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China Admits Use of Death-Row Organs
h.ross.perot writes "Like a page from Larry Niven's Known Space series, here is a real report of criminals' organs being harvested for 'profit.' From the article: 'China is trying to move away from the use of executed prisoners as the major source of organs for transplants. According to the China Daily newspaper, executed prisoners currently provide two-thirds of all transplant organs. The government is now launching a voluntary donation scheme, which it hopes will also curb the illegal trafficking in organs.
But analysts say cultural bias against removing organs after death will make a voluntary scheme hard to implement.'"
Gotta have the heart of a murderer.
I think that it would be a waste NOT to use these organs. The prisoners will be executed either way, might as well make them contribute some good to society to offset whatever they were sentenced to death for. There is a possible conflict of interest, though, if the judges start getting paid off to sentence people to death...
I'll get this all sorted out in a few hundred years.
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"Qua!?"
Who hardly notice? China's in the news for this quite often. I've heard of the story of Israel a few times (there is some quite compelling testimony, if no evidence). I have never seen anyone seem to care about either beyond news outlet in the wider world. Obviously killing innocents for organs, as Israel was accused of, is vastly different than harvesting the already-going-to-be-killed.
Whaaaat! When did this happen? I demand an investigation into these Zionist barbarians!
rectums and vaginas
I have not heard any outcries about "Zionist barbarians". I believe you are misrepresenting the views of the people you are opposing. It is a cheap trick that does not add anything constructive to the discussion. Please stop doing that.
It is a fact that there is organized, illegal organ trade in Israel. See for example an article in Jerusalem Post, Jul 23, 2007 (available on the web). I do not believe that this a "total fabrication", as the Jerusalem Post would presumably have little interest in fabricated smearing in this case. Or do you mean that the accusations against the _state_ of Israel are untrue, as opposed to the accusations against _citizens_ of Israel?
In the case of China, I believe it has been proved that the state is involved. On the other hand, Chinese organ trade uses bodies of its own citizens, whereas in the Israeli case, bodies of citizens from other countries are used. I think it is completely fair to demand investigations in both cases.
Uh, an outcry? At least here (Finland) The Israel story only became news when Israel demanded the Swedish government to condemn something an independent newspaper said in an article... The outcry has been about that not about the contents of some obscure and unverified article.
The china situation on the other hand has been in the papers before.
Total fabrication? Says who?
The claims are not even being investigated. Instead, a huge government backed moaning and whining took place to hide the real issue: sweden as .eu lead would have taken up the issue of settlement construction. So Isreaeli government just avoided the issue by raising a stink about the whole thing, therefore banning swedish pm thus eu from entering the country.
China is a totalitarian regime, demonized by the US media. Barbaric act like harvesting organs is just par for the course for them.
Israel is supposed to be a civilized country, receiving tremendous aid from the US. Is it surprising that people have different expectation, and thus different reaction to the same accusation from the two countries?
You'll note that all the specimens are Asian...
What if you get heart of a serial-killer? :))
I thought the beef fried rice had a slightly ozone-ish smell. Last time I go there for lunch. I demand nothing but sinless virgin meat on the buffet!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Bill Hicks quote:
Put them in the movies!
The Indiana University Center for Bioethics has an interesting bibliography about inmates and organ donation in the United States (not harvesting) http://www.bioethics.iu.edu/body.cfm?id=79. Obviously inmates are - in some states at least - not even allowed to donate their organs and in some cases not even to close family. The ethical questions concering the death penalty aside: Harvesting without consent is IMHO not an ethical thing to do under any circumstances. Whatever guilt there was has been paid with the death penalty, after that, the will of the deceased should be respected. In doubt, consider silence as a "no". That inmates are prohibited to donate organs (donate as in: Not for profit and of their own free will) is equally nonsensical.
Just typical anti-semitic comments
I suspect most of us agree that after death we won't be needing those organs... So give society a favor and fill out that organ donor card. It's just one more card in your wallet after all. Saving someone's life post-mortem is not a bad last accomplishment. :)
Granted, your liver might end up in a person worthy of a Darwin award, but it's a risk I'm willing to take myself. ;)
.: Max Romantschuk
But then it becomes a non-story, and something that should not be commented on, and if you do write a story about it, your whole nation would get black listed. But then again the Israeli organs are harvested off terrorist Palestine people who probably deserved it right? I suppose it's ok for IDF to go around rounding about militants and other terrorist elements, and conviently have them die and be returned to the miltiants parents sans organs. Many of which are exported out to western nations.
