Wikileaks on Organ Harvesting: A Webb Companion

There are hundreds of emails that reference organ harvesting in the Wikileaks email collection. Some are contained in the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) reports from various nations (Moldova/Yemen/Uganda), another large amount relate to Human Trafficking in Kosovo and others focus on specific cases.

While searching through the Wikileaks emails, one email in particular caught my attention in the Syria Files.

https://wikileaks.org/syria-files/docs/2085261_26-oct-worldwide-english-media-report-.html

The contents of the email originate from an article written by Nancy Scheper-Hughes for Counterpunch.org (2010) entitled:

Body Parts and Bio Piracy

http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/10/25/body-parts-and-bio-piracy/

The article focuses profiles the work of Dr. Hiss at the National Forensic Institute and Israel’s involvement in organ harvesting.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkley. She is an active field researcher in organ trafficking, tracking the movement of human bodies, body parts, transplant doctors, kidney sellers, organ recipients, organ brokers and tissue harvesting worldwide. She also co-founded the organization Organs Watch.

Dr. Scheper-Hughes research provides a unique window into the dark and controvertial work of Dr. Yehuda Hiss and his connection to the Israeli Ministry of Health, and the National Forensic Institute (part of the Israeli Defense Force).

The story begins with the discovery of a human organ harvesting scheme in New York centered around Levy Itzhak Rosenbaum. A brief summary of the case is that Rosenbaum was accused of violating the National Organ Transplantation Act (NOTA) through the illicit transfer of kidneys. In addition, there was evidence that he also participated in the recruitment and trafficking of marginalized Israelis to the US for organ harvest/transplant purposes.

At the time the 2010 article was published, Rosenbaum’s case was still going through the courts system but he was ultimately the first individual successfully prosecuted under the NOTA and was sentenced to 2 ½ years in prison.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/30/the-rosenbaum-kidney-trafficking-gang/

There was a deeper story here, and Scheper-Hughes was attempting to uncover the network behind the Rosenbaum case.

Years earlier, Dr. Scheper-Hughes had conducted an indpeth interview with Dr. Yehuda Hiss at the National Forensic Institute at Abu Kabir.

This is how she described the interview with Hiss in 2000

Introducing Dr Yehuda Hiss

I knew the answer. In July 2000, while studying the growth of organized transplant tours run by underworld brokers in Israel, I conducted a formal, audiotaped interview with the director of Israel’s National Forensic Institute, Dr. Yehuda Hiss, at Abu Kabir, in which he openly and freely discussed the “informal” procurement of organs and tissues from the bodies of the dead brought to the Institute for examination and autopsy. Hiss described a kind of “presumed” consent, one invented by him and shared with no one except, by example, with his medical students and residents and interns. He pursued a quiet policy of aggressive tissue, bone, skin, and organ harvesting, purportedly for the greater good of his country, a country at war, and for the good of his countryman. Professor Hiss, viewed by many Israelis and by the New York Times as a hero because of his service to the nation in handling bodies killed by terrorists and suicide bombers, deemed his behavior as patriotic. He was, in his own mind, not so much “above the law,” as representing the law, a much higher law, his law, supremely cool, rational, and scientifically and technically correct. The country was at war, blood was being spilled everyday, soldiers were being burned, and yet Israelis refused to provide tissues and organs needed. So, he would take matters into his own hands.

The taped interview was a smoking gun, but I feared the unintended consequences of making it public. The tape sat, more or less untouched, in my archives for ten years. But now it was necessary to set the record straight. But before I did so, I wanted to give professor Hiss a chance to explain, or even to correct, the things he had admitted to in the 2000 interview. Prior to leaving for a research trip in September-October 2009, accompanied by Dan Rather and his team for a news report on the criminal networks built around organ trafficking in Turkey, Moldova, and Israel, I contacted Yehuda Hiss in Israel (through one of my several Israeli research assistants) requesting a follow-up interview.

Various attempts were made to once again interview Dr. Hiss but on the advice of his lawyers and the Ministry of health no follow up interview was ever granted.

