Legislators across party lines have accused National Security Council (NSC) Secretary-General King Pu-tsung (金溥聰) of overreaching his authority and acting like an “underground president” when he visited the National Police Agency (NPA) to sit in on a report on Friday following a visit to the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau on Wednesday.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lo Shu-lei (羅淑蕾) said the legality of King’s visit depended on whether there were precedents and if his rights as secretary-general sanctioned such visits, adding that King was overreaching if such visits were outside of his purview.
KMT Legislator Wang Hui-mei (王惠美) said no harm was done if King wished to get to understand the duties of the bureau, but added that the systemic difference — the NSC is an organ of the Presidential Office, while the Investigation Bureau falls under the Executive Yuan — is not conducive to such visits.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) said King’s actions have confirmed that he is in fact the “underground president.”
The NSC has no administrative powers, and is not directly in charge of the NPA or the Investigation Bureau, he said.
“The NSC secretary-general is simply an advisory unit and no one, not even the Presidential Office secretary-general or former NSC secretaries-general, has such powers,” Chen said, adding that King’s actions may be unconstitutional.
DPP Legislator Tsai Chi-chang (蔡其昌) said King’s actions would only muddle the system.
Meanwhile, senior bureau officials, who declined to be named, said they could not recollect any precedent of the NSC secretary-general and the National Security Bureau (NSB) director inspecting the Investigation Bureau, adding that the visit was not appropriate.
The NSC is not a direct supervising unit of the Investigation Bureau and should not intervene in its handling of intelligence, sources said.
Citing similar incidents where former NSC secretary-general Hu Wei-chen (胡為真) had been criticized for “disrespecting the system” when he attended a news meeting at the Investigation Bureau, sources said King had overreached his authority and broken the chain of command in the nation’s intelligence units.
Presidential Office spokesperson Ma Wei-kuo (馬瑋國) referred reporters to the NSB for response, by quoting the bureau as saying that the visit was in accordance with King’s legal responsibility to “visit units with the same responsibility as intelligence gathering agencies” and receive reports from them.
The visit was an effort to better understand the general status of national security intelligence-gathering and not to intervene in the everyday operations of the agencies, she quoted the bureau as saying.
However, detractors said the National Security Council Organization Act (國家安全會議組織法) stated that the NSC secretary-general was a close adviser to the president in matters of national defense, diplomacy, cross-strait relations and other national affairs, but had no legal justification for intervening in the organizations’ operations.
NSC officials may need to have certain channels through which they receive information pertinent to their jobs, but they should not reach over the line, sources said, citing former secretaries-general Su Chi’s (蘇起) and Jason Yuan’s (袁健生) conduct as examples of passive interaction between the NSC and the Investigation Bureau.
Su visited the Investigation Bureau with President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in 2008, and Yuan has never set foot in the Investigation Bureau, sources said.
Sources said “visit units with the same responsibility as intelligence gathering agencies” referred to government agencies whose jobs touched on affairs of national security, such as the National Immigration Agency.
Sources said King’s actions, from rearranging the personnel assignments in the NSB and the Investigation Bureau to sitting in on their meetings, pointed toward tightened security ahead of the seven-in-one elections at the end of the year.
Additional reporting by Yang Kuo-wen, Lo Tien-pin, Shih Hsiao-kuang, Wang Wen-hsuan and Tseng Wei-chen
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods