medical codes and legal systems to shield their moles or direct agents from exposure.

That would be something along the lines of " You---the GA etc- KNEW that our agents and operatiative or cats paws have lethal anti-interrogation inserted into them and that almost any question that gets close to what they are doing or what and for whom is going to kill them....so you can't interrogate ANY suspect but MUST leave them in place or be murderers for triggering the nanites." Sure, that is about what I would expect from the Alignment. On the other hand, the The Alignment has not (Yet) notified anybody that this is an anti-interrogation device and the fact -when it finally intrudes on the Alignment that the GA and others have discovered this is being done.

This is like crying Cocodile Tears......oh, you bad people, you killed these people because we rigged them up such that if anything came close to exposing anything about us they would die by what we hoped would be considered natural causes. Yet this is exactly what they have done to bury the knowledge of their existence and eliminate traces back to them.
Meanwhile you have to cease searching for any of our agents or we will charge you with murder....humm, the Alignment wouldn't come out of the woodwork to do that so they would have to sponsor some "cough" social active "caugh" branch of the legal systems (of ever so many planetary systems and the remnants of the SL) to bring such a suit against various governments while ignoring the "fact" that these are walking dead people who WILL die if exposed in the course of committing civil crimes (like commercial espionage) or actual espionage while acting as "foreign agents" for a party that is intent on the destruction of (fill in all the blanks you want) almost every sovereign political system in the galaxy.

Like: you are not allowed to try and stop us killing you or destroying everything you believe in because that would be unfair of us!
A bit much but what have we seen going on in things much closer to our time. Very BIG SIGH :)
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by markusschaber   » Sun Mar 19, 2023 11:07 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
phillies wrote:The operation is to preserve life, hence lawful. Undoubtedly the GA will 'request' extradition warrants for suspected alignment spies, with the promise that they will be returned to Mesa for trial or given political asylum.


That's splitting hairs and I believe the Beowulfers would err on the side of caution.


If the Beowulfers refuse (and at least the BSC and other more radical elements might well play along), maybe the "Engagement" on Mesa would help? They never felt bound to the strict Beowulf codex, but are still clear opposing the old mesan gouvernment as well as the MAlignment. They also have lots of medical experts in their rows.
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