Sweden, and the Israel-linked organs story

I realize I’m coming into the Israel-linked organ-trafficking story late. But my old editors at the CSM always stressed the value of working assiduously at a story to get it done as well as possible rather than rushing in under the illusion you can write a satisfactory “first draft of history” within the confines of a 24-hour news cycle. And I’m still working at this one… Mostly, at this point, gathering and assessing sources.
One of the ongoing diplomatic dimensions to this story has been the tension that arose between the Israeli and Swedish governments after Swedish journo Donald Bostrom published his controversial article (English translation here) recounting the many allegations Palestinians and others made back in 1987-92 that the bodies of young Palestinians who were shot dead in those years were taken by the IDF forces back into Israel where they were stripped of many transplantable organs before being returned, hastily sewn back up along the mid-line, for speedy burial by their families.
The Israeli government screamed that the article was a “blood libel” and demanded that the Swedish government “condemn” it. The Swedish government replied, unsurprisingly, that it would not take an action that would violate the country’s free-speech traditions in such a way.
Sweden took over the presidency of the EU in July. Several observers noted that the Israeli government’s salvo of harsh accusations against Sweden over the Bostrom article may also have been a shot across the bow, in an attempt to “warn” the Swedish government off from undertaking any meaningful EU activism on the Palestine issue for the rest of its six-month presidency.
Yesterday, indeed, Sweden’s Foreign Minister, the internationally renowned diplomatic “rock star” Carl Bildt, announced he was canceling a planned visit to Israel.
Most Israeli sources and commentators speculated that this was because of Bildt’s embarrassment at the prospect of protests against him over the Bostrom article. The Swedish foreign ministry’s statement said “he’s waiting for the right opportunity to do it when the peace process is maybe in a more positive state.” Which seems at least as plausible, given the outrageously provocative steps the Netanyahu government has taken over the past few days.
Anyway, back on the Israel-and-organs story…
In addition to the two I referred to in this blog post Saturday (J. Cook and Shraga Elam), I’m now looking at two more:

Both of them use– and provide links for– a lot more very valuable material.
Woodward gives an excerpt from, and a link to, the very informative testimony on the worldwide market in often illegaly trafficked organs that UC Berkeley prof. Nancy Scheper-Hughes gave to a congressional committee in June 2001.
Her prepared statement starts at p.62 there.
Scheper-Hughes is one of the founders of the Organs Watch project, which has been tracking the international traffic in human organs and tissues since the late 1990s. In the hearing, which was convened originally to examine China’s role in harvesting the organs of executed prisoners, she makes clear that Israeli doctors and medical institutions are significant actors in the global market in human organs.
I became intrigued by the role Scheper-Hughes played in the most recent (end-of-July) arrest in New Jersey of Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum. In this July 24 article in the NY Daily News, Michael Daly wrote,

    Rosenbaum’s name, address and even phone number were passed to an FBI agent [in 2002] in a meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan by a prominent anthropologist who has been studying and documenting organ trafficking for more than a decade.
    Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California, Berkeley, was and is very clear as to Rosenbaum’s role in the ring.
    “He is the main U.S. broker for an international trafficking network,” she said.
    Her sources include a man who started working with Rosenbaum imagining he was helping people in desperate need. The man then began to see the donors, or to be more accurate, sellers, who were flown in from impoverished countries such as Moldova.
    “He said it was awful. These people would be brought in and they didn’t even know what they were supposed to be doing and they would want to go home and they would cry,” Scheper-Hughes said.
    The man called Rosenbaum “a thug” who would pull out a pistol he was apparently licensed to carry and tell the sellers, “You’re here. A deal is a deal. Now, you’ll give us a kidney or you’ll never go home.’ ”
    Scheper-Hughes felt she had to stop Rosenbaum. She met with the FBI.
    “I always thought of it as my Dick Tracy moment,” she said Thursday.
    She waited and waited for something to be done. The FBI may have been following the lead of the State Department, which dismissed organ trafficking as “urban legend.”
    “It would be impossible to conceal a clandestine organ trafficking ring,” a 2004 State Department report stated.
    Scheper-Hughes had better luck in Brazil and in South Africa, where law enforcement corroborated her findings and acted decisively…

