The Briefing Room

March 16, 2006

Investigate Nov 05, Return to Erebus

EREBUS: What really happened?

Twenty six years ago, New Zealanders were shocked as their mid evening TV programmes broke format for a newsflash. A somber Dougal Stevenson advised an Air New Zealand DC10 with 257 people on board was overdue from a sightseeing flight to the Antarctic. The airline was advising waiting friends and relatives at Auckland airport not to panic. STUART MACFARLANE argues misinformed commentators are now trying to rewrite the history of New Zealand’s worst aviation disaster:

The cockpit transcript of the last few minutes of the flight indi-cates these guys had no idea where they were as they flew straight into the foothills of Mt Erebus. Everyone in the cockpit seemed to be throwing in their penny’s worth. It was like the country cousins up from Ekatahuna, mum with map book on her knee, lost on Spaghetti Junction,” wrote Brian Rudman in the New Zealand Herald.
“It has been instructive to reflect on the loss of TE901 on Mt Erebus … It is clear from the cockpit transcripts that at least some on the flight deck knew that they did not know where they were. It was therefore a substantial error of judgement that the pilot did not immediately climb his aircraft to a safe altitude at the moment in which the doubt was first raised,” said Keith Rankin on Scoop.
“There was probably more than one cause involved, as I’ve read the Erebus situation, but it is certainly clear I think in retrospect that the pilots could not bear the full blame for what happened,” said Michael Cullen on Newstalk ZB reported in the New Zealand Herald.

CHIPPINDALE REPORT
On 28 November 1979, Air New Zealand’s DC10 flight TE901, on a sightseeing mission to Antarctica, crashed into the slopes of Ross Island. It was at 1,500 ft (457 m) and heading towards the 12,450 ft (3,795 m) Mt Erebus. Its number 1 engine, and most probably all three engines, were in climb settings of 94% of maximum power just below a level which might damage the engines. The ground speed was 257 knots or 476 kph. On impact the shock waves passed through the victims’ bodies at about 960 kph killing all 257 before nerve impulses at about 140 kph could transmit any pain, so the victims felt nothing.
New Zealand’s Chief Inspector of Air Accidents of the Ministry of Transport, Ron Chippindale, investigated the cause of the crash. Ian Gemmell, a member of the airline’s management team, and its principal witness who argued the airline’s case that pilot error caused the crash was said to be Chippindale’s principal adviser and perhaps only adviser regarding the technicalities of jet flight and DC10 navigation. He accompanied Chippindale to the DC10’s manufacturer and was among those who went with Chippindale to the crash site. He was present when Chippindale interviewed pilots. Reports from Chippindale’s office were leaked to the media who reported the aircraft had been flying in cloud.
When the Chippindale Report was published it said the crash was caused by pilot error. The pilots didn’t know where they were, “the crew was not certain of their position”. “The crew were not monitoring their actual position in relation to the topography adequately”. “The crew descended beneath the minimum altitude permitted by the airline.” The co-pilot “should not have overcome his natural caution in relation to cloud covered high ground.” The captain decided “to continue the flight at low level toward an area of poor surface and horizon definition.” The report’s findings coincided with the arguments Gemmell subsequently put forward on behalf of Air New Zealand in claiming the crash was caused by pilot error and the airline’s management was blameless.

MAHON REPORT
Justice Peter Mahon was appointed on 11 June 1980 as a Royal Commission of Inquiry to inquire into the crash. The inquiry was in public, the evidence extended over 75 days and filled 3,083 pages, while submissions of counsel took 368 pages. The total of exhibits produced was 284. In contrast the Chippindale Report’s inquiry was held in private and, with few exceptions, statements of evidence were not taken. Finally Chippindale made no evidence public. The Mahon Report overturned Chippindale’s findings of pilot error and instead decided that “the single dominant and effective cause of the disaster was the mistake made by those airline officials who programmed the aircraft to fly directly at Mt. Erebus and omitted to tell the aircrew.” “… neither Captain Collins [the pilot] nor First Officer Cassin [the co-pilot] nor [Brooks and Moloney] the flight engineers made any error which contributed to the disaster, and were not responsible for its occurrence.”
He went on to say in respect of Air New Zealand’s case which had asserted that the pilots were to blame for the crash “… the palpably false sections of evidence which I heard could not have been the result of mistake, or faulty recollection. They originate, I am compelled to say, in a pre-determined plan of deception. They were very clearly part of an attempt to conceal a series of disastrous administrative blunders and so, in regard to the particular items of evidence to which I have referred, I am forced reluctantly to say that I had to listen to an orchestrated litany of lies.”
Air New Zealand applied for judicial review to the Court of Appeal against the “orchestrated litany of lies”. The Court held Mahon had no jurisdiction to make such a finding and he could not say that unless he had first warned the witnesses that he did not believe their evidence. Mahon appealed to the Privy Council but it upheld the Court of Appeal, saying there was no evidence of a pre-determined plan of deception, he didn’t warn the witnesses, and his reasoning was illogical. Much publicity followed. What is now forgotten by many is that the Privy Council did not accept the Chippindale Report as being correct and indeed went out of its way to uphold the Mahon Report in exonerating the pilots from blame for the crash.

