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SID wiretap not
deliberate: panel
ADMINISTRATIVE ERROR: The panel said prosecutors
should have known from telephone records that the wiretapped number did not
belong to an individual
By Chris Wang / Staff reporter
Vice Minister of Justice Tsai Pi-yu,
convener of the task force set up by the ministry to investigate the wiretapping
controversy involving the Special Investigation Division (SID), yesterday says
during a press conference that the SID is responsible for "administrative flaws"
that occured during its wiretapping process.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
An 11-member panel of the Ministry of
Justice yesterday released its final report on the Special Investigation
Division’s (SID) alleged wiretapping of the Legislative Yuan’s switchboard,
concluding that the incident stemmed from administrative errors rather than a
deliberate attempt to bug the legislature.
Deputy Minister of Justice Chen Ming-tang (陳明堂) told an afternoon press
conference that Prosecutor-General Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘) and two SID
prosecutors, Yang Jung-tsung (楊榮宗) and Cheng Shen-yuan (鄭深元), would be the
subject of further investigation by the ministry’s Prosecutors Evaluation
Committee.
The SID’s wiretaps of the legislature’s general line has been at the center of a
political storm involving an alleged conspiracy by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九),
Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) and Huang to remove Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng
(王金平) from his post.
Huang and Yang, SID’s chief prosecutor, will be referred to the committee for
supervisory negligence, while Cheng, the prosecutor overseeing the wiretap
assignment, will be held accountable for administrative errors, according to the
panel’s report.
The SID has said that it mistakenly assumed that the telephone number
0972-630-235 belonged to a legislative assistant and that nothing was recorded
on the 21 compact discs it obtained from the Investigation Bureau from the
wiretap.
The ministry’s ad hoc panel, established on Sept. 29, supported the SID’s
stance, but said that the error could have been avoided.
Telephone records for that number in the six months before the SID began its
wiretap showed that the number averaged about 364 calls a day during that time,
which prosecutors should have realized meant that it might not be the number of
an individual, Chen said.
Chen said the panel had concluded that the SID’s application to wiretap the
number was legal.
The SID’s wiretapping became headline news after the division held two press
conferences on Sept. 28. In the morning press conference, Yang said 0972-630-235
was not the legislature’s main number. Huang held the second press conference
that evening to apologize for the mistake.
Opposition lawmakers had questioned the motive for wiretapping the legislature’s
general line, seeing it as overtly political and part of a collaborative effort
between Ma, Jiang and Huang to undermine Wang and the opposition.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus slammed the report as full of lies
that “takes people for fools.”
“The report is unacceptable to the public,” DPP spokesperson Wang Min-sheng
(王閔生) said.
Huang is under investigation by several agencies for discussing the wiretapping
with Ma on several occasions even though the SID had not yet closed its
investigation.
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