Scheper-Hughes strikes me as an exemplary individual. She has been working hard to try to expand the role that anthropologists can play as socially activist public intellectuals.
Her work on the Israel case also, it strikes me, helps us to make sense of the many different episodes of human-body abuse that have been reported out of Israel.
She has also been one of the leaders of the international effort to ban “transplant tourism” and to draw up the 2008 Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism, which stated the following:

    The Istanbul Declaration proclaims that the poor who sell their organs are being exploited, whether by richer people within their own countries or by transplant tourists from abroad. Moreover, transplant tourists risk physical harm by unregulated and illegal transplantation. Participants in the Istanbul Summit concluded that transplant commercialism, which targets the vulnerable, transplant tourism, and organ trafficking should be prohibited. And they also urged their fellow transplant professionals, individually and through their organizations, to put an end to these unethical activities and foster safe, accountable practices that meet the needs of transplant recipients while protecting donors.
    Countries from which transplant tourists originate, as well as those to which they travel to obtain transplants, are just beginning to address their respective responsibilities to protect their people from exploitation and to develop national self-sufficiency in organ donation. The Declaration should reinforce the resolve of governments and international organizations to develop laws and guidelines to bring an end to wrongful practices. “The legacy of transplantation is threatened by organ trafficking and transplant tourism. The Declaration of Istanbul aims to combat these activities and to preserve the nobility of organ donation. The success of transplantation as a life-saving treatment does not require—nor justify—victimizing the world’s poor as the source of organs for the rich” (Steering Committee of the Istanbul Summit).

Anyway, there are a lot more dimensions to this story that I want to look at. I see that Wikipedia already has a lengthy and very informative page on the Aftonbladet-Israel controversy, as they call it. I think I’ll spend a bit of time over there now.

Qtube– what a resource!

If you want to learn about the form of Quakerism to which I belong, you should head over to the brand-new “Qtube” website published by Baltimore Yearly Meeting and click on a few of these great video-clips.
A small group of BYM Quakers were busy making these clips during annual sessions last month. Lots of the folks who were there volunteered to go and speak for them. (I kind of volunteered but then got busy with other things.)
I get a special pleasure watching these because I know so many of these people.

Cook and Elam on Israel’s organ-removal problems

Jonathan Cook had a great piece in The National yesterday, in which he pulled together from exemplary Israeli sources the history of serious problems at Israel’s government institute of forensics at Abu Kabir, near Jaffa.
He made the important point that the Swedish journo Donald Bostrom who wrote about the accusations and fears of illegal Israeli harvesting of Palestinian organs was making an unwarranted connection between the recent story of Jewish residents, including some apparent community leaders, in New Jersey, USA, being indicted on charges of organ trafficking and the much longer-running and very well established problems Palestinians and Israelis have experienced with organs being “harvested” (ugh!) without permission by officials at the Abu Kabir institute.
As far as I can tell, no connection between the two situations has yet been discovered. And the Palestinian claims about organ harvesting at Abu Kabir that Bostrom was writing about all related to the early 1990s; they were not current accusations.
Cook writes,

    the doctor behind the plunder of body parts, Prof Yehuda Hiss, appointed director of the Abu Kabir institute in the late 1980s, has never been jailed despite admitting to the organ theft and he continues to be the state’s chief pathologist at the institute.
    Hiss was in charge of the autopsies of Palestinians when Bostrom was listening to the families’ claims in 1992. Hiss was subsequently investigated twice, in 2002 and 2005, over the theft of body parts on a large scale.
    Allegations of Hiss’ illegal trade in organs was first revealed in 2000 by investigative reporters at the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, which reported that he had “price listings” for body parts and that he sold mainly to Israeli universities and medical schools. [6]