THE COCKPIT VOICE RECORDER
The Chippindale Report printed a transcript of the tape from the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) which recorded the last 30 minutes of the flight and which has been repeatedly quoted by the media in subsequent years. The cockpit area microphone (CAM) recorded voices from the cockpit area including those of passengers on the flight deck and, when the door was open, those behind the flight deck including persons in the galley. It was discovered that the transcript printed in the Chippindale Report was not the original transcript which had been transcribed by a team working in Washington at the Audio Laboratory of the National Transportation Safety Board in accordance with accepted procedure (Washington transcript). This procedure required the transcribers to be familiar with the persons whose voices were recorded, familiarity with the aircraft type, and familiarity with flight deck procedure and terminology.
The Washington transcription team under the direction of an air accident inspector consisted of Captain Barney Wyatt, Don Oliff, the chief flight engineer, and Captain Arthur Cooper who had over 13,000 hours flying time including over 2,000 as pilot in command of DC10s and was an experienced navigator. All knew the deceased flight crew members well, having crewed and socialised with them on many occasions. Cooper knew the engineer Moloney even better than the others. They had a long time friendship dating back before Cooper joined Air New Zealand in 1965 and continuing until Moloney’s death. Chippindale did not possess any of the requirements. Cooper was the only one of the Washington team to give evidence. He was appointed on behalf of the Airline Pilots Association. Air New Zealand appointed the other two members of the transcription team but did not call them to give evidence.
The Chippindale transcript was instead one rewritten by Chippindale himself and contained not less than 55 departures from the Washington transcript. Each departure varied from one word to several lines. For instance one question he added to the Washington transcript seemed to imply one engineer was saying to the other called Bert that the weather was a bit thick here, even though neither engineer was called Bert. Other changes he made removed from the record evidence of the crew’s competence during the flight. Air New Zealand’s principal witness, Gemmell, listened to the tape with Chippindale.
The most lasting damage done by the Chippindale Report was its accusations that the transcript showed the engineers were trying to convince the pilots who were lost not to fly into cloud thereby risking destruction. This folklore is illustrated by the articles Rudman and Rankin have written.
That Chippindale’s allegations are fiction not fact is proved first by the fact that they are contrary to the “crew-loop” discipline, secondly by the record of the very words spoken by the two engineers Brooks and Moloney and the two pilots Collins and Cassin, and thirdly by overwhelming evidence also disproving his 1987 claims based on tone of voice.
First, the crew-loop or fail-safe system to ensure the safe flying of DC10s did not rely on the skill of the captain but relied instead, in the usual case, on the triangular link of three people on the flight deck, being the two pilots in front and the flight engineer seated between the two pilots but slightly to the rear of them. In this instance, on flight 901 it was more than just a triangular link as there were two engineers on the flight deck. In the case of flight 901 it can be virtually taken for granted Brooks would be facing forwards from the time he took over from Moloney and the critical period starts from then. In all probability Moloney would have been standing slightly to the rear of Brooks’s left shoulder. The CAM would have been positioned directly above or slightly to the rear of Brooks’s head so it would pick up the voices of Collins, Cassin, and Brooks clearly.
Airlines run with fail-safe systems. If a main system fails then a backup system will take over and carry the load. The same fail-safe system is applied to the flight crew and was called the crew-loop or simply the loop. Flight deck communication involves a continual flow of comments, questions, observations, and confirmations being circulated between the three members of the flight crew. So that if one member should fail to respond in an appropriate manner, then the other two must take the necessary action, which is to remove the unresponsive member from the loop, that is to remove him from flying the aircraft. A vital part of the crew loop is detecting and interpreting body language.
Gordon Vette, author of Impact Erebus, discoverer of sector whiteout, and a witness before the Royal Commission gave a dramatic example of the loop as practised in the DC10 simulator. A note is secretly passed to one of the pilots saying “You’ve had a heart attack”. Without showing many overt signs the pilot ceases to take part in flying. If the loop works well the two other crew will notice this within seconds. The engineer will pull the seat withdrawal lever to pull the “dead” pilot clear of the controls and check the flight position and instruments with the other pilot before attempting first aid.
One of the engineers, Brooks, was an instructor in fail-safe training. He was a firm disciplinarian on the flight deck and came down hard on anyone who seemed not to be concentrating.
Cooper told the Royal Commission:
“It is also important to understand the three crew ‘fail-safe’ concept utilised in flying an Air New Zealand DC10. One of the basic fundamentals of this philosophy is that it is the inherent responsibility of every crew member, if he be unsure, unhappy or whatever, to question the pilot in command as to the nature of his concern … if a pilot in command were to create an atmosphere whereby one of his crew members would be hesitant to comment on any action, then he would be failing in his duty as pilot in command. I have no doubt that if any crew member on Captain Collins’ flight had any concern about the progress they would have not hesitated to advise Captain Collins of that concern. Some remarks in the tape transcript are suggested [by the Chippindale Report] as having been directed to the Captain and to have indicated concern on the part of the person who made the remark [an engineer].
“Any such remark would be in the nature of a challenge in the ‘fail-safe’ concept and would be responded to. When the transcript shows that there has been no response to a remark, the remark must be regarded as conversational and not a challenge nor critical or important as to the operation of the aircraft and indeed it must be a matter of doubt as to whether Captain Collins was aware of the remark having been made at all.”
Secondly, the record of all that was said by Collins and Cassin during the critical final period of the flight demonstrates that there was no acknowledgment by them of the remarks which Chippindale attributed to the flight engineers and which he claimed showed increasing concern on their part.
If the remarks had indeed been made as a challenge in the crew loop and Collins or Cassin heard them, the pilots would have responded to them. If the pilots had not responded, the engineers would have repeated them. This disproves Chippindale’s allegations. Furthermore, the actual words spoken by the engineers show no sign of so-called mounting alarm.
The following records all that was said by pilots Collins and Cassin from 46:14. It proves from that time at least they did not acknowledge the remarks which Chippindale attributed to the flight engineers and which he claimed showed increasing concern on their part. If the remarks had indeed been made as a challenge in the crew loop and Collins or Cassin heard them, then the pilots would have responded to them. If the pilots had not responded, then the engineers would have repeated them.
This is because of strict fail-safe or “crew-loop” discipline imposed on flight crews under which they must respond to comments made by others in the flight crew to prove they heard and understood the comment and where appropriate are reacting to it. Furthermore Brooks was himself a fail-safe instructor. The extract printed below demonstrates the crew-loop in operation. Note especially from 48:55. Times GMT, 46:14 being 0046:14 GMT.

THE FINAL 3 MINUTES: WHAT THE PILOTS SAID
46:14 Collins: Two nine three oh ... right
Cassin: Yes
46:21 Cassin: A thousand to go.
Collins: O.K.
46:24 Cassin: Alt, Nav track, vert speed.
Collins: Speed.
46:28 Cassin: Speed I see.
46:43 Cassin: Yep Yep.
47:06 Unidentified voice: Down to two thousand feet. [Comment from source other than pilots on the aircraft arriving at 2,999 ft. The acceptance of this altitude is not queried.]
Collins: Yes
Cassin: Yes
47:20 Collins: You’ve got speed set up there anyway, haven’t you?
47:23 Cassin: Yes alt cap (nav) track
47:28 Collins: Speed nav track alt ...
47:43 Collins: We might have to (drop) down to fifteen hundred here I think. [Washington transcript. Chippindale rewrote “drop” as “pop”. Both Collins and Cassin with the best forward vision concur in the decision to descend to 1,500 feet.]
Cassin: Yes O.K.
47:47 Cassin: Probably see further anyway.
47:49 Cassin: It’s not too bad. [This is before the commencement of descent from 2,000 feet to 1,500 feet.]
47:55 Cassin: I see vert speed for fifteen hundred feet
48:10 Collins: Right [Chippindale transcript. Not recorded on Washington transcript]
48:12 Cassin: (Terrain) fifteen hundred
48:22 Cassin: Alt hold
48:30 Collins: We didn’t get that TACAN frequency did we?
Cassin: No
48:38 Unidentified voice: What’s the frequency one oh nine two? [Comment from source other than pilots]
48:40 Cassin: Well we think that’s what it is, but it’s channel twenty nine.
48:46 Collins: Actually those conditions don’t look very good at all, do they? [Note he says “those” not “these”.]
Mulgrew: No they don’t. [Comment from source other than pilots]
48:50 Mulgrew: You’re down at one one four now are you? [Comment from source other than pilots]
48:51 Collins: Fifteen hundred.
48:55 Collins: Have we got them on the tower? [Cooper believed from his personal knowledge of the parties and his involvement in the transcription that this is Collins’s first positive indication of concern. But his tone of voice showed he was puzzled not worried. It was asked as a question. Although Collins is not concerned about terrain obstruction, he is saying that something is not jelling here, we are not getting some sighting of these buildings, or any of the things which I would have expected would be coming into view.”]
48:59 Cassin: No ... I’ll try again. [Cooper explains that Cassin also sounded puzzled not anxious. His confirmatory demur put into the loop.]
49:04 Collins: Try them again
Cassin: O.K.
49:24 Brooks: I don’t like this. [Brooks’s first positive indication of anxiety or concern. It’s the first verbal as opposed to tonal demur. [Sitting between pilots but about 400mm behind them almost certainly facing forward. His view to the right is blocked by the engineer’s panel, so he has lost sight of Cape Bird (which he believes is Cape Bernacchi) on the right. Mulgrew seated and Moloney standing on his left have probably blocked his view of Cape Tennyson (which he believes is Cape Royds). He has gone into full whiteout, so he expresses concern. The pilots are still only in sector whiteout.]
49:50 Impact

