Minister of National Defense Lee Jye (李傑) and Political Warfare Department Director-General Chen Pan-chih (陳邦治) told a hearing at the Taiwan High Court yesterday that they did not take any special security measures on March 19 in response to the assassination attempt on the president and vice president.
The hearing is part of a case brought by the pan-blue camp requesting that President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Vice President Annette Lu's (呂秀蓮) re-election be suspended.
PHOTO: YEH CHIH-MING, TAIPEI TIMES.
Taiwan High Court Judge Wu Ching-yuan (吳景源) presided over the hearing, which focused on whether the president had ordered the ministry to suspend all regular days off for military personnel for the launch of the so-called "national security mechanism" -- which might have prevented thousands of service members from voting.
Both Lee and Chen Pan-chih said that they had not taken any unusual security measures in response to the shooting. Chen Pan-chih even said that he did not know that the national security mechanism has been launched until he watched TV news later that day.
"The president never gave me any order to carry out any stricter security measures. All military personnel followed their regular rosters to carry out their daily duties," said Lee, who was chief of the general staff at the time.
In addition to endorsing Lee's testimony as well as that of former defense minister Tang Yao-ming (湯曜明), Chen Pan-chih said he had encouraged his fellow soldiers to make good use of a hotline to complain if their superior officers abused them for any reason.
"We never received any calls complaining of being grounded," Chen Pan-chih told the court.
The hearing began at 9am but less than an hour later Wu cleared the courtroom of observers and made it a close-door hearing because most of Lee and Chen Pan-chih's testimony concerned national security. The hearing ended around noon.
According to the court, former chief guard General Chen Tsai-fu (陳再福) will be summoned on Sept. 14 for questioning. That could be the final hearing in the case before a verdict is delivered later this month.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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