Anticipated questions and answers

(1)

Question.  You said that Dr. Y's group performed many terminal ballistic experiments. But you did not present any detail of the experiment. We do not know who these people are, whether they are qualified, and how the experiments were done. Why should anyone take these claims seriously?

Answer. Whether a scientific statement is true or false can be tested by experiments. Experiments can be repeated, any time and anywhere. Information about Dr. Y's group's experiments have been provided to allow other scientists to design and perform similar experiments to verify the claims of Dr. Y's group. The Taiwanese authority, with its vast resources, can easily commission several independent groups to perform parallel experiments, if the truth of the March 19 incident is deemed important. Unfortunately that seems unlikely to happen.

(2)

Question.  Both the CIB and the Henry Lee Committee said that President Chen's wound was caused by a gunshot. The experts have spoken. Why should we believe a group of scientists?

Answer.  The misconducts of the CIB and the unprofessional acts of the Lee Committee have been discussed in §8 and §9.⁷⁷The focus in discussing the 319 incident must be facts and truth. Science offers objective truth that can be tested by experiments anytime and anywhere. Each of the five damage patterns considered in the Introduction is based on the official, government-certified evidence. That is a fact. No impact parameter can produce any of the five damage patterns. That is a scientific truth. Facts and truth do not need endorsement from the CIB or the Lee Committee. They speak for themselves.

(3)

Question.  Physicians can make mistakes with gunshot wounds. President Chen's doctors may have been mistaken congealed blood for burn marks. They genuinely believed that those were burn injuries. Their error is not a proof that the March 19 incident was staged.

Answer.  The physicians who treated Chen were all experienced medical professionals in senior positions. We can be sure that they proceeded very carefully when the patient was the President. These surgeons have intimate knowledge concerning burn injury. The chance that any one of these surgeons made such a basic error is already very small. The probability that they all made the same basic error is extremely low indeed. Moreover, if there was no cauterization, then the fact that the amount of blood on President Chen's clothing was far less than what was normally expected from his abdominal wound becomes more difficult to explain.

(4)

Question.  Baby pig's skin is different from human skin. The curvature of baby pig's abdomen is different from President Chen's abdomen. The inability of Dr. Y's group to reconstruct a 11 cm long and 1-2 cm deep graze wound on baby pig's abdomen does not prove that the length and depth of President Chen's abdominal wound is not possible. Moreover, Dr. Y may not have tried hard enough. Further experiments might produce a graze wound close to Chen's wound in size.

Answer. The mechanical and thermal properties of baby pig skins are similar to human's. Yet the dimensions of the graze wound that can be produced on baby pigs were only one third of Chen's wound, for both the length and the depth; see 5.2. Rabbit skin is much more tender than human skin, hence it should be easier to produce graze wound on the abdomen of rabbits than on humans. Yet the maximal length of graze wound produced on rabbits was also approximately 3 cm. Speculation is easy. To anyone who says that an 11 cm long and 1.2 cm deep graze wound is possible, our response is, please first produce a graze wound on the abdomen of a live mammal that is at least 7.5 cm long and 0.8 cm deep, using a 1 cm long lead bullet.

(6)

Question.  The entrance hole on President Chen's shirt may have been inadvertently enlarged by the nurses and doctors at the Chi Mei Hospital.

Answer.  If the 2.4 cm long entrance hole on Chen's shirt was enlarged by the actions of the medical professionals at the Chi Mei Hospital, then the ``original damage'' and the ``subsequent damage'' should be differentiable. Neither the CIB report [CIB1] nor the Lee Report [L1] mentioned such a possibility; see the photographs of that bullet hole in [L1].