THE FINAL 3 MINUTES: WHAT THE ENGINEERS SAID
46:39 Brooks: Where’s Erebus in relation to us at the moment? [Question is directed to either Moloney or Mulgrew]
Mulgrew/Moloney : Left (about four or five miles) about 11 o’clock. ((Sound of paper rustling))
46:43 Mulgrew/Moloney: Left do you reckon?
Mulgrew/Moloney: Well no [pause] I think.
Mulgrew/Moloney: I’ve been looking for it.
46:46 Mulgrew/Moloney: I think it’ll be erh
46:48 Brooks: I’m just thinking of any high ground in the area that’s all.
Mulgrew: I think it’ll be left yeah.
Moloney: Yeah I reckon about here.
Mulgrew: Yes [pause] no no I don’t really know.
47:02 Mulgrew: That’s the edge. [Mistakenly identifies Cape Royds on edge of Ross Island when in fact looking at cliffs on left of Lewis Bay.]
47:06 Unidentified: [unintelligible word] Two thousand feet.
Collins: Yep.
Cassin: Yep.
47:16 Brooks: Yeah I just
[47:18] Brooks didn’t want to block the window too completely with it.
47:20 Collins: You’ve got speed set up there anyway, haven’t you?
47:23 Moloney: Alt cap. [Moloney has announced he has seen the enunciator light displaying “alt cap”, showing the aircraft is initiating a capture of the selected altitude.]
47:43 Collins: We might have to (drop) down to fifteen hundred here I think.
Cassin: Yeah OK.
47:55 Cassin: I see vert speed for fifteen hundred feet [vert speed in flight guidance system used to initiate descent.]
[47:57] Moloney: [unintelligible words] it’s not right
Unidentified: [unintelligible words]
47:59 Moloney: Yeah bloody oath.
48:05 [The word “instruments” was spoken by someone but after Mahon, Baragwanath, Turner , Tench, and Shaddick had listened to the passage, they agreed it was unintelligible or not sufficiently intelligible to be given any reliable meaning. What was shown as one sentence in the transcript was probably two sentences relating to different subjects and possibly by different speakers.]
[48:08] Brooks: Alt cap.
Mulgrew: Ross Island there [Sentence interrupted] Erebus should be here.
Unidentified: Alt hold. [Someone has announced he has seen the enunciator light displaying “alt hold” showing the aircraft has completed the capture of the selected altitude.]
[48:10] Moloney: Yeh yeh. [Moloney appears to concur with Mulgrew, albeit mistakenly, on location of Erebus.]
48:23 Brooks: Hold on both nav track. [Navigation track followed by auto pilot]
48:30 Collins: Ah we didn’t ah get that ah TACAN frequency did we?
Cassin: No.
48:36 Brooks:(Have) we got the (AIRAD) [British equivalent of the Jeppeson navigation manuals] [unintelligible word] on the aircraft? [Suggesting Cassin looks up TACAN frequency in the AIRAD.]
49:00 Moloney: (Only got them on HF that’s all.) [Refers to radio comms with Control Tower.]
49:04 Collins: Try em again.
Cassin: OK.
49:08 Mulgrew: Looks like the edge of Ross Island there. [Still believes he’s looking at Cape Royds while in fact he’s looking at Cape Tennyson.]
49:24 Brooks: I don’t like this. [Sitting between pilots but about 400mm behind them and is almost certainly facing forward. His view to the right is blocked by the engineer’s panel, so he has lost sight of Cape Bird (which he believes is Cape Bernacchi) on the right. Mulgrew seated and Moloney standing on his left have probably blocked his view of Cape Tennyson (which he believes is Cape Royds) . Has gone into full whiteout, so he expresses concern. The pilots are still only in sector whiteout.]
49:25 Collins: Have you got anything from him? [Anything on radio from Control Tower?]
Cassin: No.
49:30 Collins: We’re twenty six miles north we’ll have to climb out of this. [Sounds puzzled not worried.]
Unidentified : OK
49:33 Cassin: It’s clear on on the right. [In right hand seat, he can still see terrain on right, so he is not yet in full whiteout.]
Collins: Is it?
Cassin: Yep.
49:35 Mulgrew/Moloney: You can see (Ross Island). [Probably Mulgrew. Could not be positively distinguished.]
49:38 Cassin: You’re clear to turn right there’s
Collins: No negative [Sitting on left, Collins has lost sight of terrain on right, so is unwilling to fly to the right. He is in full whiteout to the right]
Cassin: No high ground if you do a one eighty. [Cassin on the right can still see terrain to the right, so he repeats his suggestion.]
49:44 ((Ground proximity warning tone – warning continues until impact))
[49:46] Brooks: Five hundred feet. [Calls decreasing ground clearances.]
[49:48] Brooks: Four hundred feet.
49:50 Impact [Aircraft impacts on 13-14 degree slope at about 1,500 ft above sea level.]
In 1987 during a claim for compensation by the dependents of the deceased Chippindale asserted that the engineers displayed their mounting alarm by the tone of their voices. Here again the evi-dence disproves his claim. He also claimed by implication that the voices marked by the Washington team as unidentified were in fact the voices of the engineers. He claimed this despite previously saying “At no time did I attribute any comment to any person. I relied totally upon the recognition of the voices made by the team in Washington.” One needs to examine his 1987 claim in greater detail.
When asked whether he was able to discern any indication of concern or anxiety in the voices of any of the crew members on the flight deck, Chippindale replied that from the time of 0041:45 GMT when a voice said “my God”, “there was a mounting atmosphere of concern among those that were speaking.” He pointed out that the expression immediately followed Collins’s words “Tell him [the control tower] we can make a visual [pause] descent.” Chippindale is by implication attributing the phrase “my God” to one of the engineers, horrified at the prospect of a visual descent, and denying it was some extraneous comment by some passenger or cabin crew member perhaps referring in awe to the scenery. He said the time the engineers’ sounds of concern become continuous commenced when somebody asked where Erebus was [at 43:27]. He said “… there was no reassuring event after that.” However the record of everything the pilots said starting from three minutes later at 46:14 shows they made no acknowledgment to what Chippindale claims were continuous sounds of concern.
The further evidence against Chippindale being correct is:
• Of the three-man Washington team Cooper detected no sound of mounting alarm and believes that neither Wyatt nor Oliff did either.
• Mahon and David Baragwanath (who was counsel assisting the Commission, later to become Justice Baragwanath) listened to the tapes many times in Auckland, in Farnborough, and Washington. Mahon concluded Chippindale was wrong while Baragwanath in his submissions made no reference to hearing mounting concern, which he certainly would have done if he had heard it.
• Three overseas specialists in CVR transcription, Shaddick, Tench, and Turner, also listened to the tape together with Mahon and Baragwanath. Had any of them heard mounting concern they would have discussed it with the New Zealanders.
• One Farnborough CVR transcription specialist, Davis, listened to the tape first with Chippindale and later with Mahon and Baragwanath. He agreed with Chippindale contrary to the Washington team that certain words were spoken but later when given more facts he offered no opinion. He is not reported as hearing concern by tone of voice, so on this point he can be added to the other eight who heard no concern.
• So a total of at least seven and probably nine persons listened to the tape without hearing sounds of mounting concern as opposed to Chippindale alone who claimed to hear them. Or rather we must assume that Air New Zealand’s representative Gemmell also heard them since he listened with Chippindale, but Gemmell gave no evidence on the point.
