Folks, CNN is now caught in its worst nightmare, and
I can't even gloat. It's tragic and it may cause lost sleep, the blame game,
finger pointing, internal review, infighting, or worse. Congressional hearings
may be in order, as an outside
investigation.
Ordinarily, I seem to be glib while I kick
the news media, as has become my habit in copies of my internet column. (The
media? Aren't they the bent, craven, depraved crew of sock puppets, managed by a
corrupt cabal? And of course, I work on a book manuscript called Genocidal
Correctness....)
Well, something is qualitatively different
today, and I take no pleasure in saying "I told you so." The key man who now
occasions the disgrace of CNN (and the rest of America's MSM) is an individual
named Lu Guoping. And, two more essential names in the story are David Kilgour
and David Matas.
The occasion is to the disgrace of the
media, because it is proving a central theme in my book: Genocide has been
occurring in China, and America's MSM has been sweeping it under the rug.
Somehow, I was thinking that my book might be fought off when released, as if it
were a proposition simply from the temerity of John Kusumi. However, it now
appears that my ringing indictment will also stand as a record of (unfortunately
true) history.
The larger matter – that perhaps 40,000
people are dead – will be documented by many historians, and will stand as a
black mark against the regime of Communist China, which is the first villain in
this case.
As an aside, journalists pride themselves
because they file "the first draft of history." What they too often forget is
that historians file the later drafts of history, without the pressure to be
politically correct in contemporary context. Historians can say things that,
apparently, journalists can't.
It's time to review the crime, and the
response – or lack of response. The crime is the forced harvesting of vital
organs from prisoners of conscience – Falun Gong practitioners – in the gulags
and prison system of Mainland China. These people, who shouldn't even be in
prison to begin with, lose their lives in a process of organ harvesting, and the
organs are transplanted into paying customers.
They may even still be alive as the organs
are removed – they are selected, as healthy specimens, for just-in-time
execution. It's diabolical. It combines theft with murder with profiteering.
Capitalist types could note that it monetizes Falun Gong persecution. This is
organized, systematic, machine-like evil through deliberately chosen policies of
the Chinese government. The only comparable evil might be Nazi Germany's medical
experiments, performed on unwitting prisoners in World War II.
There is plenty of gravity to this matter if
it sinks in that this is real – a confirmed crime against humanity that may
still be in progress. And, it happens in a context that has also gone unreported
– the crackdown against Falun Gong in China. To be fair, it was reported back in
1999 when it began. To be accurate, it dropped out of the news after, late in
1999, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed a "free trade" deal with
China.
As an aside, when did Bill Clinton ever say
that we should be "trading away" our concern for human rights? He didn't! The
deal was ostensibly about trade, and was not about human rights, per se. I
believe that news media behavior was decided at the news media level, not the
White House. In other words, sociopathic managing editors made their call and
took the trade deal "to the next level" of sanitizing China's public image. If
it were mine to arrange, I would have Nuremberg-style trials for Peter Jennings,
Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather – accessories to genocide, each.
Let's look beyond my aside, so that we can
lay out a time table of notable occasions in my narrative.
Before the Organ Harvesting
story
- 1999: Falun Gong persecution
begins. Media covers it. Then, White House signs trade deal.
- 2000: Ted Koppel has three
guests for it, and zero against it. Congress passes the trade deal.
- Each year since: News media
dodges many stories emerging from the Falun Gong crackdown.
- 2003: This author gives a
speech and coins the term "genocidal correctness."
- 2004: Anti-communist Falun Gong
related newspaper, the Epoch Times, debuts in English.
- 2005: People begin quitting the
Communist Party in droves. CNN dodges the story.
The Organ Harvesting
story
- March 9, 2006: The Epoch Times
breaks the story of forced organ harvesting at a facility called Sujiatun (in
Shenyang City, Liaoning Province, China).
- Shortly thereafter: A military
doctor of Shenyang military zone corroborates the horror and indicates that a
network of 36 facilities participate.
- April 4, 2006: The Coalition to
Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (CIPFG) is launched.
