[News] Body Parts and Bio-Piracy - Israel's National Forensic Institute
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Mon Oct 25 14:14:01 EDT 2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/
October 25, 2010
Exclusive CounterPunch Report
Tissue, Skin, Bone and Organ Harvesting at
Israel's National Forensic Institute
Body Parts and Bio-Piracy
By NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES
Editorial Note: Nancy Scheper-Hughes is professor
of anthropology at the University of California,
Berkeley, where she directs the doctoral program
in medicine and society. Since 1996, she has 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 organ and tissue harvesting in
several countries – from Brazil, Argentina, and
Cuba, to Moldova, Israel and Turkey, to India,
South Africa, and the United States. She is a
co-founder of Organs Watch, an independent,
medical human rights, research and documentation center at UC Berkeley.
What follows is her detailed report on the
tissue, skin, bone and organ harvesting conducted
for many years at Israel’s L. Greenberg National
Institute of Forensic Medicine, a.k.a. The Abu
Kabir Institute, under the aegis of its former
director and current chief pathologist, Dr.
Yehuda Hiss. Long before Donald Boström leveled
allegations of organ-harvesting from Palestinians
in the Swedish tabloid, Aftonbladet, in August
2009, causing furious accusations of “blood
libel,” Dr. Scheper-Hughes had already
interviewed Dr. Hiss and had on tape the
interview that forms part of her report here.
Dr. Scheper-Hughes says her purpose here is to
refute the controversial official statements of
the Ministry of Health and the IDF that while
there may have been irregularities at the
National Forensic Institute, they have long since
ended. To this day, she says, they have failed to
acknowledge, punish, or rectify various medical
human rights abuses, past and present at the
National Forensic Institute. While many of the
allegations are widely known, the testimony by
Israeli state pathologist and IDF (reserve) Lt.
Col. Chen Kugel has never been published in
English and his allegations are known only within
Israel. Dr. Scheper-Hughes invited Dr. Kugel to
speak publicly on this topic in the U.S. on May 6, 2010.
There are three lawsuits ongoing in Israel at the
present moment concerning the Forensic Institute
and Dr. Hiss. Two concerns alleged abuses against
the dead bodies of Israeli citizens. The third
concerns Rachel Corrie, a U.S. citizen who was
killed in Gaza in 2003 while protesting the
demolition of houses. Transcripts of court
proceedings show that Corrie’s autopsy was
conducted in contravention of an Israeli court
order that an official from the U.S. Embassy be
present. These transcripts also show Dr. Hiss
conceding that he had kept samples from Corrie’s
body without her family’s knowledge. Dr. Hiss
also testified that he was uncertain where these
samples now are. For his part, Dr. Kugel asserts
that abuses at the Institute continue to this day.
The Scheper-Hughes article takes care to note Dr.
Kugel’s description of his former mentor, Dr.
Hiss, as a man who saw himself as willing
to take great personal and professional risks
“to serve a noble end
to help the war-wounded
victims of terrorist attacks,” with his actions
“as something sublime, or even heroic, as a modern-day Robin Hood.” AC/JSC
In July 2009, I was identified as the
“whistle-blower” in the arrest by New Jersey FBI
agents of a Brooklyn organs trafficker, an
orthodox rabbi, Isaac Rosenbaum,1,2 whose
unorthodox business activities I had uncovered
several years earlier while investigating an
international network of outlaw transplant
surgeons, their brokers, lawyers, kidney hunters,
insurance and travel agents, safe house
operators, and “baby sitters” to mind sick and
anxious international “transplant tourists.” The
particular criminal network, in which Rosenbaum
played a bit part, originated in Israel through a
“company” run by a well-known crime boss Ilan
Peri, who had over the years established shady
transplant deals and kidney transplant outlets
and connections in Turkey, Moldova, the Ukraine,
Brazil, Germany, South Africa, the Philippines,
China, Kosovo, Azerbaijan, Columbia, and the United States.3
The arrests, amidst gunfire in the operating
rooms, of two of Ilan Peri’s transplant
associates – Dr. Zaki Shapira, formerly of Rabin
Medical Center, Petach Tikva, Israel, and his
Turkish associate Dr. Yusuf Sonmez – in a private
hospital in Istanbul in 20074 gave pause to the
Israeli Ministry of Health which, until then, had
permitted Israeli sick funds (medical insurance)
to reimburse living donors overseas with
transplants, many of them trafficked from the
former Soviet Union countries. The kidney sellers
captured in the Turkish shootout, however, were
two Palestinians, Omar Abu Gaber, age 42, and
Zaheda Mahammid, age 26. The organ recipients
were an Israeli man of 68, Zeev Vigdor, and a
younger South African man, John Richard Halford,
who were filmed on Turkish TV being carried out
of the operating room on stretchers and taken to
another hospital before being returned home,
without the transplants they had so desired.
After his release from a German prison in 2007,
Peri returned to Israel, where he was
investigated for tax fraud,5 detained, but
released because Israel’s organ-transplant laws
were murky with respect to the legality of
“brokering” overseas transplants using paid
donors. In 2008, two new laws were passed by the
Israeli Parliament (Knesset): one that paved the
way for applying brain death criteria that would
satisfy the ultraorthodox, and the other that
outlaws buying, selling and brokering organs for
transplant.6 The Ministry of Health no longer
reimburses overseas transplants unless they are
legal. Peri continues to organize transplant
tours, but today, he claims, using only deceased
donor organs and legal pathways.
In its heyday (1997-2007), the Israeli transplant
tourism/organ-trafficking network was an
ingenious and extremely lucrative
multimillion-dollar program that supplied a few
thousand Israeli patients and diasporic Jews
worldwide with the “fresh” organs and transplants
they needed. With Rosenbaum’s arrest, the U.S.
media were suddenly interested in the
Israeli-based transplant-trafficking scheme, now
that there was a proven link to hospitals in New York City.
The NYC Commissioner of Health and the FBI, whom
I alerted years earlier about the Rosenbaum
transplant gang, had dismissed the information as
lacking credibility. How could patients and
kidney sellers from two different countries be
smuggled into hospitals for illegal transplants?
How would they get through the red tape required
for any transplant operation? It sounded like an
old wives’ tale, an urban legend, or a blood
libel against Jewish surgeons and their patients.
And that was the worst suspicion of all.
Although the criminal justice system refused to
believe the story I gave them, transplant
surgeons working in hospitals in the U.S. who had
been approached by Ilan Peri and his associates,
including Isaac Rosenbaum, knew it to be true and
knew that some of their colleagues were complicit
in transplant crimes that ranged from violating
the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) in the
buying and selling organs, to fraud, deception,
money laundering, taking bribes, participating in
organized crime and human trafficking. The
Rosenbaum case, still in preparation, will be the
first U.S. federal prosecution of crimes related to organs trafficking.7
The Aftonbladet Story Breaks
Then, in August 2009, another organ-trafficking
story broke, one that linked Rosenbaum’s
U.S.-Israel organ-brokering and money-laundering
schemes with much older allegations of
organ-and-tissue stealing from the bodies of
Palestinian “terrorists” and stone throwers’
following autopsy at Israel’s National Forensic
Institute in Abu Kabir, a neighborhood of Tel
Aviv. These allegations, dating back to the early
1990s, were recycled by a Swedish journalist
Donald Boström in a left-leaning Swedish tabloid,
Aftonbladet, on August 17, 2009.8
Headlined “Our Sons Plundered for Their Organs,”
Boström’s feature story was a mix of organ-theft
accusations, seemingly coincidental connections,
and political rhetoric. The information was based
on Boström’s research in Israel and the Occupied
Territories during the first Intifada, and his
award-winning book, Inshallah,9 published in
2001, where Bostrom first introduced the
allegations of body tampering and
organ-and-tissue theft from Palestinian dead
brought for autopsy to the Abu Kabir Forensic
Institute. Boström’s article suggested that
Palestinian bodies were being harvested as the “spoils of war.”
The Aftonbladet story, instantly translated into
Hebrew and English, created a firestorm of
protest that included a libel lawsuit by
anti-defamation lawyers in New York City and a
boycott of Swedish industries. Boström was
labeled an anti-Semite, and the story he “dredged
up from the sewer” was labeled a despicable
“blood libel” against Israel and the world’s Jews.
I read these news reports with mounting dread.
Like Boström, I was once greeted during a
research visit to Israel in 2003 with an ugly
headline and centerfold ( “New Blood Libel on
French TV – Israel Steals Kidneys of Orphan
Children in Moldova”) in Makor Rishon, a
right-wing tabloid.10 The feature story reviewed
an hour-long TV documentary by French filmmaker
Catherine Bentellier, Kidneys Worth their Weight
in Gold. I had traveled with the filmmaker to
Moldova in 2001, where we interviewed people in
villages that had been ravaged by organs
traffickers targeting young men and trafficking
them to Turkey, the Ukraine and Georgia as paid,
sometimes coerced, kidney providers to Israeli
transplant patients. The “blood libel” accusation
featured medieval woodcuts and a blurry photo of
me patting the hand of a Moldovan orphan in his crib.