I don't see what the big deal is about China, if those are condemned people just like the above terrorists.
In a free society, when a person dies an accidental death or becomes brain-dead from same, why does their right to leave a pretty corpse trump the right to life of someone who needs a transplant? Our current transplant system is opt-in...how is that justifiable? (Once again, I'm referring to donation at death rather than live donation.)
Doctors make bank. Insurance companies make bank. Maybe it is different in China, but if only we PAID surviving beneficiaries for organs, resistance would go down. Imagine, even if you die penniless you don't have to saddle your family with funeral costs. It would still be voluntary but it would be beneficial (or not - nothing prevents pure donations). They could set up a standard 'no risk' payment schedule ("we harvest/we pay") and nations would be swimming in organs. Black market influence - whether real or imagined - should be diminished. It works for plasma and sperm.
come now China is merely being green, reduce the criminals, reuse the organs, recycle the bodies (as fuel)
But analysts say cultural bias against removing organs after death will make a voluntary scheme hard to implement.'"
Pah! Up here in Canda, we harvest human hearts while the donor is ALIVE!
I mean, "ghoul" comes to mind, but it's the only one that comes close.
They are parting people out for profit. Literal chop-shops for human bodies. It's a proposition only the most extreme horror movies have touched. It's the walking definition of Capital-E Evil.
You have to remember there have been three parts to the accusations. They just ADMITTED to the first one.
1. That the Chinese were selling organs of condemned prisoners, which they've always denied until now, and
2. That many of these people were condemned for their political views, and
3. That many of these people were condemned for being a marketable genotype.
Dear God. We have a government admittedly selling human organs for profit, the one thing that every medical ethicist in the world has always agreed would be the prima facie standard of "morally and ethically repugnant" and your response is "Waste not, want not"?!
They are killing people and selling the meat on an open market. I don't care that they're only doing it to the "bad" people. All of the fantasy Halloween monsters are laughable in comparison. Even the Texas Chainsaw family could cry hunger, not greed, as a motive.
Our beloved trading partners, who probably manufactured half the stuff in my house, are literally selling the human flesh and bone of the people they killed and butchered.
We don't have the words to fit this crime. I've always had a problem with the idea of an Eternal Hell, but stuff like this makes a strong argument for it.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
China publicly harvests organs and people hardly notice. Israel is accused of harvesting organs, a total fabrication, and there's an outcry, demanding an investigation into these Zionist barbarians. What the hell?
When were these allegations against Israel? I've been paying pretty close attention to media driven hysteria for a couple years now, and I think I've completely missed this one. Where is the proof of the hysteria (from an American-centric POV), and where is the disproof that it actually happened? Are you sure you aren't thinking that minor outcry over things you pay attention to and care about are not being greatly conflated?
Actually if there was public, and proven, allegations of ANYONE harvesting organs against their will, I would be generally angry, and somewhat apathetic at the same time.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I dunno why everbody is suddenly surprised, it has been known for quite a long time that China harvest organs from death row prisoner (end of 90 local china group were claimoring it, 2000 some major paper reported it, and I assume by then many state department knew it), what is NEW is that they admitted it *NOW* and want to introduce ethical organ harvesting practice. So whereas everybody get their panty in a knot and cheap shot China, one should note (as the WHO did) that this is a bettering of the situation. China should be encouraged at that point in time , because they are trying to do the right thing. And all I see in this thread are cheap shots.
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The hubbub is about a article published in the Swedish newspaper "Aftonbladet" on 17th of August this year (link in swedish: http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab) claiming that IDF harvested human organs from palestinians. This caused the israeli foreign minister to demand that the Swedish government condemn the article. The Swedish government responded that they would not due to freedom of press. (link to NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/world/middleeast/24mideast.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=aftonbladet&st=cse)
The allegations are recent and were made by a Swedish tabloid newspaper, see Wikipedia.
BBC News article
CNN article
There have been allegations of an Israeli human body part smuggling ring for years (2003 BBC report).
The new allegations centre around a scandal in New Jersey in which two state legislators and several Rabbis have been arrested for trafficking in human body parts. The Slate article claims that Jewish religious law allow most other laws can be broken to save the life of a Jew ("for the sake of saving a life, a Jew is allowed to break just about any commandment.") and that the Rabbis would see human body part trafficking as a good thing ("They sincerely felt they were not hurting anyone; indeed, by giving life to another, they probably felt they were mimicking the divine. They were in the business of saving lives.") The additional allegation made by the Swedish newspaper is that the IDF were removing organs from Palestinian prisoners who die in custody, and from other sources of dead Palestinian bodies, in order to supply the smuggling groups.
