[Jtsummers]

Organ harvesting from prisoners is apparently legal in China (per the Wikipedia article, haven't followed through all the links yet). So apparently some not-crazy people think it's not really bad or crazy people are running the show. Let's assume not-crazy. They have a source of organs, people they intend to execute, and they apparently make use of this. There's a lack (or circa 2006 was) of a detailed registry showing the source of transplant organs. There's some evidence (but not conclusive) that some of those organs were from Falun Gong members.

So China is harvesting organs from prisoners. They have not maintained an accountable record of which prisoners were used that could be offered as verification. Torture and coercion of Falun Gong prisoners does happen. In an environment of poor accountability and oversight with a willingness for brutality, the potential abuse cannot be immediately discarded.

If you think I'm just bashing China, see the US and its various torture abuses over the past 15 (in particular) years. Abu Ghraib is not something that most people would have expected from the US Army, but it happened.

Bush was a public figure. Bush was probably not crazy. Most US people are not crazy. Not-crazy people think that dehumanizing and torture of prisoners is really bad. But it happened.

This is a different scale (thousands, not hundreds) and different issue (killing and harvesting, not torture) but your assumptions are insufficient to discard it out of hand. They do, however, provide a solid basis for skepticism.

But had the Chinese officials and agencies involved done their due diligence they should have had records demonstrating the source of organs. If for no other reason than the medical knowledge for recipients. A closed examination or audit of those records would have sufficed to put this case to rest (for the vast majority of people).

[analyst74]

I think you make an excellent point, and my assumptions are probably not sufficient to lead to my conclusions.

I'd like to point out though, organ harvesting death row prisoners is on a vastly different scale of acceptance than organ harvesting less-informed cult followers who has harmed nobody except themselves. The former is unethical because it incentivizes unjust sentencing, but the wrong part is unjust sentencing, not necessarily organ harvesting(although this is controversial and can get philosophical); the later would affect many millions of people, enraging orders of magnitude more.

Bottom line, did Jiang order the crackdown of falun gong and resulting in some being tortured or even sentenced to die? Yes. Did he order organ harvesting of falun gong members? Most definitely not.