With respect to the Swedish “blood libel” against
the National Forensic Institute at Abu Kabir, the
main issue that wasn’t raised in the avalanche of
articles, editorials, and news columns published
in Israel, Europe and the United States was one
simple question, “Was the organ theft story
true?” And were there any grounds for linking the
tissue theft from the dead to the organization of
illicit transplant tours for Israeli patients?
Were there any grounds for linking the one story with another?
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.
The Ministry of Health thwarted his initial
acceptance. A private interview in his home was
proposed, but Hiss (and his lawyers) wanted to
review beforehand any questions I wished to
raise. Then the Ministry of Health denied Hiss
permission to speak with me at all, under any
circumstances. While being interviewed about the
effects of the changes in transplant laws and
practices, several medical and transplant
colleagues in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem often
interjected disparaging references to the
“despicable blood libel by the Swedish media,”
even though they knew full well – and knew that I
knew – that tucked inside Boström’s tabloid story
was a real medical and political scandal of
international proportions. I understood their
nervousness about the topic, but not their denial
of a known fact that was being manipulated into a
global political tool of the Israeli government.
Just before returning to the United States, I met
with Meira Weiss, a distinguished anthropologist
and former professor at Hebrew University, and
Chen Kugel, M.D., a forensic pathologist who had
worked side by side with his mentor, Yehuda Hiss,
at the Institute. Both Weiss and Dr. Kugel urged
me to write a rebuttal to those in Israel who
were “crying wolf” and using blood libel
accusations to bludgeon their critics into
submission. Weiss reminded me of the taped
interview, done in 2000, with Dr. Hiss, as she
herself had arranged the interview and was
present during it, and she was as stunned as I
was at the boldness and arrogance of Hiss’
revelations. Chen Kugel, a military officer
(reserve) and former forensic pathologist at the
Institute, agreed that the truth should be told
to the global community, though perhaps not by
them. Both had suffered enough. Both had been forced out of their jobs.
My interview with Yehuda Hiss at the Institute
had come about in the following circumstances. In
July 2000, three years into the Organs Watch
project, I was given a file and a photo by an
Israeli human rights lawyer, Lynda Brayer, at her
organization’s headquarters in Bethlehem. The
Society of St. Yves was created to provide legal
assistance to Palestinian families, whose
relatives had suffered the demolition of their
homes, forced removals, and other abuses. The
organization was then representing the family of
Abdel Karim Abdel Musalmeh, who was shot in the
head on November 8, 1995, by IDF snipers. The
single bullet that killed Abdel is clearly
indicated in the photo, which was part of the
autopsy record. A military order for the
demolition of Musalmeh’s home in Beit Awa, a
village outside of Hebron, preceded his murder by
the IDF as a “wanted person on the run.” The
lawyers were arguing a case to allow the home to
stand, so that Abdel’s widow and their six
children would not be homeless. 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.
When I first shared this information and the
graphic photo with Meira Weiss, she reassured me
at that time that there was no organ or tissue
harvesting at the Institute. She had witnessed
hundreds of autopsies – of Israelis, Arabs,
Arab-Israelis, Russian immigrants, foreigners,
and Palestinians. While bodies were opened and
organs examined, they were returned to the body,
except for small tissue samples as needed for
forensic examination in the laboratories above
the morgue. There were practices Weiss had
observed that were not in compliance with
international codes of ethics and internal law,
the 1975 Helsinki Accords on the use of human
subjects.11 There were acts of deviance by
certain staff members. Tattoos, for example, were
sometimes removed with a knife from the bodies of
new immigrants to Israel, mostly Russian and
Ukrainian, always suspect of nor being Jewish
enough. Tattoos gave them away, and so they were
treated with hostility. Penises might be
circumcised, postmortem, without the knowledge or
consent of relatives. The bodies of Jews and
Muslims were treated differently. When
Palestinians were brought in, following conflict,
they were subjected to a complete autopsy, as
required to produce information for the
Palestinian Authority. On the other hand, the
bodies of Israeli soldiers were respected, and
autopsies were often discreet and partial.
Allegations About the Forensic Institute
The National Institute of Forensic Medicine at
Abu Kabir, a Tel Aviv suburb, is Israel’s
national depository of dead bodies requiring
identification, examination, and autopsy. It
serves two purposes, on the one hand, as a
scientific institute affiliated with the Sackler
School of Medicine (Tel Aviv University), through
which it operates a state-of-the-art genetics
laboratory. On the other hand, the Institute is
controlled and closely supervised by the chevra
kadisha – the orthodox religious organization has
a virtual monopoly on all burials in Israel,
except for the military. The Institute is a civil
organization working under the Ministry of
Health. On the other hand, it is an arm of the
security police and the military.
