The National Security Bureau (NSB) said yesterday that, although it did not provide President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) with the information that People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) had met the director of China's Taiwan Affairs Office in the US in February, the information seems to be correct.
Opposition legislators yesterday peppered NSB Director-General Hsueh Shih-ming (
"The NSB did not provide this information to the president, and I do not know who did, but I believe the president received accurate information from other sources," Hsueh said.
He said that the president has more sources of information than just the formal intelligence bureau, and that a friend or other government bureau may have provided the news.
Hsueh said that the bureau is unable to uncover all the activities in which Chinese officials or Taiwanese politicians engage abroad, especially if those activities took place under tight security.
Legislators from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and PFP criticized the president's claim that Soong and Chen Yunlin's meeting had seriously damaged Soong and the PFP's reputation.
They also accused Chen Shui-bian of trying to cast the opposition leaders' visits to China in a bad light to appease his pro-independence supporters.
"Are you saying the country has another secret intelligence bureau or task force providing the president with information?" PFP Legislator Lin Yu-fang (
"I don't think so," Hsueh replied.
Lin asked whether the president had checked the veracity of the information with the NSB before he made the claim on television. Hsueh said no.
"So the president did not believe and trust the bureau," Lin said.
The legislators asked the bureau to complete an investigation in two weeks on whether Soong did in fact meet Chen Yunlin in the US, and open the results of the investigation to the public.
In an interview with SET TV cable news on Sunday, the president said the two met in the US and that Chen Yunlin applied pressure on the US government, including the State Department, to get the two pan-blue leaders to vote against a constitutional amendment after the National Assembly elections.
Chen Shui-bian also claimed that Chen Yunlin had told Washington that Taiwan's National Assembly election would promote the constitutional incorporation of referendums to pave the way for de jure independence.
Soong has denied meeting Chen Yunlin in the US.
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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