file.Taiwanese President Chen Shui-Bian and Vice President Annette Lu were reported to be shot on March 19, 2004, one day before the presidential election. The event changed the dynamics of the campaign, propelling Chen to victory by a margin of 0.2%.
There was a series of violations of the standard security protocols before and after the shooting, and crime scene was not secured. CNN reported on March 23 that
``No arrests have been made, no weapons found and no suspect identified,1..., leading to accusations about political interference in the investigation.''That report remains an accurate description.
Speculations, misconceptions and half-hearted investigations have only obscured the truth. A well-reasoned scientific approach, based on repeatable experiments, should afford a solid footing for objective judgment. The present article is an attempt in this direction. It is based on the following principle of terminal ballistics, which is a consequence of Newton's laws.
With the target and projectile fixed, the damage inflicted on the target depends only on the location of impact, the orientation of the projectile at impact, and the instantaneous velocity vector of the center of mass of the projectile at impact. Moreover, the damage depends continuously on the impact parameters above. So small variations of the impact parameters will produce the same damage pattern.2
By matching the impact parameters (velocity and orientation) with the resulting damage patterns, the range of all possible physical parameters in the March 19 shooting of President Chen can be determined by an impact experiment. That is, of course, assuming that the damage to Chen and his clothing was caused by the lead bullet recovered in his garments. Moreover, once the physical parameters are determined, the damage patterns can be routinely reproduced. In other words, the damage patterns caused by the lead bullet in the March 19 incident determine the range of possible impact parameters; conversely, the impact parameters determine the resulting damage pattern. One does not need to know the location of the shooter, the type of firearm and cartridge used, or the identity and marksmanship of the shooter. These information are important for apprehending the culprit, but unnecessary for determining the impact parameters.
The basic principle of impact science discussed above also offers a test on the validity of the government-certified evidence in the March 19 incident:
There must exist a certain range of impact parameters that will produce the damage patterns in the evidence.In other words,
The totality of the damage patterns must be reconstructible by a single shot, with a lead bullet identical to the one recovered in President Chen's clothing.
A series of experiments to determine whether the damage patterns in the official evidence can be reconstructed was conducted by a group of scientist, led by Dr. Y.3Five damage patterns in the official evidence are identified. None of the five damage patterns can be reconstructed individually, much less simultaneously. These results provide a compelling argument that the March 19 incident did not happen as purported.
The goal of this article is to provide a coherent presentation of the qualitative results4obtained by Dr. Y's group, together with the relevant scientific background. A scientific question is addressed in this article, and science is the final arbiter on the validity of our conclusions. We invite the Taiwanese government to prove us wrong, by reconstructing the features (A)-(E) in the damage patterns of the March 19 incident listed in the Introduction, in rigorous scientific experiments. We also call on President Dr. Yuan T. Lee of Academia Sinica, Nobel laureate and the epitome of the Taiwanese scientific community, to commission independent international groups of impact scientists and ballistic experts to conduct parallel damage reconstruction experiments. That would be an important milestone in the march of the truth.
file.A. The following features among the damage patterns in the March 19 incident violate the laws of nature; none can be reproduced individually in a laboratory setting.
B. If there does not exist a range of impact parameters that will produce the totality of the features (1)-(5) above in one shot, then the March 19 incident did not happen as purported.
C. The CIB and the Lee Committee chose to exclude crucial evidence and information that would change the direction of the investigation. Most importantly, they concluded that the damage patterns in the March 19 could be reproduced with neither scientific documentation nor statistically meaningful data.
The Taiwanese High Court ruled for the defense in two post-election litigations brought by the challengers in the 2004 presidential election. The two rulings, in November and December of 2004, effectively ended the legal challenge of the result the 2004 presidential election.
Cynics have long viewed the legal challenge doomed from the beginning, and all scientific investigation of the March 19 shooting as either futile or whitewashing. They say that the March 19 incident has been thoroughly politicized, and the science of terminal ballistics is not socially or politically relevant, for the following reasons.
The integrity of the Lee Committee has to be questioned, because its flawed report obscured the truth. The Committee excluded the presence of melted fibers from its report, and chose not to address the issue of burn injury. The Lee Committee might plausibly claim that the presence of burn marks was not presented to them by the CIB, therefore it was not part of its charge. However the presence of melted fiber was in the CIB Forensic Report dated August, 2004. Pleading oversight will be disingenuous. Most importantly, it made the sweeping conclusion that ``a 8mm home made bullet fired from home made barrel will be able to produce similar graze wound as observed on the abdomen of President Chen'' without any meaningful data or scientific documentation. We demand that the Lee Committee presents its data to support this conclusion, in repeatable and statistically meaningful experiments.79
We invite the Taiwanese government and the leadership of the Taiwanese scientific community to prove us wrong, by sponsoring and conducting parallel ballistic experiments designed to reconstruct the damage patterns of the March 19 incident. Experiments can be repeated; they do not lie!
President Chen prevailed in the ever-accommodating Taiwanese High Court, but he still has an appoint with the court of history. One hopes that, in a few years, the Taiwanese people will be able to confront the March 19 shooting incident with dispassion and objectivity, and come to see it as what it really was. That day will arrive, as Émile Zola declared with eloquence and force in J'accuse:
``Ce nést pas, dáilleurs, que je désespère le moins du monde du triomphe. Je le répète avec une certitude plus véhémente: La vérité est en marche et rien ne l'arrêtera. ... quand on enferme la vérité sous terre, elle s'y amasse, elle y prend une force telle d'explosion, que, le jour où elle éclate, elle fait tout sauter avec elle.'' (As for myself, I have not despaired in the least, of the triumph of right. I repeat with the most vehement conviction: The truth is on the march and nothing will stop it. ... when truth is buried underground, it grows and it builds up so much force that the day it explodes it blasts everything with it.)
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