2/23/10

the unimpeachable investigators of CHINESE organ trafficking

Quick history of the Falun Gong, condensed from here...

  • Founder Li Hongzhi was born in 1951
  • Qigong fitness movement sweeps China in the 1980s
  • Li Hongzhi creates Falun Gong in 1984, a more accessible variant of training he had practiced since childhood
  • By 1992 Falun Gong is joined to the qigong fitness movement and popularity grows steadily
  • All is well through the mid 1990s as people discover many health benefits of Falun Gong
  • Things get more political around 1995 as the movement expands internationally and pressure grows to control it (and reap the rewards?)
  • Late 1990s the Chinese government starts harassing Falun Gong as a "heretical cult" while 70 million people practice it
  • February 14, 1999: Chinese official tells U.S. News & World Report that as many as 100 million may have taken up the practice and highlights the costs the practice is saving China's national health care system...
...and it was pretty much all downhill from there.

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Also note the Falun Gong symbol, which is a reversed swastika:



For thousands of years the swastika symbolized good, until the 20th century, when it became reversed, and we all know what it means now. I may expand on this aspect in another post. For now, there it is, the swastika. Knowing what we know about symbols and their importance as triggers for human behavior, I suspect it's no coincidence that the Falun Gong has come under particular brutality and oppression. How *dare* they use that symbol properly.

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Former Secretary of State, Canada, David Kilgour

Human Rights Lawyer, Canada, David Matas, senior legal counsel of B'nai Brith Canada


These two gentlemen, at the request of CIPFG (Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong), sponsored a report published in January 2007 called Bloody Harvest: Revised Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China. You can download a pdf of the report here.

The request was to investigate allegations that state institutions and employees of the government of the People's Republic of China have been harvesting organs from live Falun Gong practitioners, killing the practitioners in the process.
In this update, published August 22, 2008, they confirm their findings with the release of additional evidence:

David Matas and David Kilgour today released new evidence confirming their conclusion that China has been killing Falun Gong practitioners so that their organs can be sold to transplant tourists. The new evidence takes the form of a video admission from Dr. Lu Guoping combined with a prior audio recording from the same doctor.

...The video is being distributed by Chinese embassies and consulates; its authenticity is therefore endorsed by the Chinese government.

In a letter to the Chinese embassy in Canada, David Kilgour and David Matas wrote:

"Denial (of the abuse of organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners) in the face of such compelling evidence which has the official sanction of the Government is no longer an option. The only option which remains is ending this horrible crime."

Prominent US members of CIPFG include three congresspeople, Thaddeus McCotter (MI), Dana Rohrabacher, (CA) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, (FL).

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Matas and Kilgour stay focused on the Chinese government for the supply side of the equation, very focused. In fact, Matas campaigns extensively to bring pressure on the Chinese government to stop this practice. I have not read the whole report yet, so I don't want to jump to conclusions. Let us say it appears to be quite thorough. I particularly enjoyed this part describing the methods of proof. They work exactly like conspiracy theorists, which obviously, they cannot be, considering their status.

We have had to look at a number of factors, to determine whether they present a picture, all together, which make the allegations either true or untrue. None of these elements on its own either establishes or disproves the allegations. Together, they paint a picture.

Many of the pieces of evidence we considered, in themselves, do not constitute ironclad proof of the allegation. But their non‑existence might well have constituted disproof. The combination of these factors, particularly when there are so many of them, has the effect of making the allegations believable, even when any one of them in isolation might not do so....

Proof can be either inductive or deductive. Criminal investigation normally works deductively, stringing together individual pieces of evidence into a coherent whole. The limitations our investigation faced placed severe constraints in this deductive method. ...We also used inductive reasoning, working backwards as well as forwards. If the allegations were not true, how would we know it was not true? If the allegations were true, what facts would be consistent with those allegations? What would explain the reality of the allegations, if the allegations were real? Answers to those sorts of questions helped us to form our conclusions.

We also considered prevention. What are the safeguards that would prevent this sort of activity from happening? If precautions are in place, we could conclude that it is less likely that the activity is happening. If they are not in place, then the possibility that the activity is happening increases.
That's an excellent question because it gets at the other side of the problem: the demand side. Because after all, it's not for nothing. These organs go someplace -- the go into other bodies. And that takes hospitals and doctors and administrators and lots of money. So when we discuss safeguards, we must consider how all these organs possibly get through the screening process on the other end -- the recipient end. Surely, if people were serious about stopping illegal organ trafficking, they can work the issue from both ends, or even from the middle -- the brokers. Myopically focusing on the Chinese extracting Fulan Gong organs without following the organs to their destination accomplishes very little, but it looks great.

