I don't really have much to say about this episode. Obviously any secret agency that acts without proper and open civil oversight needs to be shuttered, not that I'm against secret agencies in principle just they need to have the strongest possible ethics and hold themselves to the highest moral standard as well as having strong oversight in order to prevent them going off the deep end and acting unilaterally on whatever they determine the greater good to be. There is nothing S31 does that more visible Starfleet Intelligence is not already doing on the surveillance and counter-espionage front. I'm also pretty certain that threat of genocide is probably not an above board tool in any war. Apart from anything else, one of the reasons the Dominion is so evil is because they use bioweapons like the Blight and routinely conduct genocide as part of their own wars. If our heroes do the same, are they really heroes and do they deserve to win (hint: no and no).
Also Bashir's superhuman ability to wake himself from mindscape traps was set up in S1's Move Along Home where he tried to scream himself out of it (and indicated he had done so before) but was foiled by that episode merely being a nightmarish existence for the viewer not the characters.