Scheper-Hughes’ interest in the National Forensic Institute came about through a case file obtained by human rights lawyers investigating the forced removal, demolition of homes and abuses of Palestinian families by the IDF.
In November 1995, Abdel Karim Abdel Musalmeh was killed by IDF snipers with a bullet to the head. Photographs included in the autopsy report clearly showed the bullet wound that ended Musalmeh’s life. Prior to his death the Israeli military had declared that Musalmeh’s home was scheduled for demolition. Lawyers working with his widow were in the process of trying to preserve the family home for the mother of six.

If murder and dispossession were not enough, Musalmeh’s body was returned to his wife in tatters. The autopsy report attributed death by rifle shot to brain. Why, then, was the body subjected to a total dissection and the removal of cornea and skin? I agreed to look into it.

The National Institute for Forensic Medicine plays several roles in Israeli society.

1. It is Israel’s national depository of dead bodies where bodies are processed through identification, examination and autopsy.
2. It is controlled by the ‘chevra kadisha’, the orthodox religious organization that controls all burials except for military throughout the country.

The Institute is then both a traditional medical-legal mortuary and, off the record, Israel’s primary source of tissues, bone, and skin needed for transplantation, plastic surgery, research and medical teaching. The illicit traffic in organs, tissues, bone and the stockpiling of assorted body parts at the Institute is what anthropologists call a public secret, something that every one inside the society knows about but which is never discussed, and certainly never admitted to those outside the society.

She continues…

Allegations of Hiss’ confiscation of organs, tissues and other body parts date back to November 1999, with an investigative report in the local Tel Aviv newspaper Ha’ir, which stated that medical students under Hiss’ direction were allowed to practice on bodies sent to the Institute at Abu Kabir for autopsy, and that body parts were transferred for transplant and other medical uses without permission from the families concerned. In 2000, the newspaper Yediot Aharonot published a price list for body parts that Hiss had sold to university researchers and to medical schools. A committee of international forensic experts was appointed by the Minister of Health to investigate practices at the Institute. It took two years for the investigation to be completed, during which time, according to Hiss’ former assistant and protégé, Chen Kugel, much of the evidence was destroyed. Nonetheless, according to Kugel, Hiss still had a huge collection of body parts in his possession at Abu Kabir, when the Israeli courts ordered a search in 2002. Israel National News reported at the time, “Over the past years, heads of the Institute appear to have given thousands of organs for research without permission, while maintaining a ‘storehouse’ of organs at Abu Kabir.” Hiss was reprimanded but allowed to continue his activities, which he defended as necessary for medicine, for the defense of the Israeli state, and for the advancement of science.

“Over the past years, heads of the Institute appear to have given thousands of organs for research without permission, while maintaining a ‘storehouse’ of organs at Abu Kabir.”

Though it had been revealed that Dr. Hiss was involved in dubious practices and several times reprimanded or stopped from continuing his work in organ extractions, somehow he was able to resume these activities time and time again, although often in some kind of new capacity or position at the Institute.

In 2005, new allegations of organs trafficking at Abu Kabir surfaced, and Hiss admitted to having removed parts from 125 bodies without authorization. Following a plea bargain with the state, the attorney general decided not to press criminal charges, and Hiss was given only a reprimand, and he continues on as chief pathologist at Abu Kabir, that is, the state of Israel’s official head pathologist. Illegal harvesting of bodies was simultaneously prohibited and tolerated. Hiss was, in fact, the state’s answer to the chronic scarcity of tissues and organs. He recognized the need produced by the deep cultural reluctance of families to tamper with the bodies of the dead, which allowed him to cross a line and to do as he pleased with the bodies entrusted to him.

In 2005, new allegations of organs trafficking at Abu Kabir surfaced, and Hiss admitted to having removed parts from 125 bodies without authorization.

Here we have the extraction of human body parts without consent by the families or by the individuals themselves prior to death.

In 2000, Dr. Hiss was very forth coming to questions of organ harvesting, even going as far to admit that they did not have permission from the families.

Here is an exchange between Dr. Hiss and Dr. Scheper-Hughes:

(YH): Now, about the question of harvesting organs – it’s strange. Not only here, in Israel, but elsewhere it all depends on the personal approach of those in charge of pathology or organs harvesting. In my case, when I was a resident in Tel Hashomer – a hospital linked to the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) – we would collaborate with the army and we would provide the army with grafted (harvested) skin for burn victims, and, from time to time, they would ask us for cornea. So, I would be involved in it because I was in charge, with two others, and we would provide this.

