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Pan-blues' ineptness on shooting is pathetic

The pan-blue post-election effort to reverse the voters' decision has stumbled badly over the issue of the attack on President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Vice-President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮), but much of the Taiwanese media has missed it.

Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) tried to raise doubts in the public's mind about the integrity of the investigation into the March 19 shootings in Tainan by demanding that outside experts examine the evidence and monitor the investigation itself. They recommended the well-respected criminologist Henry Lee of the Connecticut State Police crime lab.

Lee dispatched three experts to visit the crime scene, review the evidence, interview witnesses and check out the Criminal Investigations Bureau and Tainan prosecutors' investigative efforts.

The team did all that and more, even obtaining permission to examine Chen's wound.

Their conclusion: Chen and Lu indeed appear to have been shot on March 19, and at the time that cameras and witnesses suggest they were shot. One of the experts, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Coroner Cyril Wecht -- who was highly critical of the controversial Warren Commission investigation of the 1963 assassination of former US president John Kennedy -- said: "Everything is completely consistent -- no discrepancies, nothing strange." He said that the president's wound "is completely consistent with a gunshot wound," and added that the investigation of the incident was being conducted in a "completely open way -- not the way it was done in 1963 in America."

If that is the case, and given who invited Wecht and his colleagues into this investigation in the first place (a point not mentioned in most media reports), one has to wonder at Lien and Soong's further demands. Why the need for another "independent" investigation of the shootings if the current investigation is being done openly and handled well according to their own experts?

Meanwhile, if the investigation so far suggests that the shooting was a genuine attack on the president and vice president, how on earth can the pan-blue team claim, as they are now doing, that the decision to put the military and police around the country on alert was simply a political scheme to keep soldiers and cops from voting? I would argue that had the government not put the military and police on some kind of higher alert status following the attack, it would have been at best derelict, and at worst, open to the suspicion that somebody knew the shootings were bogus.

I can state with some confidence that if the president and vice president of the US were shot and wounded at the same time, and if the perpetrators were not immediately caught, the US would be on a high state of alert. (Why do people think US Vice President Dick Cheney has spent most of his time since Sept. 11 in hiding?)

Certainly there are questions that should be answered: Who came up with the foolish idea of having Chen and Lu repeatedly appear in public together? And who could have come up with the equally foolish idea of having them ride down crowded streets in an open jeep?

But at this point, continuing to charge that the shootings may have been staged, as the pan-blue leaders are doing, is nothing but dangerous demagoguery.

A recount in such a close election, carefully monitored and openly done under court supervision, makes absolute sense.

As for the rest of the pan-blue demands, charges and insinuations, they should be seen clearly for what they are -- the desperate ploy of people who have lost but won't admit it.

Dave Lindorff is a Fulbright Senior Scholar in residence at National Sun Yat-sen University.
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