The heckler on the South Lawn of the
White House and CNN's Wolf Blitzer
- April 20, 2006: With an Epoch
Times press pass and on the South Lawn of the White House, Dr. Wenyi Wang
becomes the "Rosa Parks" of this cause, by shouting at the U.S. and Chinese
Presidents who were meeting together, "Stop the killing!"
- April 21, 2006: CNN's Wolf
Blitzer on The Situation Room has Wenyi Wang as a guest. On the way in during
the elevator ride, Blitzer's producer coaches and
warns Wang: "Don't talk about organ harvesting!" On TV,
Blitzer proceeds to act like a school headmaster, scolding Wang as though the
only story was her disruption at the White House. She was there with a
message. CNN didn't get the message – although they knew enough to say "shush"
about that message just before the on-camera appearance.
The Kilgour-Matas report and CNN's
Anderson Cooper
- May 24, 2006: CIPFG seeks and
obtains the help of Canadian public figures, David Kilgour and David Matas, to
investigate the allegations of organ harvesting.
- June 17, 2006: While Kilgour
and Matas were investigating, CNN's Anderson Cooper did a report about "organ
tourism," about a California man who went to China for an organ transplant.
Cooper did raise an eyebrow at China, saying that a prison population was
"vulnerable." But, he stopped short of mentioning Falun Gong, so there was no
exposure of that persecution / crackdown campaign, and no indication that the
organ sources may be prisoners of conscience.
- July 6, 2006: Kilgour and Matas
issue the first edition of their report, later renamed Bloody Harvest. After
looking over all available evidence they wrote, "the government of China and
its agencies have put to death a large but unknown number of Falun Gong
prisoners of conscience. Their vital organs, including hearts, kidneys, livers
and corneas, were virtually simultaneously seized involuntarily for sale at
high prices." They concluded "that there has been and continues today to be
large-scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong
practitioners."
The Kilgour-Matas report is the smoking gun.
David Kilgour is a former Member of Parliament in Canada, and was Secretary of
State for the Asia Pacific region. David Matas is an international human rights
attorney. With their political and legal backgrounds, they would know better
than to be casual or inexact with public statements. While they knew the stakes
in international relations, and while they knew the enormity of the charges
against Communist China, they nonetheless undertook to inform the world of their
findings.
The Kilgour-Matas report was never debunked
by the news media; however, for their own convenience reporters wrote that the
entire organ harvesting story was discredited. Apparently, reporters will
manufacture lies to suit their convenience and to preclude further research or
writing. The Wall Street Journal printed this falsehood, but stopped before
citing any source or basis. It's akin to printing, "They say it's not true."
That invites the question, who are "they"? Perhaps, do U.S. reporters have
communist masters in Beijing?
What sociopathic reporters were doing was
clearly an example of genocidal correctness and of making a choice to err on the
side of death, rather than to err on the side of life. Their omission is now
exposed, at least to history.
And at CNN? The release of the Kilgour-Matas
report did not cause a ripple. The point being that Kilgour and Matas got the
story, and CNN didn't. For that matter, the American public was kept in the dark
for the next two years.
Around the world, Kilgour and Matas got
their points across. At the end of 2006, I analyzed their clip sheet, and I
learned interesting things about where their publicity was (and
wasn't):
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (8),
The Calgary Herald (6), The Globe and Mail (4), National Post (4), Ottawa
Citizen (4), Sydney Morning Herald (4), CBC News (3), China Post (3), NZ Scoop
(3), St. Louis Post-Dispatch (3), The Christian Science Monitor (3), The
Ottawa Citizen (3), The Toronto Sun (3), Abbotsford News (2), AFP (2), Asia
News (2), Canadian Christianity (2), Chronicle Herald (2), CounterPunch (2),
Cowichan Valley News Leader (2), CTV (2), Free Market News (2), Langley Times
(2), South China Morning Post (2), Taipei Times (2), The Halifax Daily News
(2), The Leader-Post (2), The Vancouver Sun (2), Times Colonist (2), Victoria
News (2).