• Chippindale chose not to reveal that his theory depended on tone of voice in his evidence before the Royal Commission so he could not be asked to point to the passages when the tape was played in public. He had legal representation.
• Air New Zealand who were zealous in pointing at every possible avenue of pilot error never adopted Chippindale’s argument.
• The voice saying “my God”, which Chippindale claimed first showed concern by the engineers was marked as unidentified by the Washington team.
• The alleged dereliction of duty would have persisted from 41:45 (the time of the “my God” remark) until 49:24 when Brooks said “I don’t like this” which Cooper says was a genuine expression of concern. Six seconds later Collins said “… we’ll have to climb out of this”.
• It is not credible to assert the engineers would have continued in dereliction of their fail-safe drill procedure by not protesting in the strongest possible terms if they believed the DC10 faced impending danger.
• Chippindale in his transcript did not purport to identify the voice which said “my God”.
• Chippindale admitted in evidence he could not identify the voice.
• Brooks expressed no concern when at 45:18 he said the DC10 was about to make a further descent to 2,000 feet.
• The actual words used by the engineers reflect a normal flight deck conversation and are at variance with a theory of mounting alarm.
• The engineers had no reason to express mounting concern at Collins’s decision to make a visual descent. The pilots believed they knew exactly where the DC10 was located because of the DC10’s navigation computer, namely at the entrance to McMurdo Sound. They could see the black rock cliffs of the Capes on each side of what they had every reason to believe was the Sound. Cloud cover was not continuous. There were large breaks between the clouds. Collins said he proposed to descend visually. There was no suggestion he proposed to make a cloud penetration. Low level flying in the area by the airline was standard practice and known by the whole New Zealand community which was why passengers booked flights.
• Chippindale admitted he did not know the crew.
• Chippindale admitted he had no experience as a crew member on a DC10.
• He had no experience of the DC10’s computer navigation system.
• He wasn’t familiar with Air New Zealand’s procedures.
• He wasn’t familiar with DC10 aircraft.
• The cockpit area microphone, as previously noted, picked up voices from not just the flight crew but also from persons in the cockpit area, including those in the galley and passengers on the flight deck wanting a view. For example one passenger was found strapped into a seat used only on the flight deck.
• Chippindale’s theory requires all four flight crew on the flight deck to have breached their duty, the engineers by failing to get the pilots to pay attention to their fears and the pilots for failing to heed them.
• A third pilot, Lucas, although not on duty, would clearly be monitoring this part of the flight carefully from the passenger cabin and he would have forcibly made his concerns felt, had he believed the DC10 was in any danger.
• Mulgrew, although he was a commentator and not a member of the flight crew, would have expressed his feelings had he believed the DC10 was in danger.
• Had the engineers in truth “expressed their dissatisfaction with the descent toward a cloud covered area”, then they must have known of the perils of whiteout under those conditions. Because it is the presence of clouds overhead when there are white surfaces below which causes whiteout. The airline, the management of which did know of whiteout, had never revealed its existence to the line pilots who actually had to fly the sightseeing flights. It is not credible that the engineers should have somehow discovered for themselves the phenomenon of whiteout and then permitted the pilots to descend without making the most vociferous protests and without explaining the deadly nature of whiteout to the pilots.
• Chippindale claimed the engineers “expressed their mounting alarm as the approach continued on at low level toward the area of low cloud.” Readers would infer the crew is about to fly into cloud which was visible as cloud. This is not correct. In actual fact the pilots were flying into sector whiteout not into cloud. Passenger photographs, taken shortly before impact, show sun streaming in through cabin windows, while other photographs looking out through the windows show clear views unobstructed by cloud. The pilots made 13 or more comments on the transcript that they were in visual meteorological conditions.
When did the pilots first sound even puzzled? Cooper said:
• The pilots’ voices did not sound puzzled until 48:55 when Collins asked “Have we got them on the tower?” which was only 35 seconds before Collins decided to climb out.
• Cassin first sounded puzzled when he replied at 48:59 “No [pause] I’ll try him again.”
• Brooks sounded really concerned at 49:24 when said “I don’t like this.”
• At 49:25 Collins confirms that concern is mounting when he says “Have you got anything from him?”
• An uneasy reply of “No” follows from Cassin.
• Collins’s last comment at 49:49 “Go round power please” sounded professional but with a degree of anxiety in his voice.
Collins is following standard go around drill to pull up even though he can see, so he believes, the clear space of McMurdo Sound 40 miles ahead. Had he believed the DC10 was in real danger because they were flying in cloud, then his voice would have carried great anxiety and he would have “firewalled” the engines in a genuine emergency climb.
So what did Chippindale actually do in order to create his theory of mounting concern? He took overlapping snatches of dif-ferent conversations of passengers and cabin crew speaking in the galley area and flight deck and attributed them to the engi-neers when the Washington team agreed the voices were unidentifiable. He added words to the transcript which the Washington team agreed were unintelligible and suggested they suited his theory that the engineers were expressing their concern about flying conditions to the pilots. He latched onto a few remarks passing between Mulgrew and Moloney. After his theory was disproved by evidence given to the Royal Commission in 1980, he claimed seven years later, contrary to the opinions of seven to nine others, and supported only by Gemmell, that the engineers expressed mounting alarm by their tone of voice.
The conclusion must be that Chippindale’s claims are untrue. The engineers voiced no queries about the proposed descent, expressed no mounting alarm as the flight continued, and expressed no dissatisfaction. Those claims ought not to have been made by an inspector of air accidents. They brought no credit to the Office of Air Accidents Investigation. They were approved for release to the public by the Minister of Transport on 12 June 1980 and are still at the time of writing on the website of that Office’s successor. They have done lasting damage. They must have caused grief over the years to the flight crew’s families. They have created a fantasy scenario of events which supposedly led to the disaster that endures in the public mind to this day as media comments such as Cullen’s, Rudman’s, and Rankin’s bear witness and perpetuates this untrue scenario into history.
Chippindale’s evidence in the court case brought for compensation by the dependents of those killed by the crash against the US Government no doubt contributed to their case failing. He attended in person to give evidence “at the direction of the New Zealand Government”. The US Government paid for his transportation to and from the US.
He has said: “One thing I will state solemnly is that no attempt was made by me to tailor the CVR readout or insert comments which were not clear to me”.

