Chen is full of 'passionate intensity'

Call Chen a chameleon if you will. Just a couple of weeks ago he feigned illness and staged a high-profiled hunger strike to show his “determination to die” for his “original sin” of advocating Taiwan independence. He appeared in court in handcuffs with disheveled hair and a haggard look to present an image of a victim of what he called political persecution.

This week, however, he morphed into another man — a Superman or Mr. Spock-daunting and indestructible. First, he told a visitor at the Taipei detention center in Tucheng that he plans to establish a “Taiwan Independence Party” with the support of his followers to carry out the goal of “nation founding.” He has no qualms whatsoever for having breached his oath of office to preserve and protect the Constitution of the Republic of China.

Then he told the court, presided over by judge Tsai Shou-hsun, that he has done nothing wrong, and argued strongly that all the previous evidence against him — including video-taped confessions and guilty pleas by many key defendants — is inadmissible in court.

He denied that he had anything to do with the billions of dollars discovered by the Egmont Group, an international anti money-laundering organization, and the NT$700 million in cash found in a secret cache in Taipei, together with a bag of diamonds, ranging from one to five karats, worth more than NT$200 million. The only thing he knew, he admitted last August in public, is that his wife Wu Shu-chen told him as late as January 2008 that she had wired a portion of the “left-over campaign contributions” to overseas accounts, without his knowledge, to be used for the purpose of “furthering the cause of Taiwan independence.”

Chen, a lawyer by training, knows better than any one else that there is no way he could absolve himself of the charges against him except to politicize the case. And he has taken steps to change the nature of the case from graft to political persecution by his political enemies-the ruling Kuomintang in collusion with the Chinese communists .

So, it is not surprising that Chen set off a bombshell this week that he plans to establish a Taiwan Independence Party-a carefully-calculated move to blur the focus and to make people believe that the billions of dollars are indeed stashed away for achieving the goal of Taiwan independence, not bribes.

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