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. But, in fact, allegations and official
investigations of organ-and-tissue trafficking at
the Forensic Institute have been ongoing in
Israel since 1999 up to the present day. Yehuda
Hiss has been, off and on, the focus of public
scrutiny. He has been sued, and he has been
decorated. He has been both upbraided and
rewarded, fired from his position as director of
the Institute, and given a new title, senior pathologist, with a higher salary.
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.
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.
Interviewing Dr Hiss
When I met professor Yehuda Hiss for the first
and, as it turned out, the only time, the
pathologist struck me as a formidable,
frightening, and brilliant man. A Polish
immigrant to Israel, with striking blue eyes,
short beard, wiry body, and a tense,
hypervigilant and belligerent demeanor, he
commands attention. The interview took place on
July 21, 2000, in Hiss’ office at the Institute,
in the presence of a staff member and Meira
Weiss. We were all, I think, shocked by his
revelations. Hiss allowed the interview to be
audiotaped, but parts of our conversation were
off the record, and the tape was turned off at
those moments. What follows now is a
transcription of the audiotape pared down, some asides deleted.
YH: My name is Yehuda Hiss. I am a forensic
specialist. Here we do forensic medicine, as well
as anatomical pathology. I do both. The main
issue, here, as compared to other countries, is
that [in Israel] we have only one [forensic]
Institute for the entire country. And it is very
conveniently located in the center of Israel, so
that the bulk of the population is located very
near to us
.There are another twenty medical
centers in various places, each with its own
department of pathology. But very few complete
autopsies are performed in Israel.
I began my training in anatomical pathology in
1974, in Sheba (Tel Hashomer). We had only three
residents, and we would perform about 850
complete autopsies [each year]. Today, there are
6-8 residents, and the hospital that trains
residents in anatomical pathology is three times
as big, but residents today perform only 40-50
mostly incomplete autopsies [per year]. So, this
is representative of what is going on in the
state of Israel. We did 800 per year 25 years ago
with fewer residents, and only 40-50 per year
today with many more resources. The only place
where complete autopsies are conducted in Israel happens to be here.
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 weregiven
some donations, equipment that we needed.
Whatever was done here was off the record, highly
informal. We never asked permission of the
family. But we would harvest only from bodies
that the family agreed to allow an autopsy. So,
we would never harvest where there were objections to the autopsy.
NS-H: The law allows this?
YH: The law demands permissions for autopsy, but
not for harvesting. I read this in the law
books
.There was an addendum to the law in 1981,
that you should ask the permission of the family
– for autopsy
. We were free to take skin from
the back of legs. We took cornea. We would not
take cornea from those bodies where we suspected
that the families might want to open the eyelids.
There are some Orthodox and some Oriental [Arab]
families who open the eyelids and throw sand on
top of them. We knew whom to avoid. Also we only
removed the cornea, not as we did in Teleshemer
[hospital], the whole eyeball. And we would close
and glue the eyelids, and we would cover any
place where we had removed something. And,
similarly, we would take [skin] only from the
back of the legs. In the beginning of the 1990s,
we began to take some long bones from the legs.
Then we were asked for cardiac valves, and we did
a few of them, because of the lack of
collaboration between us and major thoracic
departments. Then, beginning in 1995, we started
to do it more formally. It was done according to
a certain list of priorities, established by
various medical centers and specific departments.
It was done as a kind of semi-legal thing. At
that point, we would inform the Ministry of
Health. Before that time [1995], it was only
between me/the Institute and the various
departments and medical centers – informally.
Later, we decided that it should be done through the Ministry of Health.
NS-H: Your chief is the Minister of Health, but
you were free to do quite a lot without any interference from them?
YH: Yes, correct, but there are things that
really should be done with some instruction and
through the Ministry of Health. It was unclear for many years.
NS-H: In some countries of Latin America, the IMF
[Forensic Institutes] is under the jurisdiction
of the police, but in others, like Cuba, it is
under the Ministry of Health. In the old South
Africa, it was under the military police – and here?
YH: Independence is very important. This
institution was established in 1954 under the
auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Then, in the early 1970s, it came under the
police department. Then, in 1975 or ’76, it came
under the Ministry of Health. We are now part of
the Ministry of Health, and the director-general
of the ministry is our boss, but we are actually
completely independent. Until a few years ago,
all medical centers were under the Ministry of
Health, but in the late 1990s they have become
independent. There are only a few still directly
under the Ministry of Health. Since then, they
are more interested in what we are doing here and
in our capacities [to harvest tissues], and so we
now get more demands and we feel that it should
be regulated. We want to be on record, too, for
the various costs that are involved in the
harvesting of skin and cornea, bones, pulmonary
values and so forth
. But until then, this was
just between us and the various hospitals that we
serviced, but we wanted there to be some control over this.