PRIVY COUNCIL UPHOLDS MAHON ON CVR
The Privy Council agreed that Mahon was correct in rejecting Chippindale’s interpretation of the CVR, saying:
“The other principal reason why the Judge felt able to displace Mr Chippindale’s ascription of the cause of the accident to pilot error was that certain remarks forming part of the conversations recorded in the CVR of the crashed aircraft and attributed by Mr Chippindale to the flight engineers had suggested to him that shortly before the crash they were expressing to the pilot and navigator uncertainty about the aircraft’s position. The tape from the CVR which had been recovered from the site of the crash proved difficult to interpret. The Judge, with the thoroughness that characterised him throughout his investigations, went to great pains to obtain the best possible expert assistance in the interpretation of the tape. The result was that he was able to conclude that the remarks attributed by Mr Chippindale to the flight engineers could not have been made by them, and that there was nothing recorded in the CVR that was capable of throwing any doubt upon the confident belief of all members of the crew that the NAV track was taking the aircraft on the flight path as it had been plotted by Captain Collins on his atlas and chart, and thus down the middle of McMurdo Sound well to the west of Mt Erebus.”

PRIVY COUNCIL UPHOLDS MAHON ON WHITEOUT
John Roughan New Zealand Herald:
“Mahon’s true insight in retrospect was not the cover-up or even the aircraft’s computer co-ordinates, it was the polar atmospheric phenomenon he described. A ‘whiteout’ was not, as most people assumed, a blizzard. It was a trick of the polar light that could obliterate the horizon on a cloudy day and cause low-flying pilots to hit a mountain they could not distinguish from a flat landscape.”
The Privy Council agreed with Mahon’s finding that whiteout was an essential ingredient of the disaster saying:
“Its effect, in meteorological conditions such as prevailed at the time of the crash in the area where it happened, would be to induce in a pilot, unaware that any such phenomenon could exist, the belief that he had unlimited visibility ahead and that he was flying over a flat terrain, since ‘whiteout’ prevents changes in levels of the terrain over and towards which the aircraft is flying from being perceived by the pilot even though the change in level is as great as that of a precipitous mountainside such as that of Mt Erebus. The Judge makes out an overwhelming case in his Report that the aircraft was in a ‘whiteout’ when it crashed into that volcano.”
The form of whiteout (“white surface whiteout”) referred to by the Privy Council and which contributed to the crash is the insidious optical illusion present in polar conditions where white surfaces exist. It leads pilots to believe they are flying in clear air and so can see any obstructions ahead; when in fact, although they are in clear air, any obstructions have been rendered invisible. This phenomenon would make an obstacle a few feet ahead invisible if the obstacle were white, even in reported visibilities of 40 miles. The contribution of this form of whiteout to the crash, in particular “sector whiteout” in which only one sector within the pilots’ vision is in whiteout, was discovered by Gordon Vette who subsequently received an honorary D.Eng. from the University of Glasgow for his research on visual perception.
The other form widely known by New Zealand pilots without polar training before Erebus involves broadly speaking (there are sub-groups) blown snow or snow showers in which pilots are conscious of being in whiteout.
When preparing for the McMurdo Sound flights to commence in 1977 Air New Zealand management knew of white surface whiteout and had attended the RNZAF briefing for air force flights to McMurdo Sound. Gemmell made a deliberate decision to conceal the existence of whiteout from the crews who flew to the Antarctic. He explained he did this because if pilots had been told, they would have believed they were permitted to descend beneath 16,000 feet which he claimed they were prohibited from doing. His reasoning was that 16,000 ft was above the level of Mt Erebus, so at that altitude whiteout was irrelevant.
However the following evidence given to the Royal Commission disproves Gemmell’s claim a prohibition existed:
• The briefing officer admitted he never imposed such a prohibition;
• flights to the McMurdo area commencing on 18 October 1977 were without exception flown at low levels;
• Air New Zealand publicised low level flying in Antarctica so widely (including distribution to every household in New Zealand) that management’s denial of knowledge did not carry credibility;
The possible existence of white surface whiteout renders low level flying in Antarctica without special precautions perilous, so polar trained pilots regarded the pilots of flight 901 as foolhardy in flying at low level in white surface whiteout conditions. This explains why such pilots have subsequently criticised the 901 flight crew.
Chippindale claimed that when the crew made their descent orbit they would have noticed broken sea ice but when they approached Lewis Bay they would have seen no such breaks and he implied that from that fact they should have deduced the existence of the phenomenon of whiteout and so realised they were not approaching McMurdo Sound but must be approaching Lewis Bay made by sector whiteout to look the same as McMurdo Sound and realised that Mt Erebus must lie ahead concealed in whiteout. His reasoning is invalid. The crew would have expected McMurdo Sound to present a flat, featureless, unbroken expanse as contrasted with the broken sea ice of the Ross Sea. Nowhere else but in McMurdo Sound would they expect to see such a clear expanse.

AIR NEW ZEALAND CHANGES CO-ORDINATES
Though the global positioning system (GPS) with its pinpoint accuracy did not exist in 1979, the DC10’s navigation system, the AINS, was state of the art for its time, being highly accurate and reliable. After flying from Auckland to McMurdo, a distance of 3,000 miles, the cross-track error was only 1.2 miles and distance error 3.1 miles. It was not uncommon on the Auckland-Honolulu route for the northbound aircraft at 35,000 feet to have its radio altimeter triggered by the southbound aircraft on a reciprocal track passing directly underneath in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
On dispatch the crew were given a printout from Air New Zealand’s navigation computer being a flight plan having the latitude and longitude of each of the waypoints. One of the crew, probably Cassin, typed these co-ordinates into the DC10’s onboard computer.
While Flight 901 flew south from New Zealand to Antarctica on the track loaded into its navigation computer the auto pilot took it over the same route which Collins had plotted onto his maps from the flight plan the airline had previously given him on briefing on 9 November. The crew would have checked the DC10 was still on this track as it approached Buckle Island, and again as it approached Cape Hallett, its second to last waypoint.
What the pilots did not know, as the airline never told them, was that at 2.10 am that very morning the airline had shifted the final waypoint from the safe location of West Dailey Island in the middle of McMurdo Sound by 26-28 nautical miles east so that it ran to a waypoint lying behind the 12,450 ft Mt Erebus situated behind Lewis Bay on Ross Island.
The DC10 was flying above cloud but passenger photos produced to the Royal Commission proved that there were large breaks between the clouds. Collins decided to descend through one of these breaks so that he could fly visually up the safety of McMurdo Sound. He’d been told visibility was 40 miles. Being a cautious pilot he decided that not only would he descend visually but he would also keep to the navigation track he had plotted on his maps.
He descended through one of the breaks between the clouds in a conventional figure of eight descent orbit. Unknown to him, as the airline had never revealed its existence to him, he placed himself in peril, because below cloud in Antarctic conditions he became subject to the optical illusions created by whiteout.
He locked the DC10 onto nav track and flew south at 2,000 ft descending to 1,500 ft. Before them the crew saw what they confidently believed to be the entrance to McMurdo Sound exactly where it ought to be located in relation to the nav track plotted from the briefing onto their maps. The geographic features matched what all of them, including the experienced Antarctic observer Peter Mulgrew, were expecting and furthermore those features lay on the expected points of the compass (“azimuth bearings”).
However what they were observing was not the flat expanse of McMurdo Sound as they believed. Instead they were looking at Lewis Bay and Mt Erebus concealed in sector whiteout. The effect of whiteout made the entrance to Lewis Bay appear to the pilots to be the entrance to McMurdo Sound.

NON NOTIFICATION
For an ordinary flight, say Auckland to Honolulu, the airline’s flight plan was contained on a cassette which the pilots fed into their on board navigation computer. The tapes were updated every 28 days. Whenever a change to a route was made between the issue of cassettes the consortium of airlines which produced the cassettes issued a notice to airmen (NOTAM) giving details. The Antarctic flights, not being a standard route, did not have cassettes, instead their flight plans were keyboarded into the DC10’s computer. The airline changed the co-ordinates without issuing its own NOTAM and without telling the dispatch officer.
The chief navigator said he asked the flight services controller (flight dispatch) to amend the flight plan on 20 November 1979, the day before Captain White’s flight was due to depart. At first the controller said he didn’t know why he didn’t make the change that day as asked but he later said the navigator hadn’t told him until the next day after White’s flight had departed. Neither the navigator nor the controller radioed White to tell him of the “error” which his flight plan supposedly contained and which the change was to supposedly “correct”. Air New Zealand flights had already flown on that allegedly erroneous flight plan for 14 months. As already noted the airline did nothing for a week until it finally shifted the co-ordinates only five hours 50 minutes before flight 901 was due to depart.
Flight plans had an “ops flash” line at the top for important information for pilots. The airline ought to have entered up the change to the co-ordinates here, but didn’t.
Had the pilots been NOTAMed, the dispatch officer been told, or the ops flash entered up, then the disaster would never have happened.
The airline said it didn’t do any of those things because it thought the change it was making was not 26-28 nautical miles but only 2.1 nautical miles and hence not worth mentioning. In effect it said it would continue not to notify pilots of such changes.

PRIVY COUNCIL CONCURS WITH MAHON ON CO-ORDINATES
The Privy Council agreed with Mahon’s finding that since the airline briefed the pilots on a McMurdo Sound flight plan, but on dispatch gave them an Erebus flight plan, there was no pilot error, saying:
“The Judge was able to displace Mr Chippindale’s attribution of the accident to pilot error, for two main reasons. The most important was that at the inquiry there was evidence from Captain Collins’ widow and daughters, which had not been available to Mr Chippindale at the time of his investigation and was previously unknown to the management of Air New Zealand, that after the briefing of 9 November 1979 Captain Collins, who had made a note of the co ordinates of the Western Waypoint [the Dailey Islands waypoint in McMurdo Sound] that were on the flight plan used at that briefing, had, at his own home, plotted on an atlas and upon a larger topographical chart the track from the Cape Hallett waypoint to the Western Waypoint.
“There was evidence that he had taken this atlas and chart with him on the fatal flight and the inference was plain that in the course of piloting the aircraft he and First Officer Cassin had used the lines that he had plotted to show him where the aircraft was when he switched from NAV track to heading select in order to make a descent to 2,000 feet while still to the north of Ross Island which he reported to ATC [the Control Tower] at McMurdo and to which he received ATC’s consent.
“That on completing this descent he switched back to NAV track is incapable of being reconciled with any other explanation than that he was relying upon the line he had himself plotted of the flight track on which he had been briefed. It was a combination of his own meticulous conscientiousness in taking the trouble to plot for himself on a topographical chart the flight track that had been referred to at his briefing, and the fact that he had no previous experience of “whiteout” and had been given no warning at any time that such a deceptive phenomenon even existed, that caused the disaster.”

