Mon, Aug 30, 2004 page8

• Editorial: Henry Lee's weasel words

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  So Henry Lee (李昌鈺) -- sorry, that should be "world- famous forensic scientist" Henry Lee -- has pronounced on the March 19 assassination attempt on the president and vice president. It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry -- before getting angry, that is. On Saturday night we heard the most staggering banalities mixed with the slippery weasel words that we have come to associate with this pillar of the pan-blue establishment on the US east coast.

  The banalities first: Lee says that the police should go after underground arms factories because they might, by studying different methods of tooling and the marks they produce on these illegal products, be able to locate the source of the gun, which might lead them eventually to the shooter.

  Somehow we didn't need a "world-famous forensic scientist" to tell us this; any 12-year-old fan of TV's CSI could have done as well.

  The good doctor goes on to say that the Taiwanese police should have better preserved the crime scene. He apparently doesn't make any suggestion as to how they might have done this, which is a shame because we would like to know. After all, the crime happened during an election procession and was not immediately even detected. The president thought he had been hit by bits of an exploding firecracker, which in Taiwan is pretty much one of the hazards of the job. By the time the crime had actually been discovered, the motorcade had moved from the spot where it occurred and so had the crowd which had come to see Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) -- trampling over any evidence, probably destroying much of it. Short of clairvoyance, it is hard to see how much better the police could have done.

  When Lee was in Taiwan at the beginning of April, this newspaper took him to task over his remarks to the effect that the shooting was not an assassination attempt against Chen because an assassin would have used a different weapon and aimed at a more vulnerable part of the body, such as the head. At the time we called this utter rubbish. And yet Lee is still peddling the same nonsense. In New York on Saturday he said -- according to The Associated Press -- "this was not a political assassination because [an assassin] would have used a more powerful weapon" than a homemade handgun.

  We are appalled that someone brought in to clarify the circumstances surrounding the shooting can so muddy the waters. We are shocked that this "world-famous forensic scientist" seems to lack the most elementary forensic skills about his own logic and grammar.

  An assassination is, according to the dictionary, the sudden or secretive killing of a politically prominent person. So what Lee seems to be saying is that the shooting was not intended to kill Chen. And the pan-blues think they are justified in claiming that it was a stunt to win the election. What we think Lee means is that it was not a professional assassination attempt, ie, Chen was not the victim of a professional hit man (and let us add here that we also worked this out for ourselves by the evening of the day of the shooting).

  Which interpretation of Lee is the right one? We hope to be able to find out, because a lot hangs by this -- and not only in regard to the shooting. Lee appears to be equivocating, putting what he knows in such a way as to deliberately not clear up the mystery. Given his well-known pan-blue affiliations, this does no favors for the good doctor's credibility. If we are to believe in Lee he needs to stop using weasel words and tell us exactly what he means.
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