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In the video, a Dr. Michael Shapiro, Transplant Surgeon (hospital not identified), makes the following remark:

"If you could, you know, know the blood types of everyone you had in prison and if you could execute people to order, um, then you could certainly deliver (laughing) hearts and livers, um, and...and...anything else you wanted to do...um...on a short time frame. You know the current wait in New Jersey for kidneys is 4-5 years, in New York City it's 8-10 years."
So, in other words, he's saying that people have to wait a long time for organs. That's a problem. But if you could run a prison full of healthy people with all their medical data on file, well, hahaha, that would be, like, a totally awesome solution. Of course it would also be totally unethical, and that's why we laugh about it haahahahahahah. Because who would do such a wicked thing?

But Dr. Francis L. Delmonico, Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School agrees on the solution to the problem:
"There's no other way of guaranteeing the opportunity of having an organ available on a scheduled basis other than to say we will have to schedule an execution."
Which of course, as everyone knows, is beyond the pale totally ridiculous completely unethical abhorrent outrageous behavior that could only be expected from the most loathsome human rights violators on earth, the CHINESE. Sadly, Kilgour and Matas have determined, through their meticulous "methods of proof" report, that the Chinese are doing precisely what these two doctors describe. And that's why Kilgour and Matas have studied this problem in exquisite detail, to see exactly how the Chinese have managed to run these camps and conduct these diabolical organ harvesting programs for years on end, without being caught.

Something Must Be Done.* (http://en.epochtimes.com/news/7-6-22/56782.html)
Rabbi Dr. Reuven Bulka, a leader of the Canadian Jewish community called on the government of Israel to do their best in order to stop organ harvesting in China from living Falun Gong practitioners....Among Rabbi Bulka's friends is David Kilgour.

...According to Rabbi Bulka, exactly because of the close relationship between Israel and China, Israel can urge China to stop the horrifying practice of harvesting organs from the living.

...The Rabbi admitted, however, that talking to the Chinese authorities probably would not change things.

The possibility of material losses for Israel, for example, in trading weapons with China, does not bother the rabbi more than the current holocaust going on in China.. Asked how the Israeli government should act, the Rabbi said, "First of all, it is necessary to prepare an instruction forbidding Israelis to go to China for transplantation."
* Look busy.

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And, sure enough, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who became much more well-known last year after the New Jersey organ trafficking story broke, testified before Congress, including Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, back in 2001, when she put the Chinese problem into context:
Thank you, Madam Chair Ros-Letinen Ranking Member and Congresswoman Mc Kinney for the opportunity to speak before you and the members of the Human Rights Sub-Committee this afternoon. 

...For the last five years, however, I have been involved in active field research on the global traffic in human organs, following the movement of bodies, body parts, transplant doctors, their patients, brokers, and kidney sellers, and the practices of organs and tissues harvesting in several countries - from Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba in Latin America to Israel and Turkey in the Middle East, to India, South Africa, and the United States.


...As Director of Organs Watch, my role here is to put the specific Chinese case, as egregious as it is, into a larger global and social perspective. For the traffic in organs and tissues transcends national boundaries and involves doctors, patients, organs brokers, and impoverished organ sellers from both third world and first world contexts.

...We are witnessing, today, a confluence in the flows of immigrant workers and itinerant kidney sellers who fall into the hands of unscrupulous and highly sophisticated transnational organs brokers.


Markets are inclined to reduce everything - including human beings, their labor and their reproductive capacity - to the status of commodities, things that can be bought, sold, traded, and stolen. And nowhere is this more dramatically illustrated than in the current markets for human organs and tissues to supply a medical business driven by "supply and demand. Bodily holism and integrity have given way to the divisible body and detachable organs as commodities, and as fetishized objects of desire and of consumption."
So in other words, people in authority have known about the global network of illegal organ trafficking for many years. How many people died having their organs extracted from 2001 to 2006, when Matas and Kilgour got involved and published their report? And how many people died since then? They could probably even tell us. I'm sure someone has that data along with all the other data they've collected on the Fulan Gong prisoners. This is big business.

So where's the Matas Kilgour report on the international organ brokers? Hmm? Waiting on that report...

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