PRIVY COUNCIL UPHOLDS MAHON ON CAUSATION
The Privy Council said of The Chippindale Report: “In effect, although there are criticisms elsewhere in his report of management practices of Air New Zealand in relation to Antarctic flights, Mr Chippindale ascribed the principal blame for the tragedy to pilot error.”
The Privy Council then summarised The Mahon Report’s findings by quoting these extracts from it:
“ ... The dominant cause of the disaster was the act of the airline in changing the computer track of the aircraft without telling the aircrew.
“In my opinion therefore, the single dominant and effective cause of the disaster was the mistake made by those airline officials who programmed the aircraft to fly directly at Mt Erebus and omitted to tell the aircrew. That mistake is directly attributable, not so much to the persons who made it, but to the incompetent administrative airline procedures which made the mistake possible.
“In my opinion, neither Captain Collins nor First Officer Cassin nor the flight engineers made any error which contributed to the disaster, and were not responsible for its occurrence.”
The Privy Council said there was ample supportive evidence for these findings. The Privy Council placed on record their tribute to the brilliant and painstaking investigative work undertaken by the Judge with the support of counsel appointed to assist him, Baragwanath. The Privy Council said: “The Royal Commission Report [the Mahon Report] convincingly clears Captain Collins and First Officer Cassin of any suggestion that negligence on their part had in any way contributed to the disaster.”

ACCEPTED BY AVIATION COMMUNITY
The Mahon Report transformed the investigation of accidents and was finally recognised as valid by the aviation community in 1994. The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) in its Safety Digest on Human Factors No. 10 used the flight 901 disaster to demonstrate how latent and active failures combine to cause an organisational accident. The disasters ICAO refers to are: Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear power accident 1986; Bhopal, the world’s worst industrial accident 1984 (6,500 killed, 20,000-50,000 seriously injured); Clapham Junction railway collision 1989; Kings Cross underground fire 1989; Dryden, a fatal aircraft accident in Dryden, Ontario 1989. ICAO concludes:
“The [Mahon] Report and most of its associated literature were produced ten years before Dryden; they generated violent controversy and remained inconspicuously shelved until recently. The [Mahon] Report was, probably, ten years ahead of its time. After all, Chernobyl, Bhopal, Clapham Junction, Kings Cross and other major high technology systems catastrophes had yet to happen. They need not have happened. In retrospect, if the aviation community – and the safety community at large – had grasped the message from Antarctica and applied its lessons, Chernobyl, Bhopal, Clapham Junction, Kings Cross and certainly the Dryden report would not have existed.”

CASUALTY LIST

ADDIS Peter James 29 Te Atatu * ALLAN Alan Lawrence Malyon 59 Clive * ALLAN Jane Phillipa 17 Clive * ALLAN Marjorie Townsley 66 Clive * ANDERSON Margaret Isobel Epsom * ANGLESEY Grant William 19 Waitara * ARMITAGE Ethel Mary 73 Milford * ARNOLD Melinda Maria Manurewa * ARNOLD Valerie Ellen Papatoetoe * ASHTON Grahame 63 Orakei * BAINBRIDGE Thomas Eric 40 Meadowbank * BALDWIN L Peter 50 Birkenhead * BEAUMONT Earl * BECKETT Desmond 62 Te Puke * BOND Marilyn Edna 48 Blockhouse Bay * BOND Rolain Melville 54 Blockhouse Bay * BREHAUT Ronald Thomas 39 Timaru * BROAD John Phillip (Dr) 51 Hamilton * BROOKS Geraldine Timaru * BROUGH Aubrey Conroy 68 Thames * BUCHANAN Geoffrey 68 Orewa * BUERGI Heinz Avonalde * BURGESS Lindsay Robert 60 Whangarei * BURGESS Rose Eileen 58 Whangarei * BURTON Lorraine 42 Wellington * BUTLER Rae Jeanne 43 Waihi Beach * CAMERON Tangiaho 57 Mt Wellington * CAMPBELL Stuart Donald 22 Whakatane * CARLTON John Barry 46 Otautau * CARLTON Marion Rennie 40 Otautau * CARR Margaret Bell 64 Whangarei * CHADDERTON Bryan Harry Papatoetoe * CHADDERTON Valerie Enid Papatoetoe * CHRISTIANSON Alla Remuera * CHRISTMAS Hugh Francis 58 New Plymouth * CLARK David 60 Mt Wellington * CLARK Irene 75 Belmont * CLARK Iris 65 Takanini * CLARK William Henry 67 Takanini * COCKRILL Joan * COLBRAN Yvonne Louise 45 Invercargill * COLBRAN Cyril Bernhard 49 Invercargill * COLE John Wright 124 Westmere * COPAS Jean Ann 46 Hawkes Bay * COPSEY Audrey Joy 55 Pukekohe * COREY Constance (Dr) 46 Epsom * CRABTREE Mary Alison Takapuna * CRABTREE Norman David 72 Takapuna * DAHL Marie Patricia 57 Wellington * DAWSON Peter Maissie 50 Piopio * DEAN Kay 22 Reporoa * DEBBAGE Florence Daisy Rotorua * DELMAGE N.V * DUKE Athol David 18 Epsom * DYKZEUL Herman Maria Douglas Wiri * DYKZEUL Johannes Jacobs 30 Morrinsville * EAGLES G * EDWARDS Elizabeth