this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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What war crimes did he commit?
S5E13 “For the Uniform: he hunts down that Marquis spy and poisons the atmosphere of Maquis colonies, forcing evacuations. Deliberately targeting civilian habitats to make them uninhabitable is a straight up war crime.
Eh, we do the same to our own planet.
It wasn't portrayed as "bad assed", it's explicitly a retelling of Javert from Les Mis.
Remember, Eddington was using the same tactic on multiple Cardassian worlds and was planning to do it again. It's not presented as "Whoa Sisko is so awesome for doing that!" but more as a moral dilemma, do you poison one planet to save many more from the same fate? Sisko did poison a planet's atmosphere, but he prevented Eddington from poisoning many more. And of course the fact that Sisko was indeed a bit too obsessed with capturing Eddington makes it all a grey area. If it wasn't a so personal, could Sisko have found another way to prevent Eddington from continuing to do the war crimes he was committing?
So it's very reductive (and missing the point of the episode) to call that a "straight up war crime".
He was accessory to assassinating a romulan diplomat to get them into the dominion war.
How could that be a "war crime" if the Federation wasn't at war with the Romulans?
Also he was an accessory after the fact. Garak did the deed, but nobody complains about everyone gushing over him.
You're technically correct that killing Senator Vreenak wasn't a war crime. It was a crime of aggression, and is still one of the four core crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Genocide, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression, and war crimes), so Sisko would still be at the Hague for it.
I don't think courts would see Sisko as an accessory after the fact as he was conspiring to bring the Romulans into the war using false pretenses. Senator Vreenak got killed by one of the conspirators while in commission of the conspiracy. I think this would definitely be an arguable court case.
According to the ICC a crime of aggression is "the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, integrity or independence of another State." What Garak did (again it wasn't Sisko that did it) in no way threatened the sovereignty or independence of the Romulan Empire.
I don't think lying is a war crime. If it were, every politician in the world would be on trial.
A crime (but not a war crime) was committed by Garak. Sisko was an accessory after the fact because he didn't report what Garak did. It's just our culture has gone towards being hyperbolic with the use of terms like "war crime" so it's often repeated that Sisko committed war crimes.
He was active in a conspiracy to draw the Romulan empire into a war, which resulted in the death of a Senator. Sisko engaged Garak into the conspiracy. How do you not see Garak blowing up Vreenak's ship as "the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, integrity or independence of another State". Garak was engaged in the conspiracy by a federation captain. It was the very definition of a crime of aggression. It doesn't matter if Sisko intended the result, he (and the Federation by extension) orchestrated the conspiracy.