NS-H: How were the prices set?
YH: In 1996, we made up a list of the various
medical services that we provided, a list of
hundreds or thousands of shekels – there were
expenses that we wanted to recoup. We would
collaborate only with public hospitals. On one
occasion, about ten years ago, there was a case
of a head of a department who used one or two
corneas donated to the hospital from a pathology
Institute – and he used them for his private
patients. This is the only case known to me –
where tissue donated for general use was used
privately. Since 1998, because of popular
pressure, there was a sharp decline in autopsies,
and we were made to ask permission of all
families for autopsy and for harvesting, or for
dissection, or for training of military medical
students. It was all because a man went to the
newspapers just recently to scream that his son,
who died in military service, was used for
medical experimentation and medical training. And
a furor resulted in the country and permissions
for autopsies declined. Since then – about two
years ago [1998] – we were told to ask permission
for everything. [This is a reference to the late
Sergeant Zeev Buzaglo of the Golani Brigade, who
was killed in a training accident in April 1997.
When his father, Dr. Haim Buzaglo, a
pediatrician, came to see his son’s body, he saw
that it had been harmed at the Institute – NS-H].
NS-H: Why [is] the military [involved in this]?
YH: There is a special relationship between the
Institute and the army because of the current
political situation in Israel. All Israelis feel
that we all have an obligation to help out in
some way, and because we all served in the army,
we all have a personal stake in the army ever
after. We are all linked to the army. And because
of this, we took it for granted. We never asked.
We thought it was part of the duty of all Israelis to cooperate.
YH [pointing out data from his files]: Look, here
is the data. Since January–April we received here
705 bodies. Of these, 500 were not suitable for
harvesting. Either the bodies were too
decomposed, or because of infections. Only 175
were adequate for harvesting. We called all of
them, and 98 refused. Twelve we could not locate
the next of kin. Only 65 out of them agreed. So,
I would say we have an acceptance rate of less than one-third.
When we cannot find the next of kin, we do not
harvest by law. Originally, the law required only
that we inform the family that harvesting is
going to take place. Now, we not only inform, we
have to ask them for permission. So, because of
this one bad incident, the backlash is overriding
the Parliament and the law of the land.
[Here NS-H explains how in some states in the
U.S. there is “presumed” consent for cornea
harvesting, as in California, but most people
were totally unaware that it was going on. The
law was more or less kept a secret.]
YH: Yes, this was our policy for many years, and
then one case, one bad scandal, and it is all
over for us. Now, young military medical
personnel no longer can get the training they
need and, when they are sent to Lebanon or to the
Palestinian territories – and there are injuries,
they have to intervene without proper training,
so that they are actually experimenting on living
soldiers. That is what all this has brought us.
No previous experience, no training whatsoever
with the human body. They have to practice
[surgery] on dogs – but never on humans! This is
an absurdity! I would not want anyone to perform
a tracheotomy or colostomy on me without any
previous experience or training. Would you?
Today, they do virtual training on computerized
bodies and so on, but it’s not the same thing.
NS-H: So, no biotech firms that want your material?
YH: In Israel, 100 per cent of the skin harvested
goes to Hadassah Hospital’s skin bank – it is for
military purposes only – no biotech firms have
access. There is another skin bank in the south
of the country, to which the Institute is not
linked – but I know that if something happens –
if one of the burn centers need skin for a
private patient, say, they can take skin from the
Hadassah skin bank, but they have to repay it.
Logistically, we are only linked to Hadassah.
Since six months ago, we have a new man working
with us downstairs, who is a kind of mortuary
assistant, and he is harvesting skin, bones,
cornea, and bones. Before him, there was only an
arrangement with the army – they used to send us
here every week a plastic surgeon, who would come
here to harvest skin for the skin bank in
Hadassah. This lasted for many years. More than
12 or 13 years he did this. Since 1987-1988,
every other week, a plastic surgeon would come
here to harvest skin. But now we no longer have
this direct relationship with the army since this
latest scandal. Now, we have our own mortuary
assistant, who is paid to harvest for us all the
skin, bone, cornea, etc., that is needed. He
helps out in other activities as well.
NS-H: When you ask permission, do some say you
can take this and not that organ?