Cook used excellent sources, which are given at the foot of the article.
Despite that, and despite his history as a former reporter for the Guardian, the Guardian refused to publish this article in its “CommentisFree” section. Jonathan also gives us his record of his subsequent communications with CiF editor Georgina Henry.
Meanwhile, the Zurich-based Israeli investigative reporter Shraga Elam has also recently put a LOT of further information about Israel’s organ-removal problems into this post on his blog.
The post, which is now available in English, is tellingly titled The Swedish canard – not only smoke, but also fire.
It tells us that the government investigation committee that looked into allegations of wrongdoing at Abu Kabir in 2001 or 2002, made the following findings:

    * The Institute harvests organs for the purposes of teaching and research, without the consent of the families, in contravention of the Law of Anatomy and Pathology, and on the basis of incorrect self-interpretation.
    * The Institute transfers organs to research institutes and universities, in return for payments and reimbursement of expenses.
    * The Institute does not have full documentation regarding the organs that were harvested from for the purposes of research and instruction.
    * All the research done at the Institute were done with the full knowledge and agreement of Prof. Hiss.
    * Prof. Hiss did not conform to the instructions of the Ministry of Health regarding research, instruction and the consent of the families. The management of the Institute attempted to cover up and to obscure the the seriousness of the acts that appear in the report.
    * Irregularities were discovered in registration of the money that was given to the Institute in return to for the salvaging of the organs…

Elam also quotes a fairly lengthy article from Haaretz, published in 2005, that said this:

    The Breaking the Silence organization has collected new testimony from Israel Defense Forces soldiers on harsh actions carried out during the course of the fighting in the territories.
    Two of the testimonies pertain to a military doctor who gave medics lessons in anatomy using the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces.
    IDf sources said on Thursday that the army was unaware of the incidents and that the reports would be investigated.
    An IDF conscript who served as a medic in the Ramallah district some two years ago told Haaretz that the “lesson” had taken place following a clash between an armed Palestinian and an IDF force.
    The soldier said that the Palestinian’s body had been riddled with bullets and that some of his internal organs had spilled out. The doctor pronounced the man dead and then “took out a knife and began to cut off parts of the body,” the soldier said.
    “He explained the various parts to us – the membrane that covers the lungs, the layers of the skin, the liver, stuff like that,” the soldier continued.
    “I didn’t say anything because I was still new in the army. Two of the medics moved away, and one of them threw up. It was all done very brutally. It was simply contempt for the body. I saw other dead enemy bodies during my service. No other doctor did anything like that.”

It is clear that there is a lot more to this story than meets the eye.

“The White House regrets… “

The statement the White House issued yesterday in response to Netanyahu’s announcement that he would unleash the construction of hundreds of additional settler housing units before he considered submitting to any possible freeze on additional construction was weak and pathetic:

    We regret the reports of Israel’s plans to approve additional settlement construction. Continued settlement activity is inconsistent with Israel’s commitment under the Roadmap.
    As the President has said before, the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion and we urge that it stop. We are working to create a climate in which negotiations can take place, and such actions make it harder to create such a climate…

Right. So what is Washington going to do about this? Why, nothing. This statement itself is the wet noodle that’s being flapped in a desultory way somewhere vageuly in Netanyahu’s direction.
The text immediately goes on to underline its own wet noodleness, by saying this:

    The U.S. commitment to Israel’s security is and will remain unshakeable. We believe it can best be achieved through comprehensive peace in the region, including a two-state solution with a Palestinian state living side by side in peace with Israel.
    That is the ultimate goal to which the President is deeply and personally committed…

In other words, it’s saying that the reason the US is working for Arab-Israeli peace is because the administration judges that this will serve Israel’s security.
Small wonder, then, if Israelis might demur from that and say, “No, actually we have different ideas for how to preserve our security.”
The only way Obama or any other American leader will ever manage to register any solid gains in peacemaking is if he makes clear from the outset and through the whole process that the United States itself has a strong and direct interest in the speedy securing of this final peace, and that the US intends to pursue its own strong national interest in this matter. (Oh and by the way, we believe this is also in Israel’s interest.)
If the successful securing of a final peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians will entail a big political fight inside the US political establishment– as it surely will– then the only way the president can win this fight is by underscoring to all Ameicans, including Jewish Americans, evangelicals, and everyone, that this peace is in the interests of us all, as a citizenry.
If he tries to sell his efforts primarily by arguing “This peace is in Israel’s interest”– but Israel’s own leader then chimes in and says, “No, it isn’t”– who do you think is going to win that argument?
Better to frame it coolly and straightforwardly from the beginning and throughout as something that’s in the interest of 300 million Americans– and that yes, also, is in the interest of both Israelis and Palestinians.
… I am very worried by this statement, and by the fact that Obama has already lost 7.5 months of his presidency doddering around quite inconclusively on the settlement issue rather than going directly and firmly to the heart of the securing the final peace.