The single-mention outlets are a wide
variety, including the Times of India, Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun, the Chicago
Tribune, the Irish Medical Times, the Guardian, and the Washington
Times.
Who is missing from this list? United
States opinion leaders are missing - the Associated Press, UPI, New York
Times, and Washington Post. ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and CNN. There is no sign of
these news outlets in the list. Should we write them off as anti-Falun Gong
media? Or as closer to Jiang Zemin than to freedom and
democracy?
That's what I wrote at the end of 2006.
Later I saw the Wall Street Journal refer, in passing, to the organ harvesting
allegation as "discredited."
Far from discredited, there is more to this
story. Kilgour and Matas came out with a second edition of their report in
January, 2007. And now, on August 22, 2008, they have come out with more highly
damning evidence. What they have now is a video admission from Dr. Lu Guoping
combined with a prior audio recording from the same doctor.
In the audio, the doctor admits that he and
his colleagues went to prison to select Falun Gong practitioners for involuntary
organ donations to be used in transplants. In the video, the doctor admits that
he was the person interviewed in the audio recording.
The audio is part of a series of recordings,
taken by investigators for Kilgour and Matas. They called hospitals throughout
China, posing as relatives of patients who needed transplants. They asked the
hospitals if they had organs from Falun Gong practitioners for transplant. The
callers got recorded admissions throughout China that hospitals did have Falun
Gong organs for sale.
The video is a documentary by Phoenix TV.
Kilgour and Matas also note, "The video is being distributed by Chinese
embassies and consulates; its authenticity is therefore endorsed by the Chinese
government."
The audio and video, taken together are "an
undeniable, inculpatory admission of the harvesting of Falun Gong practitioner
prisoners for profit," according to the investigators.
These investigators hardly needed one more
nail in the coffin, but they got it. We may consider it that the Chinese
government is "busted" for the practice of Falun Gong organ
harvesting.
And, who else is busted is CNN. Yes,
Virginia, CNN had this story on April 21, 2006. If the story were well exposed,
it would lead to the international community taking action to stop what is akin
to a holocaust in progress. (The world swore, "Never again" after the Nazi
holocaust....)
Rather than expose the story, CNN left space
for the Chinese government to add two more years of killing into the record of
history. When my book comes out, the ink will be dry on a true-life, morally
reprehensible drama that matches my thesis-genocidal correctness-to a
tee.
I take no pleasure in saying "I told you
so," but how well did I hit the mark? Yes in fact, they have been bent, craven,
depraved, self-serving, shortsighted, and genocidally correct. And that's only
in the United States. In China, it's been deadly. At many news outlets beyond
CNN, there is a person who has had the job to circular file, or bury, story
after story after story from the Falun Gong persecution. If this were the
America of the 1990s, they would never have "just let go" the Falun Gong
crackdown. But more recently, genocidal correctness became their M.O.; their
standard procedure; business as usual in America's hideous newsrooms.
Rather than "I told you so," since I can
just about say "checkmate," instead I would prefer to say, "Game over." Each
newsroom is challenged to find a shred of integrity, and to do the right thing
with this story. (The Kilgour-Matas report is at organharvestinvestigation.net.)
Perhaps my prediction (first made in 2006) will come true:
Everyone else knows about China's crimes
against humanity; the last to know will be Brian Williams (NBC News anchorman)
and Jacques Rogge (IOC President, who cannot be happy as this story tarnishes
the Olympics).
www.kusumi.com
John Kusumi ran independently for U.S. President in
1984, as the teenager going up against Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale. He was
the first Generation X politician in U.S. federal elections, and Ronald Reagan's
youngest political opponent ever. In 1989 Kusumi launched the China Support
Network, a grassroots organization of Americans supporting the Chinese democracy
movement - amid outpouring of response to the massacre of college students and
other civilians in and around Tiananmen Square. In 1994 Kusumi launched Xcalibur
Development Co., incorporated in 1995 as XDC, Inc. The firm creates software and
technical services, generally in the B2B (business-to-business) space of
contracting and specialized consulting, with a Fortune 500
clientele.