We don't know what kind of mindset they have over there, towards this sort of thing.
Come again?!
Oh sorry, that was bitter irony, I almost missed that.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Ted Bundy just called and promises to be a much better date from now on.
Ed Gein promises to start collecting only stamps tomorrow.
And Albert Fish is going to be a better baby-sitter than Mary Poppins, come the morning.
Take these three monsters, toss in the Zodiac, the Ripper, and all the other shattered bloody psyches we now know by their full first-middle-last names. Hell, you might as well throw in Jason Vorhees and Dexter to boot, because it won't matter when it comes to numbers.
All of them together PALE next to Hu Jingtao's now-confessed body count. You have to bring in the scythes like Stalin, Pol Pot and Godwin to get close. The men who run China have decided to murder, butcher and sell human meat for money, and their promise to try to do better in the future matters not a damn. NO ONE who calls themselves Chinese can hold their head up today, and yeah I'm well aware of my own country's recent atrocities.
Sure, we've betrayed our most sacred princples, killed by the thousands and tortured people to death in secret prisons.
But we have yet to wrap the bloody parts in slick white paper and begin singing the auction call.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
One of the Christian beliefs is that at Judgment day, people will be resurrected with their full bodies intact.
It's absurd, but what if someone claims it? doesn't he/she have the right not to donate their organs?
That is what I thought when I read TFA.
There has long been speculation that killed inmates were used for organ donations - not in the least because often the family can not see the body, and execution dates are set usually less than a day or sometimes only hours before the execution. So many families can not say farewell to the prisoner. And organs for donation are of course best used fresh.
What is new of course, and what surprises me, is that the China government admits they are doing it. They are usually so secretive about anything that may be controversial, this admission comes really as a surprise to me.
Organ donation in China is far far lower than in the West. This is largely cultural (same as in Hong Kong, my place of residence), as people believe the body is best kept intact for burial/cremation. While in Western cultures that is not so much an issue. As a result there are very few people allowing organs to be donated.
But this article is also a bit sensationalist: they claim China puts more people to death than any other country. I am not surprised. China is the most populous nation in the world. Nr 2, India, also has the death penalty but is barely using this form of punishment. What would be more interesting would be the number of people put to death per million population or so. The USA is known for putting many people to death also, but China simply has more than four times the population.
As does Ukraine.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Ah... Thank you.
First I've heard of this.
Create a central registry of organ donors.
Once you have been on the registry for (say) two years, you get preference over someone else if you need an organ.
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On the other hand, when there is smoke... ...there's usually a right-wing media reporter fanning the flames somewhere.
The only outcry I heard was Israel screaming "ANTI-SEMITISM!!" when the reports surfaced.
Which, to be fair, it almost certainly was. There is no sign of any real evidence that support the reports.
What is, to my mind, totally unreasonable was the Isreali government's stance of blaming the entire country for the behaviour of a single independent newspaper.
That has to be one of the dumbest things I've seen online for quite a while.
Why the hell didn't you LINK to that article? Are we just supposed to browse through every single article in that newspaper from that day in order to find that article? Take your word for it? This isn't a book where you can't include the article - link to the bloody thing!
I really don't see the problem with using organs from dead people, they don't need or use them any more. nobody gets hurt. I do have a big problem with killing though, which includes the death penalty.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Oh come off it. Where did you get this "condemned for being marketable" from? I see words don't fail you, you're bursting with cheap drama actually.
Condemning and executing people for their political views, that's wrong. That's a crime.
Using the organs of executed prisoners to save lives? Nope, not a problem - it's a good thing, and I think it's still good even if you charge for it. It's not like healthcare is free everywhere in the world, or is it?
Please try and leave horror movies and all that religious crap out of it for a second - less drama, more fact and though. Stop mixing the issues.
And I can't believe that shit you wrote about how America's better because you're not selling the organs after killing people in places you don't belong - excellent, I can see how limiting yourself to dismemberment is what Jesus would do.
I wonder - will words fail you over this as well? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
And they're so worried about a little porn corrupting their pure communist utopia?
The summary is presumably referring to Larry Niven's A gift from Earth . It details a human colony that has become split into two - the Crew (descendants of the crew that flew the original ship), who rule over the Colonists. They have become dependant on organ transplants to the point that all crimes are punished by death - at which point their organs are harvested. Even worse, this is only done to the Colonists and the organs are only received by the Crew.
