Allegations that the National Police Agency (NPA) in January proposed downgrading the national counterterrorism training center has drawn criticism from Democratic Progressive Party lawmakers.
The national counterterrorism training center is housed in an incomplete compound in Taoyuan’s Sinwu District (新屋), with construction of the NT$550 million (US$17.04 million) project having dragged on for 13 years.
According to an anonymous source, on Jan. 13 — just three days before the presidential election — the NPA abruptly filed a request to the Executive Yuan asking for approval to downgrade the training center from a national-level establishment to an agency-level establishment.
By the time the request had been reviewed by the Executive Yuan, the election had taken place, and the Executive Yuan decided it would be prudent to suspend the controversial issue for president-elect Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration to decide after it has taken power on May 20, the source said.
Executive Yuan spokesman Sun Lih-chyun (孫立群) declined to comment on the NPA’s proposal.
Cabinet spokesperson-designate Tung Chen-yuan (童振源) said that the incoming Cabinet did not fully understand the situation and would not comment on it until after its inauguration.
DPP Legislator Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) said the NPA had overstepped its remit by demanding that the training center be downgraded, which would affect other public agencies, including the military.
Citing media reports that the Indonesian government had expressed concern that terrorists might seek to infiltrate Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong, Chen said that the NPA’s proposed downgrade of the center had “put national security in reverse gear.”
DPP Legislator Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) said that President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration had “chronically neglected” the nation’s counterterrorism efforts, and that the Executive Yuan’s Homeland Security Office had been an “empty establishment” that was “criticized by lawmakers” and “underfunded.”
The NPA said that local environmental regulations had made it impossible to build the several training facilities it had proposed, including nuclear, biological and chemical warfare training facilities, and that the Ministry of National Defense had agreed in May last year to build those facilities separately for the military.
The downgrade would not affect the ability of any counterterrorism unit from outside the agency to use the training center, the NPA said.
However, the national training center was conceived to both improve the coordination of the nation’s various counterterrorism units and to enable military exercises with international partners, the source said, adding that these important plans had been thrown into disarray by the NPA’s unilateral actions.
The training center was supposed to have 12 subordinate facilities, each with the capability of designing and holding a wargame aimed at a specific type of terrorist attack, such as nuclear, biological or chemical weapons strikes, an explosive device attack, hostage-taking on planes, ships or cars, or inside a compound, the source said.
The NPA has “bitten off more than it can chew” by taking the responsibility of building all 12 facilities of the center on itself, the source said.
When the NPA realized that it was unable to build all the facilities itself, it at first reduced the number of facilities from 12 to nine, then from nine to seven, until only “anti-violence and anti-hijacking” facilities remained in the center, the source said.
Minister of the Interior Chen Wei-zen (陳威仁) dismissed concerns about the downgrade and insisted that the only difference would be lexical, adding that not all the government’s national-level establishments had the word “nation” in its name, citing Academia Sinica as an example.
Additional reporting by Lo Tien-ping
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