LifeSiteNews, a right-wing online news outlet with somewhat dubious standards of reportorial accuracy and a never-failing slant on even the most straightforward stories, offers this shocking headline:

Chinese Military Doctor Witness to over 60,000 “Involuntary” Organ Donations – most from Falun Gong

That’s gut-wrenching. The fact that it’s almost certainly false, however, only detracts from the serious issue of telling the truth about Chinese organ-transplant abuses and repression of the Falun Gong.

Sixty thousand involuntary organ harvests – witnessed by one doctor? Assume each harvest procedure takes 1 hour. The story makes a rather sketchy and unlikely link between the organ harvest system and China’s one-child policy, but assuming that the two have both been running for the same 30-year period, that makes 2,000 harvests per year witnessed by this doctor, for a total of 2,000 hours per year devoted to cataloging illegal organ procurements. In other words, he has devoted more or less an entire working career (and likely several times that cumulative total of hours) to “witnessing” these events. Even assuming he personally was participating in the procurements – the only reason such a person would be likely to be present in so many cases – we are to understand that he spent every hour of his entire working life doing illegal organ procurements and has performed 60,000 of them in total?

But, of course, that’s not what he did. The actual text of the story offers a slightly different version:

A Chinese military doctor has revealed that he has personally encountered falsified documents for over 60,000 detainees – many of them members of the Falun Gong religion – which falsely claim that the individual named is voluntarily donating an organ.

Ah . . . he isn’t a “witness to over 60,000 involuntary organ donations” – he’s a witness to a lot of papers that document voluntary donations. And he knows these papers are false . . . how? We aren’t told. He examined all 60,000 of them carefully enough to make this determination? Apparently so. Nobody objected? I guess not.

This claim is at least more plausible than the headline implies; it might even be physically possible for him to have done this. But we are not left with a very firm impression of exactly what happened, who did it, how we know the story is believable, or even who this “witness” is. (Any takers on a bet that it’s a member of Falun Gong?) That of course did not stop LifeSiteNews from declaring as a matter of fact that:

China’s 30 years of brutal, forced abortion to implement its one-child policy and its subsequent devaluing of human life has led has led to a new atrocity.

They know, you see, that these atrocities actually took place – and that they are a direct result of the one-child policy, and somehow linked to abortion. We should believe them on the basis of their detailed, documented description of the events and their complete lack of language indicating an ideological bias with regard to these issues.

And it’s a good thing that we have that confidence, because otherwise the details would be just too grueseome to be believable:

[Victim "donors"] are brought in to a military facility for what they are told is a routine exam, given local anaesthetic, and then the doctor removes the organ – sometimes even a heart – while the prisoner is still conscious. Those who survive the process are later cremated alive.

“One thing worth noting is that during the entire process of an organ transplant, if the transplant is not successful, the documents on the organ source and the body must be destroyed within 72 hours,” testified the unnamed doctor, who is now elderly. “All of the documents and the body (sometimes even a live person) must be cremated and the cremation certified by military management personnel. These military personnel have the right to arrest, detain, or execute any doctors, police, paramilitary police, or research staff who leak the secret to the outside.”

As reported by the Epoch Times news on line, “underground” organ transplants occur at a rate many times that of the number publicized by the government. “For example, if the government says that there are 30,000 cases a year, then the real number is about 110,000. There is an abundance of organ sources, and this is another reason why the prices for organ transplants have decreased.”

So it’s not 60,000, but 30,000 per year, except it’s really over 100,000 per year. That would make over a million screaming, cremated organ donors in the last decade alone. It has been confirmed that China has harvested organs from executed prisoners – itself a grave ethical issue – but recent reports suggest that China “only” executes between 3,000 and 10,000 prisoners per year. This leaves 20,000 (or is it 100,000 . . . or 107,000?) people cremated alive each year without anyone noticing or reporting it.

One is hesitant to dismiss charges of abuse, especially from a country with a documented history of severe rights violations, abuse of prisoners, frequent executions, and illegal organ harvesting. On the other hand, it is difficult to credit such charges coming from an unreliable, ideological organization that traffics in exaggerated claims (“brutal forced abortion” almost invariably means “social pressure” – whether or not a good thing, certainly not what its critics claim it is). The sheer mathematical implausibility of these charges, and their almost psychotic content, would make them dismissable out of hand, were it not for the similar unthinkability of the first reports of Nazi extermination camps and cremation ovens.

Still, it seems impossible to imagine how China could be doing what this report suggests. It is possible the entire thing is a fabrication; it is perhaps more likely that it is some highly-distorted version of a less-shocking truth (as with the known cases of “forced abortions” and prisoner organ harvests). Keeping an open mind, we should consider whether these charges might even be true as stated, but, as I say, the internal evidence alone seems against it. And that leaves us not with a semi-plausible story to go on, but in fact no story at all. If the basic story is almost certainly a fiction, we have no grounds for concluding that even some of it is true.

And that is the worst thing. It is vitally important to monitor abuses around the world, and to draw attention and opposition to them. But when the information about them comes mainly from ideological parties with a known history of exaggeration and falsehood, it only creates a terrible dilemma: to treat the information in keeping with its known (lack of) reliability, and risk overlooking another Nazi-scale atrocity, or to waste time, resources, the world’s credulity, and one’s own credibility on someone else’s fraudulent axe-grinding.

I am very concerned about reports of Chinese organ transplant abuses. I just wish most of those reports, and the worst of them, didn’t come from nutcase wingers with a fleeting relationship to reality. They have only harmed the cause of the (putative) victims they seek to help, by having made themselves so unreliable over the years, and then splashing this kind of drama across the Internet.