Discrediting Wu
September 14, 1997
This is my opinion of Harry Wu’s videos he showed us last Tuesday evening. For those who didn’t see Harry Wu’s presentation, he was speaking on human rights violations in China through forced prison labor camps and illegally taking human organs for transplants.
On the “60 Minutes” video, we were told Wu and Ed Bradley went undercover with a hidden camera. Later, Wu told me personally that you can’t hide a camera; you could only put it in some sort of a suitcase with a lens-sized hole in it. Anyone could see the camera.
He lied through his teeth. Television shows like “48 Hours,” “Primetime Live,” “20/20,” “Dateline NBC” and “60 Minutes” do it all the time.
He showed a BBC video — that was rejected by the American media — about illegal kidney transplant surgeries.
This footage was taken at high angles, in an operation room. Some operation rooms have those observation balconies around the top so doctors can watch.
In order to film from such angles, Harry would have to film from up there.
Why now did he set the doctors to perform illegal surgery on camera? Why didn’t I see the doctors make any incisions? Why were they attempting to operate from the front to get to the kidneys? And especially, how did he ever get such overhead shots — direct overhead shots?
He would have either have permission to go in with a camera boom, or stage the whole thing.
The video where he went into the restaurant to get the doctor to confess also was pure bogus. Wu was nowhere in that video — only men eating with one’s face blurred out.
Why weren’t they looking into the camera? Why didn’t he blur the other faces, or just zoom into the individual “doctor?”
This also makes me ask: what was there that identified these men as doctors? Who, besides Wu, goes up to a man, points a camera in his face and takes his confession?
I think I could do better. I could just videotape a little bit off some TV doctor show and dub in the voices confessing to just about anything. At least my video would look like real doctors.
And just in case I couldn’t electronically blur the doctor’s face, I would just smear some Vaseline on the TV picture tube. That would protect the doctor’s identity just as well as Wu ever could.
That evening, Wu spoke in circles throughout his speech. He lacked solid evidence and never got to the point. For example, he criticized the forced labor in prison, but the only example of force in the forced prison labor was in the “60 Minutes” video, where a woman said the prisoners who didn’t do good work would get beaten.
The focus of the illegal act from this video was that it’s the American law, not Chinese law, that America doesn’t accept imports from prison labor.
Afterwards, while taking questions, Wu was asked if he was directly taking money from the CIA. He never answered that question directly. Instead, he spoke in circles, saying, “Why would the CIA take someone like me?”
I don’t like Harry Wu. I, too, asked him point blank, yes or no, if he was in the CIA. He said “no.” Then he lied to me about hidden cameras. He lied through his teeth to me.
He goes around dressing as a policeman sneaking prison photos, he poses for “60 Minutes,” who claim they used a hidden camera, when his video said otherwise.
He can’t even make a movie about illegal kidney transplant surgeries without making it look staged.
Then he comes to America, dumps his Chinese citizenship and squeals like a pig, calling himself a journalist.
But the way I see it, the difference between a journalist and a spy is ethics. It’s sad, because whatever truth there was in what was going on, got lost along with Wu’s ethics.
Mike Schuster
Ames