Dumbledore's plans in HBP again WAS: Re: Cohesion

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 162303

Sherry now:
> 
> However, he did not tell the students nor their parents that he was
purposely allowing an attempted murderer to roam loose in the school.
 An attempted murderer who was sharing classes, dorm rooms, common
rooms, meals with everyone else.  Realistically, parents would have
and should have been up in arms over that one.  No responsible parent
would have willingly kept their kids in a school under those
circumstances.  I can't imagine molly and Arthur doing so, nor the
Grangers nor anyone but those who supported Draco's mission, if they
knew it.  Of course, this all had to happen for the story, but
objectively, any school headmaster who did such a thing, if he did
know it was happening, could probably be brought up on criminal
charges for it, especially once it went from suspicion to actual
attempts, as with Katie Bell.

Carol responds:

Dumbledore knew that he, not a student, was Draco's intended victim.
He had a man on the staff who could handle just such emergencies as
the cursed necklace--Snape. (Snape would also have handled the
poisoning incident easily, in contrast to slughorn; it was he, both as
a teacher and as the HBP, wh taught Harry about bezoars in the first
place.) And he was watching Draco through Snape, and after Snape
talked to Draco, Draco made no more "amateurish" attempts that could
go astray (it was too late to stop the mead, which Slughorn would
already have bought). As long as Draco confined his efforts to
whatever he was doing in the RoR, no students were in danger except
Draco himself, who would be killed by voldemort or the DEs if he
failed. Dumbledore had every conceivable protection in place--no owls,
no Floo network, no brooms, no Apparition, students checked going in
and out of Hogwarts, the Order in Hogsmeade. Both the students and
their parents knew that these protections were necessary because
Voldemort was back. And yet the parents chose to send their children
there. A few made their children return home after the Katie Bell
incident, but some, such as the Patil twins (or at least Parvati)
talked their children into letting them stay. And Katie's own parents
allowed her to return to the school after some five months in St. Mungo's.

There was danger everywhere in the WW, as the Montgomery sisters found
when their five-year-old brother was killed by Fenrir Greyback and
Hannah Abbott found when her mother was murdered by Death Eaters.
There was no need to warn students and parents against Draco, who was
not after anyone's children. It would only have caused unnecessary
panic and sent them out into a world that was even less safe than
Hogwarts. 

Once the protective measures were in place and the desperation
measures (necklace, mead, etc.) were stopped, the only thing left was
to watch Draco and, after the Sectumsempra incident, keep Harry away
from him, accomplished in part through the Saturday detentions. To do
anything else would be to kill Draco or force his hand or to activate
the UV and kill Snape, the one man at Hogwarts who could keep the Dark
magic at bay.

Carol, who trusts Dumbledore's wisdom and Snape's loyalty despite
Dumbledore's death