YH: Some say do not touch the heart or the brain
– some are afraid you might want to take the
skin. But it is not like you are skinning a
rabbit or something, and we say, no, it is not
like that – it is gentle, there is no blood – we
are not peeling the skin off. It is not like
scalping a person. We take only a superficial
layer off – from the back and the legs. And we
tell them, too, that we are only taking the thin
tissue [from the eye] and not the globe.
In order to fulfill both Jewish and Muslim laws
about the disposal of the dead, everything is
done immediately. We start working here at about
6 in the morning. By 7 a.m., we have the whole
list of all the bodies that are going to be
coming in that day. Only some of these are going
to be autopsied. And then this person here draws
up a list about what will be done to whom. And then we are on the phone.
NS-H: Are there special techniques for how to present this request to people?
Staff member: We have to know how to read people.
YH: – Yes, but this is not for me. From the very
beginning, I said, “Please free me from this! I
cannot possibly talk to people about these things.” I am not patient like this.
Staff member: He loves the dead. But not the living! [Laughter]
YH: Yes, I switched to forensics from clinical
medicine because I wanted the patients to shut up
already! So, we say that X will do it – but she
is too busy – and, really, we need a social worker to do this
NS-H: Any other body parts taken – like pituitary glands?
YH: When I was a medical resident, we would take
pituitary glands. Today, we have chemical
substitutes, but when I was a resident, I used to
rush to the refrigerator to deposit pituitary
glands in a bottle with water. I would collect
them – sure, of course! Also, tiny bones from
inside the ear – these are very good for some
surgical procedures. We would do this about twice a year.
NS-H: Some of these small bones were used for
training NASA astronauts for space travel, and
its effects on balance? And what about transnational sales?
YH: You can buy cornea from Russia for $300 each,
I think
. In Moscow, you can get a kidney for
$20,000 and cornea for a few dollars, because
they really don’t care
At every autopsy, they
take what they want, and they have a tremendous
stockpile of organs that they can draw on. They
have skin and cornea. In some large medical
centers in Russia, you can get fresh kidney that
they get from auto accidents – and in Turkey as
well. So, in both places you can get transplanted
organs for just $20,000 – including the kidney –
because they have a stockpile of them. I know
because I was part of a transplant procurement
organization, and we studied this. It is very
cheap. It is well done by very good surgeons
there. In fact, there is a surplus of kidneys in
Russia. They have surplus because fewer people there can afford transplants.
NS-H: There is some doubt about whether Russia
was using the international standards for determining brain death.
YH: Yes, sometimes our surgeons would accompany
our Israeli patients to Russia, and they would
perform the surgery there and the kidney was from
a Russian. The surgery would be performed by
Israeli doctors in Russia, with Russian kidneys.
Some are leading transplant surgeons from Israel...
NS-H: Yes, transplant tourism, some of this has
been reported in the newspapers.
YH: Right. They would go once a month for a few
days and would perform five or six surgeries
there, and the patient would come back here to recuperate.
NS-H: The UCSF medical ethics board decided that
if people who want to break the law and travel to
China or the Philippines to be transplanted, then
we will not provide you with follow-up care – you
can go to a private institution.
YH: Many things in Israel are done on a personal
basis and through connections
I think that in
Israel everything should be as equitable as
possible. One should not have to depend on
connections or money. If advertising and the
media would only persuade the Israeli population
to donate organs from deceased victims from
trauma
[ and even though there is nothing in
Talmudic law against organ harvesting from the
dead], a religious family will find a rabbi who
will agree with them. I try to tell them how
important it is to donate, and they will say, “I
need to discuss this with my rabbi” – and nine
times out of ten they come back with a negative
answer. That is, the answer that they want
.
Dr Chen Kugel, Whistleblower
As can be seen from the transcript, Hiss readily
admitted to the non-consensual, informal tissue,
skin, bone and organ harvesting to serve the
needs of the country. 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. Although it was in
violation of tissue and organs laws, Hiss thought
it could be justified for a war-torn and
traumatized country like Israel. Hiss admitted
that the organs-and-tissue harvesting was
“informal” and its legality unclear. From his
perspective as a state pathologist, little harm
was done by the careful removal of some organs
that would never be missed by the deceased and
about which the family would never have to know.
Medical students in military training were
brought into the morgue after Hiss and his team
completed their legally mandated autopsies, to be
trained in the removal of organs.
After my tape was released in Israel, on December
19, 2009, to Israeli TV’s Channel 2, government
officials for the army and the Ministry of Health
admitted that organs and tissues were harvested
from the dead bodies of both Palestinians and
Israelis throughout the 1990s, but that the
practice ended in 2000. Dr. Hiss, however,
publicly denied everything on tape – including
his words to me. Today, he says that he denies it
all – the stockpiling of body parts, the perjury,
and the organ harvesting. He denies everything.