Anyway, it's an interesting book. The main protagonist finds he has a unique psychic ability - he can make people completely uninterested in himself.
While across the road there is a Jew beating the crap out of someone to take his money while shouting "the anti-semite is attacking me, the anti-semite is attacking me".
I read a report by a Chinese doctor who fled the country and said some donors were still alive when they started removing the organs. The donors were killed by a shooting squad and some weren't hit properly. The doctors were ordered to remove the organs anyways ASAP.
china's greatest threat to itself is overpopulation, which puts their country at risk for a lack of important resources (potable water, food) and at a risk from rampant diseases (plague, bird flu, etc). china doesn't need to perform organ donations which prolong life. they instead need to start weeding down their population to a more manageable size.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Not to defend either China or Iran..
But, are the numbers Amnesty International reported adjusted for population?
China executed 1,718, Iran 346.
The CIA gives China's 2008 population at 1,330,044,544
Also the CIA, Iran's population, in 2008 65,875,224
1718 / 1330044544 = 1.29168606 Ã-- 10 ^ -6 = 0.0000129% of population
346 / 65875224 = 5.25235406 Ã-- 10 ^ -6 = 0.0000523% of population
So taking population into account, Iran executes 5 times more than china?
Another deterrent to all who would do things to get them on death row....if the inmate is a serial killer that killed 20 people in cold blood, I would say he gave up his rights a long time ago, when he chopped them up into little pieces, and as for those who were
possibly incarcerated on a mistake (identity, bad case etc...) then they would just go down as having made the greatest contribution of all...to society! I say we should all adapt this new policy and harvest all we can from these no good criminals.
Actually, his most direct treatment of it is in the short "The Jigsaw Man", collected in Tales of Known Space and elsewhere. The "Gil the ARM" stories also explore it in depth.
Although we all get squeamish about it, it's better to have a supply of donated organs than not. Prisoners being executed have done something horrible and can help repay their debt to society through their organs. Give new life where old was taken, instead of getting all uppity and fearish about the grim task of forcibly taking organs from criminals.
Futurist Traditionalism
So based on organs they need they will choose how to execute? if they need heart, do not shoot at the heart, we need this guy's heart !!! Let's suffocate him
Interesting is that they have a cultural problem with organ donation, but have no cultural problem with using organs of the prisoners. What a hypocrisy.
The question wasn't whether there was an illegal organ trade in Israel. There is an illegal organ trade in quite a few countries - I've heard of it existing in parts of Africa including South Africa, as well as being fairly widespread in India. Israel has actually prosecuted people for it, however (the article you reference is here and it describes the prosecution of some people involved in this).
There is a big gap however from saying there has been a trade in organs in a country to saying that the country's government or military actually are killing people *in order to* harvest their organs (a claim I have seen in this thread). It's almost as big a gap to saying that the government or military are harvesting organs of people who happen to have died or been mortally wounded in conflict in order to profit.
I don't really believe the amount of money involved would be sufficient for a government or military to take this sort of risk to their reputation to do something like this. The Israeli military budget is over $13B US.
What some unscrupulous individuals may have done to line their pockets, however, is another story. As an American Jew, I actually think any legitimate claims that organs were illegally harvested in Israel should be investigated and any perpetrators prosecuted. If somebody illegally harvested organs from a dead/mortally wounded person, they should go to jail. If somebody actually killed somebody to harvest their organs, they should be imprisoned for the rest of their life.
The government is now launching a voluntary donation scheme, which it hopes will also curb the illegal trafficking in organs.
In other words, nothing has changed.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I am not a 'crop' to be havested. I am a person.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1184766040398&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Here you go. Calling it "one of the dumbest things" you've seen online is a bit of a stretch. Googling 'jerusalem post july 23 organ' instantly returned the article.
Now, I'm assuming you'll want to point out my terrible mistakes, so what is the second dumbest thing you've seen online? The fact that you are forced to copy the URL from my post and paste it into your adress bar because I failed to hotlink it? The fact that I used " and ' incorrectly? Go ahead - I made sure to include plenty of mistaeks in this post to make you happy.
Actually, Jewish law allows the breaking of laws to save any life, not just Jewish. http://www.jlaw.com/Commentary/whatcost.html
This is really sad, as most people here do not seem to know that many of the prisoners are there for unjust reasons.