NS-H: Why cornea to the military?

YH: For injuries perhaps. Maybe it was easier [for the military] to make this request of us, and, once we had gotten permissions to perform – and the family agreed – to the autopsy, we would take some skin and take the cornea. For autopsy, we always had to ask permission of the family, unless it was a court order [a criminal case].

NS-H: There is some resistance here, in Israel, to autopsy – both Jewish and Arab – right?

YH: Yes. We did everything off the record, highly informal. We never asked for the families’ permission.

Then we started harvesting cornea for several Israeli hospitals, initially for Tel Hashomer, because I had friends there who knew me well. I suggested this to them at various meetings. I was amazed because no one had ever come to us to ask. Why are you not coming over to us? I told them how it worked at Case Western Reserve Hospital [in Cleveland]. So, then they started to come from hospitals in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv. Everything was done on a friendly basis between us and our colleagues in various departments. I felt strongly that these corneas should go to public patients and not to private clinics. We were not paid for harvesting, but we were given some donations, equipment that we needed.

This passage is striking in that Hiss freely admits to theft of human organs. Although he denies money was involved, they did receive gifts in the form of equipment and ‘donations’.

Dr. Hiss also divulges the close relationship between the institute and the Case Western Reserve Hospital in Cleveland.

Note: George Webb also points to Cleveland as a center for organ harvesting and transplantation.

Case Western Reserve Hospital

http://case.edu/medicine/

There are a number of facilities including Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital

Cleveland Medical Center

Organ transplant procedures at Case Western Reserve Hospital

http://www.uhhospitals.org/cleveland/services/transplant

Harvest Continued

As it happens, Dr. Hiss actually studied at Case Western Reserve Hospital and stated that the kinds of organ harvesting he practices is not exclusive to Israel.

Until he arrived in 1987 as chief pathologist at the Forensic Institute, there was no organ or tissue harvesting. He explained to his staff that this practice was common elsewhere in the world, in the U.S., at Case Western Reserve, where he had studied, and in other forensic Institutes he had visited. It was a “presumed consent” without the backing of the population, or the law.

In 2009, the original Dr. Hiss interview in 2000 was released to the Israeli public. Dr. Hiss denies all claims made in the recording. He now denies organ harvesting, perjury and the collecting and stock piling of human body parts.

Despite the denials, Dr. Chen Kugel and Meira Weiss, who both worked under Hiss at the Institute, revealed that the situation at the Forensic Institute was much more than Dr. Hiss admitted to in the 2000 interview.

In fact, according to Kugel, “Organs were sold to anyone; anyone that wanted organs just had to pay for them.” While skin, heart valves, bones, and corneas were removed and used for transplants, solid organs – hearts, brains, livers – “were sold for research, for presentations, for drills for medical students and surgeons.”

There was a price for these organs, low – $ 300 for a femur, for example – and should a client want all the organs from a body, that could be arranged, not the body itself, but all the organs removed and sold, Kugel said, for about $2,500.

When asked about the specific criteria about selecting bodies for harvesting Kugel explained that there were only two main factors involved.

1. The physical condition of the body and its organs
2. The ability to conceal what would be done to the bodies

Organs were taken from soldiers, protesters, Jews and Muslims.

Most of the victims of illegal organ harvesting, according to Kugel, were not even subject to autopsy, they were simply harvested. They hid the damage by putting pipes and glass eyes, and broom sticks, and toilet paper and plastic skull caps to cover the place where the brain was removed, and so on.

After much delay in investigating Dr. Hiss was finally removed as director of the Forensic Institute, however he was given another title as head pathologist and even received a raise in salary. Dr. Kugel was fired from his position (he was accused of interfering in the investigation) and he was blacklisted from teaching at all but one university in Israel.

To Dr. Kugel the prime issue had nothing at all to do with science: it was about disrespect, about hoarding body specimens, about turning the Institute into a factory of bodies.

To this day, Dr. Kugel believes that this continues to go on at the Institute.

And it begs the question…if this is still going on at the National Forensic Institute in Israel, are similar practices still going on at Case Western Reserve Hospital in Cleveland?

Link -Day 100 pt. 2 - DynCorp Harvest - George Webb Investigation