Jane 30 Naenae * EDWARDS Miriam Ponsonby * EMMETT Cecilia Campbell 62 Te Awamutu * EMMETT John Barnham Te Awamutu * FROST Barle Sandringham * GALLAGHER Alfred James Remuera * GALLAGHER Elsie Thelma Remuera * GIBBS Bryn 78 Wellington * GOLLAND Pamela Margaret Bucklands Beach * GOSLING Violet 60 Opotiki * GULLEVER Richard Kawerau * HANSEN Marlene Anne Picton * HARRIS Hazel Phoebe 60 Hamilton * HARRISON Annie 50 Takapuna * HARRISON Muriel Florence 78 Campbells Bay * HARTLEY James Follett 36 Otorohanga * HARTY Myra Pearl 82 Devonport * HILL Eileen 73 Lower Hutt * HILL Gordon Alexander Mission Bay * HOLLOWAY Jean Marie 63 Glenfield * HOLTHAM Bryan Ernest 35 Invercargill * HOTSON Roy Henry 58 Tuakau * HOUGHTON John 39 Dunedin * HOWARTH Bart Ralph 31 Tauranga * HOWARTH Kathleen Maureen 47 Forest Hill * HOWARTH Peter 52 Forest Hill * HUGHES Stephen 32 Bucklands Beach * HUMPHREY Mildred 69 Orewa * HYNDMAN Thomas William 60 Blockhouse Bay * JARVIS Nicholas Dunstan 43 Glenfield * JENKINS Evelyn Lois Birkenhead * JENNINGS Charles Ivory 44 Taradale * KARL Kathline 61 Ellerslie * KEARNEY Denis 40 Hillsborough * KEITH John Edgar 39 Whangarei * KENDON Nancy Phyllis 67 Howick * KERR Betty New Lynn * KERR Francis Ronald New Lynn * KERR Geoffrey Ian Hamilton 21 Wanganui * KILSBY Anthony John 44 Levin * KILSBY Geoffrey Michael 35 Levin * KING Nancy 62 Russell * KIRK Donald Clive Te Kuiti * LANVIN James Francis 58 Howick * LARSEN Olaf William Raetihi * LING Alison Louise 60 Titirangi * LOCHER Urs 29 Kelston * LOMAX B Kawerau * LOUGHNAN Charles Henry 66 Tauranga * LOUGHNAN Patrick Louis 61 Tauranga * MacDONALD Shirley Jane 35 Palmerston North * MacKENZIE John 62 Manurewa * MADGEWICK Eudora Emily Whangaparoa * MANLEY David Victor 37 Cambridge * MANN Dorothy Maude 49 Te Atatu * MARSDEN Dorothy Tokoroa * MARSDEN Joseph Alan 45 Tokoroa * MARTIN Sally 65 Blockhouse Bay * MASKELYNE Trevor John 26 New Plymouth * MASON R * MATHEWS Aoxautere 60 Palmerston * MAYNARD Olive Mytle 54 Thames * MAYNARD William John Thames * McKENDRY Richard John 33 Wellington * McKENZIE Margaret Joyce 62 Napier * McMILLAN John Bruce 64 Gisborne * McMILLAN Melba Pearl 63 Gisborne * McNAMARA Bernard Joseph Pauanui * McNEIL Eric Onehunga * MITCHELL Mark Geoffrey 17 Lower Hutt * MULGREW Peter David 52 Parnell * MUNRO Ross 34 Otorohanga * MURRAY Murray 33 Mataura * NICHOLSON Christine Margaret 26 Christchurch * O’CONNOR Ian John 41 Timaru * OLIVER Mervyn John 65 Palmerston North * PALMER David Lloyd 31 Stanmore Bay * PALMER Edward James 63 Tauranga * PALMER Gary Kent 29 Tauranga * PATERSON Ethel Mary 54 Onehunga * PATERSON Linda Jan 22 Onehunga * PAYKELL Nola Minchin Devonport * PAYNE Alfred Murray 34 Remuera * PEACOCKE Marjorie Ethol Glenfield * PETHERS Carla 49 Takapuna * PLUMMER Alexander Francis 85 Pakuranga * PLUMMER Hilda Francis 52 Hamilton * POTTER Michael Arthur 53 Whangaparoa * PRICE Irene 86 Sandringham * PRICE Beverley (Daughter) Sandringham * PRIDMORE Joy Agnes 40 Levin * RAWLINS Valgria 76 Mt Eden * REVELL Basil Halvor 52 Waiwera * REVELL Geraldine 60 Waiwera * RICHMOND Pamela Gaye 24 Mt Eden * ROBB Helen (Lady) Remuera * ROBERTS Allison Meryle 46 Wellington * ROBERTS Michael Seaver 47 Wellington * ROBINSON Betty Estell 36 Pariate * RUDEN Karl 79 Mission Bay * SCOTT Mary Theresa 40 Dunedin * SMITH Betty Louise 46 Whangarei * SMYTHE Henry Howard 55 Thames * STEVENSON Anthony James Picton * STEWART Donald Mathew 35 Birkenhead * STOKES Alan Maxwell 51 Pakuranga * STOREY Phyllis May 58 Mt Wellington * TANTON Peter Alec 60 Whangaparoa * TAYLOR Douglas Clement Frank 56 Whangarei * THOMAS Roy Pearce Tauranga * THOMAS Walter Daniel 69 Whangaparoa * TREMAIN Floss Taupo * TREMAIN Robert David 60 Taupo * TRINDER Elaine 26 Epsom * WARD Henry 58 Henderson * WARD Valerie 57 Henderson * WATSON Isobel 65 Mt Albert * WATSON Kathleen 64 Wellington * WEBB Alfred William Waitoa * WILLIAMS Jan 60 Havelock North * WILLIAMS Janet Challis 70 Hastings * WILLIAMS Leonard Heathcote 60 Havelock North * WOOD Barbara Annie 66 Kiwitea * WOOD Irvine Kirkham 72 Kiritea * WORTH Linda 74 Epsom * ZOLL Otto 46 New Lynn * FLIGHT CREW: ALL FROM AUCKLAND * BENNETT David John Senior Flight Steward * BROOKS Gordon Barrett Flight Engineer * CARR-SMITH Elizabeth Mary Stewardess * CASSIN Gregory Mark First Officer * CATER Martin John Flight Steward * COLLINS Martin John Purser * COLLINS Thomas James Captain * FINLAY Michael James Senior Flight Steward * KEENAN Dianne Stewardess * LEWIS James Charles Fight Steward * LUCAS Graham Neville First Officer * MARINOVIC Suzanne Margaret Stewardess * MAXWELL Bruce Rhodes Flight Steward * MOLONEY Nicholas John Flight Engineer * MORRISON Katrina Mary Stewardess * McPHERSON Roy William Chief Purser * SCOTT Russell Morrison Purser * SICKLEMORE David Brian Flight Steward * SIMMONS Stephen George Flight Steward * WOLFERT Marie-Therese Stewardess