There are many Falun Dafa practitioners there for instance, many elderly man and woman, because of their believe in Truth, Compassion and Tolerance.
In today's age we have so much access to information, please, take the time to google and research this, something needs to be said and done.
This practice has been extensively covered by some excellent research a couple of years from now
China had 40 "death vans" built by Junguan Group to standardize executions. Now we know why.
China wants you to believe that the organs come from convicted criminals, but actually many, perhaps most, come from Falun Gong practitioners who haven't gone through due process and hence can't be properly called convicted criminals.
You might want to read Matas and Kilgour's report.http://organharvestinvestigation.net/
There's a holocaust going on. The number of victims is smaller, but the evil is at least as great.
They run the whole gamut of knockoffs and conversions (Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Ford, and whatever Western company does riot vans).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
As in the earlier term "bootlegger".
Thank you, Larry Niven.
You are of course, quite correct. This reflects badly on our species, period. There's no end of shame to go around.
I need to find a word that means "Members of the ruling political party in China and those who support them" rather than "Everyone who has ever had a member of their extended family live on this continent." Having the words "China" and "Chinese" stand for both the ethnicity and the political/economic power causes confusion and raises issues of racism where there are none. We need different words for the two groups which overlap, like "Soviet" and Russian. What term would you suggest? "Members of the Chinese Communist Party" seems a little unwieldy and makes you sound like some drunk old codger from the VFW ranting about the "ChiComs."
I've ran my own personal boycott of China since I saw Tiananmen Square in living color. Today's confession -- that they have killed people and sold their organs for profit, and no, I don't give a damn that they were "criminals," -- My God, if that doesn't tie your moral compass in a knot, then you have none.
Why are we still doing business with men who would make Victor Frankenstein blanch?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
>The Slate article claims that Jewish religious law allow most other laws can be broken to save the life of a Jew
Actually the article states that "for the sake of saving a life, a Jew is allowed to break just about any commandment." No mention of the person being saved was Jewish or not, a big difference.
... shooting palestinian youths, taking them away for 'autopsy' and returning the bodies to be buried in the dead of night under the watchful eyes of guards - sans organs th
www.whatreallyhappened.com has a lot of stories on it.
A lot of the posters above are saying that the state officially sanctioned the removal and sale of organs from the executed prisoners. Where does it say that in the article? All I read is that the government acknowledges organ removal is very prevalent and the body parts are being sold illegally by individuals on the black market. I'm I missing something?
Eh?
I heard the rumor that most of those intricately detailed bodies in that great exhibition 'Bodies were political prisoners in china. I mean, it makes sense, as most of those figures were realtively young, and in decent shape. but it was kind of sad and funny to look at each one and think, what did this guy do wrong?
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"In fact I would be willing to bet that more people need organ transplants due to trauma or disease than do because of any genetic problems"
Susceptibility to disease _is_ a genetic problem. You could probably argue either way on trauma, depending on the nature of the trauma.
-- Terry
Ask this: If it were mandatory for all usable organs to be harvested, would the long run result be that demand for organs would be filled to the extent that there would be no need/incentive for questionable executions/pulling of plugs/etc?
You are right, the Slate article doesn't state that. I don't know which specific bit of Jewish religious law the Slate article is referring to, I had assumed it was the "pursuer's decree", which only applies to Jewish lives. That was the legal ruling that some Rabbis used to justify the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, ("Under Jewish law, if a pursuer is chasing a Jew with the intent to kill him, one is required to kill the pursuer to save the life of the intended victim. This is one of the few exceptions to the general rule against killing.") It may indeed be the case that this was not the particular legal decree applied to justify organ smuggling.
Inversely proportional means one stat goes up as the other goes down. The US has a higher homicide rate and a lower execution rate than the other four countries
Whereas my point was that the US has (we are told) the highest murder rate in the world (which I doubt) AND higher execution rates than ca. 90% of countries the world (since it is among the top 20 executors and there exist >200 countries), the "other four countries" notwithstanding. Ie. if anything as the execution rate goes down, the murder rate goes down. How could that be inversely proportional?! Not that we have the least basis here for talking about proportionality here.
If the US has the highest murder rate (which is the assumption you are basing this "proportion" on), then all countries with lower (or zero) execution rates (ie. the overwhelming majority (>90%) of countries in the world) would have lower murder rates.
Are you suggesting that they all have... higher murder rates instead?
No ... I'm suggesting they have lower rates both for murder and execution.
Does Slashdot not understand basic mathematical relationships anymore?
Funny you should ask.