DanaScu wrote...
Dean_the_Young wrote...
scotchtape622 wrote...
Wait, when did Aria kidnap and torture small children, or turn a unknowing group of scientists into Husks, or sick a pack of Thresher Maws on a group of Marines?
Aria is a criminal, yes, but she is not nearly as bad as Cerberus.
Aria rules through open killing, terror, and intimidation. Cerberus doesn't rule at all, and most people don't even know it exists. Different crimes, but Aria far closer fits the definition of a terrorist (and a tyrant) than TIM or Cerberus.
If you read the emails that Shepard gets in ME2, *everybody* knows about Cerberus, or knows someone who works for/in Cerberus.
The people who know about Cerberus are the people who have a close connection to it (or those connected it). If, say, in ME1 you didn't keep Tombs from killing the Doctor, an official investigation doesn't pull up jack on Cerberus's involvement.
Cerberus is something people can know about if they look hard enough, but it isn't a major issue in the minds of most people. The people who know much of anything about it are the exception... which is pretty much the exact opposite of how terrorist groups work.
If you believe what Cerberus says, then I guess so. After all, after learning that the quarians don't trust Cerberus because they infiltrated the Fleet, killed quarians, and attempted to blow up one of the ships chasing down one of their escaped involuntary experiments, I can't imagine how anyone wouldn't get the warm fuzzies when thinking of Cerberus. Miranda said it wasn't anything personal, and Jacob [who only works for Cerberus as long as they don't do bad things] said they can debate who killed who later. So everything is cool. Personally, I think it great how Cerberus is going to funnel money and support to Horizon after TIM uses it for bait and gets a third or so of the colonists abducted and smoothiefied. [Yes, it could have happened without his intervention, but he actively worked to have it happen, and wouldn't alert the Alliance for back-up for Shepard, but that's another debate.
It's not a matter of trusting Cerberus, and it certainly isn't a matter of warm and fuzzies. It's more about what terrorism is, and is not: anyone can be called a terrorist, but if they don't actually fit the category it's little more than propeganda.
One of the defining aspects of terrorism, and the one most conspicuously absent from Cerberus, is a large, public presence, and the pursuit of policy/public opinion change by terror and threats of violence against a populace. Cerberus really doesn't have a known history of that. The most wide-affecting thing they have done that has effected the general public is the E-zero exposures, which even today are mostly chalked up to industrial accidents, and has no public perception as being an attack (if one classifies it as an attack at all: the harms and complications were a side effect, not the intention, which was more human biotics).
Most of Cerberus's actions have been small scale and hidden, often never known. Assassinations, sabatoge, drugging uppity biotic supremacists with anti-biotic drugs... these were done in secret, and often passed off as natural causes/accidents. Cerberus doesn't (hasn't) stood up in public for the galaxy to see and said 'do this, or we will attack your populaces,' or worked to stir up public fear of them. The public is barely aware they exist, and largely don't know or care if they aren't connected directly or indirectly.
Cerberus isn't a terrorist group in the meaningful definition of terrorism. It's a military-industrial-political cabal: no nicer, but it isn't some heavily weighted buzzword.
I wonder how the body counts compare over the time span of Cerberus and all the "rogue" projects and Aria being in charge of Omega. How many Cerberus projects got results, and therefore TIM had no issues about what the scientists did to get those results? The recordings on Teltin say "if we get results he won't care what we did." I get the feeling that only the projects that didn't pan out or were discovered before Cerberus could destroy the records "went rogue". The mission report for Teltin suggests TIM was rather more pissed that evidence wasn't cleaned up than at the fact atrocities were committed.
To date, Cerberus casualties per project that go bad are measured in the dozens. Aria's showdown with Wrex alone, in which an entire space station was destroyed, was implied to have a lot more collateral.
Cerberus has had, what, two, maybe three known rogue projects? Teltin, Overlord, and Shepard's Lazarus? One of which was always under Shepard's control in the first place?
who knows if Aria tortures her enemies, deals in the slave trade or made deals with the Collectors
Omega is survival of the fittest its not calm
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