A local newspaper’s reports alleging that the US had asked Taiwan to develop biological warfare agents could be linked to a Beijing disinformation campaign, top local officials said yesterday, while the US Department of State said there was “no truth” to the reports.
The claim that Taipei is building a biosafety level 4 lab with the aim of producing biological weapons has been repeated by the United Daily News in a series of stories beginning on Sunday.
To back up its claims, the paper published a purported summary of a secret Executive Yuan meeting titled the “Nanhai Work Conference” held on June 23 last year.
Photo: CNA
It said the summary was obtained from an anonymous source.
The Taipei Times was unable to independently verify the document’s authenticity.
Presidential Office spokeswoman Lin Yu-chan (林聿禪) told a routine news conference in Taipei that the reports were false.
The document was written in a format different from what the Executive Yuan uses, and the Chinese-language terms and usage suggests it originated from China, Lin said.
Beijing in the past two years has repeatedly made use of fake official documents to accuse other countries of developing biological warfare agents, which should cast doubt on the accuracy of the reports, Lin said.
Taiwan is a democratic society that respects freedom of the press, but it does not tolerate disinformation, she said, adding that the reports harm Taiwan’s national interests and appeared to have been written to undermine regional stability.
Lin urged the newspaper to honor its social responsibility and retract the stories.
The Ministry of National Defense in a statement yesterday again denied the reports, saying the document included a reference to “tan ke” (坦克), a Chinese-language translation for “tank” not used in official Taiwanese correspondence.
The document also mentioned “the headquarters of each army,” which is not language the defense ministry would have used in that situation, it said.
The meeting minutes were a mismatched collection of statements showing little logical connection to one another, and the syntax bears resemblance to known instances of disinformation from Beijing, it said.
The Executive Yuan said separately that the document’s reference to “our party” would never have been used in the records of a Cabinet meeting, and that the phrasing suggests the document’s creators do not understand “separation of party and state.”
The alleged secret meeting could not have taken place as the Executive Yuan was holding its 3,808th general meeting that day, which then-premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) presided over, Cabinet spokesperson Lin Tze-luen (林子倫) said.
The supposed summary was missing almost all of the information that would have been included in this type of record kept by the Cabinet, including the meeting’s date, time and location, the names of the officials present, an itemized agenda and a record of the discussion, he said.
Examples of correctly written summaries of Executive Yuan meetings can be accessed on the official Web sites of government agencies, including the National Police Agency and Gender Equality Committee, Lin Tze-luen said.
The reports are to be listed in the Executive Yuan’s newsletter as a textbook example of disinformation, he added.
The state department on Tuesday told the Central News Agency that it denies the report.
“There is no truth to this report,” a department spokesperson was quoted as saying. “The United States is in full compliance with its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention and does not develop or possess such weapons anywhere — nor do we support anyone else to do so.”
A post on the department’s Web site says that the convention is “critical to international efforts to address the threat posed by biological weapons... To remain effective, it must deal with all biological threats we face in the 21st century.”
Additional reporting by CNA
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