-Caveat Lector-
The Toronto Star:
15 November 1999
RCMP hint at blood probe charges
After $2 million and two years, investigation enters `new phase'
By Tim Harper
Toronto Star
Ottawa Bureau
OTTAWA - It's taken almost two years and cost more than $2
million, but there are now signs that the pieces from one of the
most complex puzzles ever handed to the RCMP are beginning to
fall into place.
The criminal probe into this country's tainted blood scandal
begins a ``new phase'' as early as this week, with investigators
hinting at more dramatic developments in the weeks ahead.
Although they will not discuss a time frame, there now seems
little doubt that charges will be laid in what has been described
as one of this country's greatest injustices.
Victims are cautiously allowing hopes to be buoyed.
Senior RCMP officers, mindful of huge, fruitless probes into
Airbus and Air India in recent years, concede there is pressure
to move on a file which has taken investigators around the world.
``We are moving at a more intense pace,'' said Inspector Rod
Knecht, the lead investigator who heads a team which works from
an unmarked, nondescript building in the shadow of the RCMP
detachment in Newmarket.
----------------------------------------------------------------
`We have put our trust in the RCMP. We want them to get
their man. It's extremely important for the memory of those
victims, both living and dead.'
- Mike McCarthy, hemophiliac and leader in compensation
battle
----------------------------------------------------------------
``We have become very focused in our efforts and very clear in
the direction we're heading. Something might be happening in the
next couple of weeks.'' For Ontario hemophiliac Mike McCarthy and
other victims, there is a sense that a long wait for justice
might be coming to an end.
``We have put our trust in the RCMP,'' McCarthy said. ``We want
them to get their man. It's extremely important for the memory of
those victims, both living and dead.''
Between 1983 and 1987, tens of thousands of Canadians were
infected with HIV - the virus that causes AIDS - and hepatitis C
from bad blood or blood products.
The task force has already eaten up about $2.3 million from a
cash-strapped RCMP budget.
Fourteen full-time staff work under tight security in the
Newmarket office, including police investigators, medical and
legal specialists and liaison officers who work with victims.
They also have their own support staff.
They have interviewed more than 1,000 people and seized more than
100,000 documents.
The probe has taken them across Canada and the United States, as
well as Costa Rica, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, the
Netherlands and Australia.
They have logged more than 700 calls to a toll-free tips line.
Next week marks the second anniversary of the release of the
report of the inquiry into the tainted blood scandal by Mr.
Justice Horace Krever. In the wake of his report, the RCMP
immediately pledged to see whether there was enough information
for a criminal probe.
Their inquiry was upgraded to a full-fledged investigation in
February, 1998.
Still, there is concern that RCMP investigators may not be
setting their sights high enough and may be content with charging
middle-level bureaucrats.
``I've always said they should be going as high on the food chain
as possible,'' said a Toronto man who holds key information and
has twice been interviewed by the RCMP. ``I was always taught
that the buck stops with the political masters.''
McCarthy, while saying no one wants a witch hunt, said many
victims would like to see the French experience repeated in
Canada.
In France, former prime minister Laurent Fabius and former
ministers Edmond Hervé and Georgina Dufoix were charged with
manslaughter in that country's tainted blood scandal. Only Hervé
was convicted, although he was given no penalty.
RCMP spokesperson Sergeant André Guertin would not discuss
whether former ministers in Canada were interviewed.
``We've gone wherever the investigation has taken us,'' Guertin
said.
There are at least four separate threads woven into the police
investigation.
a.. There is the destruction of documents by bureaucrats in the
now defunct Canadian Blood Committee, itself the subject of a
separate probe within the probe.
Eight years worth of audio tapes and transcripts were trashed by
officials in a decision made by Dr. Jo Hauser, then the executive
director of the committee.
Information commissioner John Grace, in a report released three
years ago, found the documents were destroyed after the committee
received a request for them under Access to Information
legislation.
b.. There is the role of the federal bureau of biologics and the
Canadian Red Cross in allowing Canadians to become infected with
tainted blood. In his report, Krever fingered the charitable
organization - and he named its former deputy national director
of blood transfusion services, Dr. Martin Davey - for allowing
its response to the blood-borne AIDS crisis to lag behind other
nations in the mid-1980s.
c.. There is the separate issue of the importation of tainted
blood from prisoners in Arkansas, brought into Canada by a
Montreal-based blood broker and used by Canadian hemophiliacs.
The same tainted blood product was exported around the world by
the Canadian broker.
An Arkansas doctor, Michael Galster [author of the novel BLOOD
TRAIL written under the pseudonym Michael Sullivan], blew the
whistle on the for-profit bleeding of prisoners at Cummins
Prison. Many of those prisoners were HIV positive or intravenous
drug users.
After the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cracked down on the
use of prison blood in 1983, the prison exported blood to Canada
through Montreal-based Continental Pharma Cryosan.
About 1,000 Canadian hemophiliacs infected by that blood product,
including the estates of those who have died, have launched a
$1.1 billion lawsuit claiming Ottawa negligently allowed it into
the country.
``The RCMP is our only hope of spurring an investigation here,''
Galster said from Arkansas. ``I've always prayed the RCMP would
stay on top of this as hard as possible to do something
officially, so our FBI and justice department would be forced to
act.''
Last January, Galster turned over his documentation to RCMP
officers.
The RCMP, however, has not inquired about an incident last May
when Galster's clinic in Pine Bluff, Ark., was firebombed.
In a curious twist, files were stolen from the Montreal offices
of the Canadian Hemophilia Society the same night.
No charges have been laid in either incident.
d.. There are the actions of Armour Pharmaceutical Co., a
U.S.-based manufacturer of blood products which supplied the
Canadian Red Cross. Krever was told the company ignored warnings
that its method of heat-treating the product to protect against
the HIV virus was not totally effective.
At least seven hemophiliacs, most of them children, contracted
HIV from two lots of Armour blood products which had been cleared
by Health Canada's bureau of biologics.
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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