Lessons from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan

Someone called Artemy Kalinovsky has just published a thoughtful essay at the AfPak Channel arguing that, for precedents for many of the dilemmas the US military faces in Afghanistan, we should look no further afield than to the Red Army’s experiences in Afghanistan a quarter-century ago.
I have a lot more to say on this topic. But I’m tired.

IPS analysis of Iraq and related regional tensions

… is here. Also here.
One of the points I make there is this:

    One notable aspect of the political tempests now swirling around Iraq is that neither in Iraq nor in the U.S. has there been any significant movement calling for the U.S. to delay or reverse its continuing pullout.

I truly think this is significant. The adamant refusal of just about all (non-Kurdish) Iraqis to ask the US to rescind or reverse its withdrawal plans surprises me not one jot. But I do think the fact that no-one in the US is calling for the US to “do something” to prevent further carnage inside Iraq is particularly notable.
I say this as someone who has always said that the American military is the organization that’s just about the most ill-suited in the world to be able to “help” Iraqis if political turmoil overtakes their country…. This is a part of my deep opposition to “liberal hawkism” in all its manifestations.
So fundamentally I’m really glad there are no significant American voices calling for the US to use its military to try to “help” Iraqis right now.
(Of course, it also helps that it was the Bushies who signed off on the Withdrawal Agreement. So the republicans are not now able to raise the whole question of the advisability of a US withdrawal from Iraq as an ati-Obama partisan issue.)
But I am still, also, more than a bit mystified. Where have all the people gone who, before the Bush administration’s conclusion last November of the Withdrawal Agreement with Iraq, were ominously warning that the US “could not” withdraw with anything like a fixed timetable from Iraq because afterwards Iraq might “spiral into bloody chaos”, or whatever?
Where are those people now?
What I’m sensing is that– perhaps especially after the economic collapse of last fall– most Americans have turned their back on their previous fondness for exotic foreign military adventures. Both Iraq and Afghanistan turned out to be not nearly as much “fun” as they used to be for those people.
This is mainly good– especially if it means there will be far fewer loud calls within the US political elite for foreign military interventions, for allegedly ‘humanitarian’ or any other purposes, over the years ahead, than there have been throughout all the years since the end of the Cold War.
But it’s also a bit worrying, if it means that Americans have become much more inward-looking and xenophobic.

Visser goes 2.0

The wise and well-informed analyst of Iraq affairs Reidar Visser has responded to the pleadings of the masses (well mine, anyway) and created a blog, Iraq and Gulf Analysis, on which he’s posting his shorter research notes as well as links to his longer analytical pieces.
Mainly, this past week, he’s been writing about the ISCI succession and the newly reconfigured Shiite bloc, the INA. He’s also loaded onto the blog all his past pieces, which are thereby now handily archived and accessible for us.
Thanks for doing this, Reidar! Now all your work will show up in a timely way on my Google Reader.

More on Norway’s targeted divestment

The compendiously smart and well-informed blogger Profco has a lot of great background about Israeli-Norwegian relations over at TPM Cafe today.
S/he wrote it, of course, in light of Norway’s recent decision to divest itself of previous investments in the company Elbit, which produces electronics for Israel’s illegal Wall.
Profco notes that Haaretz has put a new lead onto its story about this, noting the following:

    The director general of the Foreign Ministry, Yossi Gal, on Thursday summoned the Norwegian ambassador to Israel, Jakken Bjørn Lian, to protest Norway’s decision to pull all of its investments from the Israeli arms firm Elbit.
    Following the meeting, the Foreign Ministry relayed that, “Israel will consider further steps of protest in the future.”