He says that everything was all done in agreement
with and by law, and that families consented to
harvest for transplantation. No organs were taken
for studies, he said, none at all.
In May 2010, Dr. Chen Kugel and Meira Weiss spoke
at a special conference I organized at the
University of California, before a working group
of experts, including anthropologists, transplant
surgeons, pathologists, detectives, prosecutors, and human rights activists.
Chen Kugel, the unheralded and original (unnamed
outside of Israel) whistle-blower on the Forensic
Institute, said that the situation was much worse
than what Yehuda Hiss admitted in his interview
with me in 2000. Kugel’s comments stand as a
first-person account from a military officer and
a forensic pathologist. When he returned to
Israel to work at the Forensic Institute in 2000,
after several years in the United States, where
he was working in various hospitals and forensic
programs, he says he immediately realized that
something was terribly wrong. He tried to address
the problems with three medical residents, and
with them together to have a meeting with the
director. Kugel was the spokesperson, and he told
Hiss that it was wrong to harvest organs and
tissues without permission, and that “giving
false evidence in court is also not okay.” This
went nowhere, and so the group wrote a letter of
complaint to the Ministry of Health, outlining
the illegalities. The Ministry of Health reacted
with alacrity: they fired the three residents and
punished Kugel, who, as a military officer
working for the IDF, could not be fired. Then
they went to the media and spilled the entire
story about what exactly was going on.
Kugel: “Organs were sold to anyone”
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.
Amid the uproar prompted by the whistle-blowers,
Hiss waged his own media campaign and tried to
convince the public that everything that was done
was to serve a noble end, to help the war-wounded
victims of terrorist attacks, and the sick. He
presented his conduct, in Dr. Kugel’s descripton,
“as something sublime or even heroic, as a
modern-day Robin Hood. Taking from the dead and
giving to the innocent victims.”
So, whom were the organs taken from? Kugel asked
rhetorically. The answer was they were taken from
everyone, from Jews and Muslims, from soldiers
and from stone throwers, from terrorists and from
the victims of terrorist suicide bombers, from
tourists and from immigrants. There were only two
considerations – the physical condition of the
body and its organs, and the ability to conceal what they were doing.
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. The Institute, Kugel said, was
counting on one thing: that most Israelis do not
view the body after death except once, to verify
that the body is the right one. The body is
wrapped in a winding sheet, or might be wrapped
in plastic sheets for the burial company to come
for it. In that case, the staff would warn the
burial employees, who were not well educated, not
to open the sheet because the body was
contaminated with an infectious disease. It was
more difficult to take organs from soldiers
because their bodies were supervised by the
military, which was more difficult to fool. “But
organs were taken from soldiers,” Kugel said. It
was easier to take tissues and organs from the
new immigrants, and, needless to say, easiest of
all to take from the Palestinians. They would be
going back across the border, and, “if there were
any complaints coming from their families, they
were the enemy and so, of course, they were lying
and no one would believe them”.
What Kugel found most amazing was the uproar
around the Boström article, when there was
abundant detail in the Israeli press about the
Institute whose affairs were discussed heatedly
by commissions, finding blatant evidence of
illegalities despite the attempts to destroy all
the evidence. After these things were exposed, it
took two years for the judge, or the head of the
special inquest, to decide whether or not Hiss
should be sued. Then, it took the police two
years to begin a serious investigation. The end
result was that Hiss was removed as director of
the Institute but, as previously noted, retained
as senior pathologist and given a salary
increase. Kugel was dismissed from his post
because, during the investigation, he spoke with
one of the witnesses who had buried evidence –
human body parts – and thus was seen as
interfering with the trial. He was censored and
blacklisted from teaching at all but one of
Israel’s universities. 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. The Institute’s conduct was
motivated by money, by power, and by
authoritarian paternalism of the sort that says,
“We know what’s good for you, we’ll decide what
happens to you, the person who doesn’t know
anything. We’ll decide.” And that’s the reason
why that happened, and Dr. Kugel asserts it is happening to this day.
Questions About Rachel Corrie’s Autopsy
On March 14, 2010, the Haifa District Court heard
testimony in the civil law suit filed by the
family of the slain U.S. citizen and Gaza peace
activist, Rachel Corrie, against the State of
Israel for her unlawful killing in Rafah, Gaza.
