Chen's shadow is getting eclipsed

In a move that shocked almost everybody, Chen in detention had an attorney in Washington, D.C. file a petition for a writ of certiorari with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces last week, suing President Barack Obama and his Secretary of Defense Robert Gates for failure to continue placing Taiwan under American military occupation. A writ of certiorari is issued from a superior court calling up the record proceeding from an inferior court for review. Jonathan Levy, Chen's attorney at law, said his client is suing Obama and Gates in order to get himself out of detention.

Chen has been detained since December 30 last year. Convicted of corruption and sentenced to life in prison on Sept. 11, he appealed to the Taiwan high court, where a newly selected panel of judges ruled last Thursday that his detention should continue until this year's Christmas Eve. One could well imagine how desperately anxious he wanted to be released on bail, but not to the extent that he would initiate litigation against President Obama and Secretary Gates to go to Washington to testify against them. His client, Levy pointed out, “is requesting intervention by the U.S. military to free him by any means.”

Perhaps in his delirious agony, President Chen has lost his consummate defense lawyer acumen. He invented an American military government that should instruct the current de facto civil administrator of Taiwan — who must be President Ma Ying-jeou or Premier Wu Den-yih — to cease the politically motivated persecution against its ex-agent, who he is. To prove he was an agent, Chen declared that during his eight-year tenure as president of the “Republic of China in exile,” he accepted “instructions of the chairmen of the American Institute in Taiwan on many occasions, even when their instructions interfered with my presidential decision-making.” As he was acting as the agent of the U.S. government and was taking orders from the AIT, he claims he was an official of the U.S. military government.

His invention of that government was sired by General Order No. 1 issued by General Douglas A. MacArthur, supreme commander for the Allied powers that occupied Japan after the end of the Second World War. The occupation was in all vital respects an American undertaking. A small British Commonwealth force, mostly Australian, shared the military tasks, and there was an elaborate machinery of international control, headed by a Far Eastern Commission in Washington, on which were represented all the countries that had fought against Japan, including Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China. In practice, the execution of policy was in the hands of the American five-star general, who took orders from the U.S. government. MacArthur ordered Chiang, who was commander-in-chief of the India-Burma-China Theater for the Allied powers, to send troops to Taiwan to accept the surrender of the Japanese army on the island. General Chen Yi led Chiang's troops to Taiwan with the help of a small U.S. contingent and accepted the instruments of surrender from General Rikichi Ando, governor of Taiwan and supreme commander of the Japanese armed forces in Taiwan, in Taipei on Oct. 25, 1945. Taiwan was made a province of the Republic of China with General Chen as its administrator-general.

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