“Further steps of protest”! Like what? Does Israel, too, have a $400 billion sovereign wealth fund that it can deploy in defense of its national values around the world?
Maybe the Israelis will unleash dirty tricks, or an invasion and occupation, or a suffocatingly tight siege against Norway?
Um, maybe better not, since Norway is not only a pretty darned exemplary western democracy but also a member of NATO.
Gal’s spluttering threat looks really childish, all in all…
So now, when will other western investment institutions start following Norway’s excellent lead?

Pat Lang on the dangerous, continued rise of ‘COIN’-mania

Lang makes some important points here about the distortion of what should be a rational, nationwide discussion about the US military’s massive and troubled engagement in Afghanistan.
He writes,

    The interests of the reigning generals, the neocons and the Brothers of the Order of Counterinsurgency at CNAS are coming together now. The mechanisms for propagation of the faith in COIN as a vehicle for the program of the AEI crowd are widespread. Among them are internal blockage of access to blogs like this one by the armed forces, exclusion from the main stream media of dissenting voices and the editorial page of the Washington Post.

CNAS— the Center for New American Security– is a relatively young but currently very influential think-tank that’s been a hot incubator for “liberal” hawkishness. Michele Flournoy, one of its founders and its first president, is now Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy and may well replace Bob Gates as Secretary.
All the “mechanisms for propagation of the faith in COIN” that Lang mentions are important. But let’s hope that wise heads and the continuing military and financial realities of the situation in Afghanistan can speedily turn the debate in Washington in the direction it needs to go.
Oh yes, and some serious, pro-withdrawal popular pressure is really necessary, too.

Bravo, Norway!

Norwegian Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen today announced that the country’s $400 billion-strong sovereign wealth fund, the Oil Fund, has divested itself of all investments in the large Elbit company, based on Elbit’s involvement in the building and maintenance of the illegal Wall built by Israel deep inside the occupied West Bank.
Elbit, based in Haifa, makes surveillance systems used by Israel on the wall.
Bloomberg reports that Halvorsen told a press conference in Oslo today that,

    “[I]nvestment in Elbit constitutes an unacceptable risk of contribution to serious violations of fundamental ethical norms.”
    … “The International Court of Justice has ruled that the building of this barrier violates international law and the Norwegian authorities have expressed the same opinion… The decision to exclude this company is not on the background of its nationality. The surveillance system Elbit delivers to the Israeli authorities is a central component of this separation barrier, or wall.”

Amira Hass, reporting this development for Haaretz, notes that Halvorsen’s decision comes in response to vigorous protests that have been mounted in Norway against Norwegian involvement in settlement-related and Wall-related companies.
She adds,

    Norway’s pension fund is invested in 41 different Israeli companies.
    A research project by the Coalition of Women for Peace called “Who profits from the occupation” found that almost two thirds of those firms are involved in West Bank construction and development.

You can find the Coalition’s information on this here.
Norway’s decision on Elbit is a breakthrough. The Bloomberg piece gives more details about the operations, thinking, and other recent ethics-related decisions taken by the country’s Finance Ministry regarding the investment portfolio of the Norwegian Oil Fund.
It tells us that before today, the ministry, based on the advice of the ethics council that the Oil Fund established in 2004, had previously divested itself from 30 other companies, though some of these bans were later rescinded. For example, a ban was earlier imposed on Thales, Europe’s biggest maker of military electronics, because it was making cluster munitions; when that production stopped, the ban was rescinded.
I hope that portfolio managers in other institutions with large investment portfolios– including of course, pension funds and universities in the US– are looking closely at Norway’s latest decision and, crucially, the reasoning behind it.
Divesting from direct financial entanglement with Israel’s large-scale and continuing construction and control projects in the occupied territories strikes me as unquestionably the right thing to do, regardless what one thinks about the issue of a broader divestment from Israel as a whole so long as its government continues with these illegal policies.