Corrie, an American college student and human
rights activist, was crushed to death on March
16, 2003, by a Caterpillar D9R bulldozer. During
the hearing, Dr. Hiss, who conducted the autopsy
of Rachel Corrie at the request of the Israeli
military, admitted that he had violated an
Israeli court order that required an official
from the U.S. Embassy to be present as a witness.
Hiss stated that it was his policy not to allow
anyone who is not a physician or a biologist to
observe autopsy. Hiss admitted that he had
retained samples of tissues and organs from
Corrie’s body for examination and testing without
informing the Corrie family. Hiss was uncertain
about whether the samples had been buried with
other body samples from the Institute. Corrie’s
parents, Cindy and Craig, were shocked by these
chilling admissions and really do not know quite
what to make of them or what, if anything, they
should do about it. They are seeking, they told
me, only the truth and symbolic damages of $1.00.
The prevention of harm to others is, they say, far more important than money.
Finally, what links the story of Yehuda Hiss at
the National Forensic Institute and Isaac
Rosenbaum and the international network of organs
traffickers in Israel? Perhaps only the same sad
fact that hysteria about organs scarcities –
whatever that chilling phrase evokes – have
driven both the medical abuses of the dead and
the medical abuses of those who were trafficked
to service transplant tourists from Israel to New
York City, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, among
other sites. When Dr. Zaki Shapira began putting
out feelers for kidney sellers in the early 1990s
to serve the needs of his transplant patients at
Bellinson Hospital in Tel Aviv, he found them
close at hand, Palestinian guest workers.
Palestinians were, he told me in Bellagio in 1996
at a conference on organ trafficking,
“pre-disposed” to sacrifice their organs. Or,
perhaps, to be sacrificed. It works both ways. CP
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is the author of several
books on poverty and health, including
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520075374/counterpunchmaga>Death
without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in
Brazil – listed by CounterPunch in its top 100
non-fiction books published in English in the
20th Century. She can be reached at:
<mailto:nsh at berkeley.edu>nsh at berkeley.edu
Footnotes
[1]. N. Mozgovaya, US Professor is whistle
blower in Rosenbaum arrest. Haaretz 26 July,
2009.
<http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1102799.html>http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1102799.html.
[2]. M. Daly Anthropologist's ‘Dick Tracy
moment’ plays role in arrest of suspected kidney
trafficker. New York Daily News 24 July 2009.
[3] Nancy Scheper-Hughes,2008,“Illegal Organ
Trade: Global Justice and the Traffic in Human
Organs” in Living Donor Organ Transplants, edited
by Rainer Grussner,M.D. and Enrico Bendetti, MD.
New York: McGraw-Hill; N.
Scheper-Hughes,2006,“Kidney bKin: Inside the
Transatlantic Kidney Trade”, Harvard
International Review (winter) 62-65; “N.
Scheper-Hughes, (2004) “Parts Unknown: Undercover
Ethnography in the Organ Trafficking
Underworld”, Ethnography 5(1): 29-73; N.
Scheper-Hughes,2000, The Global Traffic in
Organs, Current Anthropology 4192): 191-224
[4] “Israeli doctor said detained in Turkey for
illegal organ transplants. Three other Israelis
said detained, including 2 alleged kidney donors
and a recipient;15 people held.” Haaretz News Service, January 1, 2007.
[5] In several detailed email exchanges
(2006-2008) from a criminal lawyer (name
withheld on request) I learned that the
government of Israel decided to pursue the
international crimes of transplant surgeons and
brokers operating out of Israel by means tax fraud investigations.
[6]
<http://www.health.gov.il/>http://www.health.gov.il/trans”
plant/about_adi.html “Knesset approves new organ
donation law”,
<http://www.counterpunch.org/http//www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3523461,00.html>http//www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3523461,00.html
[7] United States District Court of New Jersey:
criminal complaint: United States of America v.
Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, : Mag. No. 09-3620 a/k/a “Issac Rosenbaum”, July 2009
[8] English translation of Donald Bostrom’s
article can be found at:
<http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5691805.ab>http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5691805.ab
[9] Donald Boström, 2001. Inshallah :
konflikten mellan Israel och Palestina. Stockholm: Ordfront.
[10] Zeev Galilee, 2003. First Source (Makor
Rishon) –“Pangs of Conscience” (Musar Klayot)
New Blood Libel on French Television: Israel
Steals Kidneys of Orphan Children in Moldavia, 24 October 2003.
[11] Meira Weiss, personal communication and
paper read at Organs Watch conference combating
traffic in organs and tissues, UCBerkeley, May 7, 2010.
For an audio link for the Hiss interview go to
<http://www.counterpunch.org/nhnotes.html>nhnotes.html.
Freedom Archives
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