Posted by Ian Wishart at 11:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Investigate Nov 05, Edge of Darkness

Because of threats to kill the subject of the story that we posted here, we have been asked to urgently remove the article.

Posted by Ian Wishart at 10:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Investigate Nov 05, Doonegate

Have NZ internet bloggers caught the mainstream media in a cover-up?
On the night, New Zealand’s election result hung on a thread. Is this the story that could have swung it for National? A story the mainstream media refused to cover? IAN WISHART profiles the rise of a blogsite and its power to embarrass big media

In cyberspace, no one can hear you scream, which is probably just as well for 20 or so of New Zealand’s top political journalists after an internet blog site stumbled across what appears to be a major cover-up for Labour by members of the mainstream media. Overseas, it was bloggers – amateur newsgatherers and commentators posting articles to their own websites – who took the scalps of major media entities like the New York Times over the Jayson Blair fake reporting case, or CBS News supremo Dan Rather over his organisation’s dodgy investigation of George Bush’s military service.
In the latter case, Rather’s team based a story around what turned out to be forged National Guard documents, and got fatally burned.
“The yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took [CBS’s 60 Minutes II] down,” wrote Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. “It was, to me, a great historical development in the history of politics in America. It was Agincourt.”
Or, as US conservative blogger “Rrrod” put it so succinctly on FreeRepublic.com, the site that led the attack, “NOTE to old media scum…We are just getting warmed up!”
In New Zealand, there’s a similar mood afoot. With Labour re-elected against a sizeable swing to the right on election day, public suspicion that socially-liberal journalists in the mainstream media have been overly kind to Labour is only set to grow. So imagine the controversy if Investigate could show that the mainstream media had a chance to broadcast a story of Brethrengate proportions about Labour, before the election, and chose not to run it?
Well, that’s exactly what we appear to have found. What follows is an Investigate story based on documents originally published on September 8, 2005 on the NZ blogsite Sir Humphrey’s (http://sirhumphreys.blogspot.com), a week and a half before the election. Ironically, through one of the Universe’s quirky little twists of fate, it was also a year to the day since Dan Rather published his own-goal on George Bush.
Under the heading, “Proof Clark knew the contents of the PCA [Police Complaints Authority] report before she talked off the record to the SST [Sunday Star Times]”, Sir Humphrey’s began to dump dozens of pages of documents released under the Official Information Act on the Doonegate affair: Labour’s railroading of former Police Commissioner Peter Doone.
Although the documentation was available to those in the know, no one in the media had joined all the dots. So the blog site decided to take it directly to the great unwashed themselves, uploading the documents, and summaries of the main points.
Sir Humphrey’s explained that it was releasing the two official police reports carried out on whether Doone had tried to prevent a constable from breath-testing his partner Robyn during a traffic stop on election night, 1999, in Wellington.
The first report, written by Doone’s subordinate Rob Robinson – the man who subsequently took over Doone’s job – was highly critical of the police boss. It was details in the Robinson report that Helen Clark allegedly relied on when she mislead the Sunday Star Times into publishing a career-destroying story on the police commissioner.
However, what Sir Humphrey’s found was that not only did the second report, the PCA investigation, contradict the Robinson report, but Helen Clark knew that when she tipped off the SST.
In brief, before we begin our own investigation, here’s what the Sir Humphrey’s blog said on September 8, under the heading “Summary Points”:
1. PCA report found neither Doone nor his partner (the driver of the car) were intoxicated.
2. Helen Clark had the PCA report before the 11th January 2000.
3. Clark leaked selected parts of the superceded Robinson report to the Sunday Star Times between the 10th and 16th of January 2000. See the Brief of Evidence of SST reporter Oskar Alley [released on the site]. On the basis of Clark’s leaks, the SST ran a front-page story claiming Peter Doone had used his position as Police Commissioner to intimidate a rookie cop and avoid a breath test.”
You should now be getting a feel for just how serious Sir Humphrey’s pre-election document drop was politically. Should the mainstream media have been interrogating Helen Clark with the same intensity they had been interrogating Don Brash that week over the Brethren pamphlets? You be the judge as you read what follows.
Although the story of Doonegate broke earlier this year, the release of the documents on Sir Humphrey’s was the first time all the documents relating to the case had been placed in the public domain. It should have resulted in a media feeding frenzy, but there was none.
So how had Doonegate arisen? The first media mention of it was Friday December 3, 1999, on the Holmes show on TV1, almost a week after the incident had taken place. Somehow, TVNZ had been tipped off that the Police Commissioner had “exchanged pleasantries” with a police patrol during a traffic stop on election night the previous Saturday – the election that brought Labour to power.
Oskar Alley’s brief of evidence discloses that the SST picked up on the story for its December 5 edition on the front page, “basically repeating the fact that the Holmes show had reported this matter”.
“By that stage,” says Alley, “it had also become apparent, from a statement released by Police Headquarters dated 3 December 1999, that Deputy Commissioner Rob Robinson was investigating the incident as a result of inquiries made by TVNZ’s Holmes show.”
Alley says his own involvement escalated in mid December that year, when he spoke to “a senior Wellington lawyer who had some direct involvement in the matter [who] spoke to me ‘strictly off the record’ saying that ‘Doone should be facing charges over this’, urging me to keep investigating because there was a very good story in this, saying that in the sources’ [note the plural] view Peter Doone had acted highly inappropriately”.
Alley does not disclose the identity of the “senior Wellington lawyer” or who, exactly, the lawyer was acting for in order to have some “direct involvement”.
However, Investigate has discovered from a Cabinet briefing paper released on the blog site that Labour’s incoming Prime Minister had been briefed on 3 December 1999, the same day the Holmes programme later went to air with the first media report of the incident. Additionally, the new Police Minister received a full briefing from Deputy Commissioner Rob Robinson on December 10. In other words, Labour was well across Doonegate long before a “senior” lawyer came forward to urge the SST to dig deeper.
On 14 December, Alley attended a police Christmas Party where he spoke to several people “employed at Police Headquarters” who disclosed fresh details to him about the case, such as the fact that the car had been stopped because its headlights were not turned on, and that both the Commissioner and his partner had been at a corporate function that evening and stopped off at a restaurant on the way home. Alley says the police sources he spoke to were adamant that the driver of the car should have been breath-tested as standard procedure.
On the same day, December 14, Rob Robinson’s preliminary report had been completed and delivered, and the more in-depth Police Complaints Authority investigation was well underway.
Among those interviewed by the PCA was another police officer who’d seen Doone and Robyn Johnstone at the corporate function:
“It was my impression the last time that I saw them that neither of them were intoxicated or unfit to drive. I do not think that Robyn Johnson had in fact had much to drink and I also gained the impression that she was the designated driver.”
The PCA also heard analysis from doctor about the likely levels of alcohol in Robyn Johnstone’s blood (two to three small glasses of wine, with food, over several hours), and found they were likely to be “well below the legal driving limit, at levels unlikely to be associated with any significant intoxication or impairment of judgement or behaviour”.
The PCA head, Judge Neville Jaine, concluded, “The only evidence available to the Authority leads to a conclusion that at the time of driving the blood alcohol level of Ms Johnstone did not exceed the legal driving limit.”
This information was in the Government’s hands by December 29. Regardless, the heat really started to go on in the New Year, with an SST lead story on January 9 2000 headlined “Labour considers sacking Doone”. According to Alley, much of the information for this story was actually provided by the paper’s political editor at the time, Ruth Laugeson, who’d interviewed key but unnamed members of Helen Clark’s staff.
The following week, Alley published a front page lead of his own, the first story to allege that Doone told the young constable “That won’t be necessary” in reference to breath-testing. For Labour, this was the silver bullet with which they hoped to dispatch the Police Commissioner.
“The first information I received about Peter Doone allegedly using the words ‘that won’t be necessary’ came from an anonymous phone call to me,” says Alley, “on about Tuesday 10 or Wednesday 11 January 2000..[the caller] said something along the following lines: … ‘I know the constable involved. Are you aware that Peter Doone said to that constable ‘That won’t be necessary’ on the night in question?’
“Of course, an anonymous phone call on its own is not a reliable enough source, so that week I contacted a Senior Government Advisor in the Police Sector [who] confirmed that he was told that our information and the words ‘that won’t be necessary’ were correct…[and] he also told me, which was something I did not know at the time, that the constable who spoke to Peter Doone on the night in question was holding a sniffer device, which I understood was [for breath testing].”
Adopting the Woodward & Bernstein three source rule, Alley decided to approach Prime Minister Helen Clark.
“By the time I approached the Prime Minister, both the Robinson and PCA reports into the matter would have been completed, signed off and handed to appropriate government members,” says Alley in his brief.
“The Prime Minister made it clear that she had seen both reports.”
Alley says he specifically rang Clark – as the person with both reports in front of her – to check whether the claims about the sniffer being visible and Doone’s alleged response – “that won’t be necessary” – were included in the report Clark was holding.
“The Prime Minister confirmed that I was correct that the Constable had a sniffer device in his hand to test for alcohol; and included in the comments Peter Doone made to the Constable, with regards to the breath test, Peter Doone said ‘that won’t be necessary’.
“The Prime Minister specifically said ‘…you’re not wrong’.”
In her own brief of evidence, published on the blog site, Helen Clark admits confirming the detail, although she suggests she drew attention to the fact that Peter Doone was “disputing” some of those details.
But even if Clark is telling the truth about alluding to the dispute, in actual fact nowhere in the two reports on her desk when she spoke to the SST is there any suggestion that the constable had intended to breath test the driver. Nor does the phrase “that won’t be necessary” appear in either the Robinson report or the Police Complaints Authority report. That allegation was never “in dispute” because it had not been made by any named source except Helen Clark herself.
The documents released by Sir Humphrey’s before the election included statements from a police officer waiting back in the police car, and two other police witnesses, none of whom mentioned seeing a sniffer device in the young constable’s hand as he approached Doone.
Even Brett Main, the constable concerned, says in his brief of evidence for the Doone’s defamation case against the SST earlier this year that there’s no guarantee his sniffer was visible to anyone:
“I have read the article from the Sunday Star Times dated 16 January 2000. The headline for this article is ‘Doone case cop was ready to breath test’. This article reported that I had said to the Commissioner that I wanted to breath test the driver of the car. I did not say that to the Commissioner. I know I had the sniffer with me but I can’t remember whether it was in my hand or my pocket. When I got out of my car, I had no intention of breath testing anyone at that stage. I only grabbed the sniffer from the car in case I needed it. I recall that I did not even mention EBA (excess blood alcohol) procedures or breath testing to the Commissioner.
“The article also said that the Commissioner said in response ‘That won’t be necessary’. At no stage did the Commissioner say that to me.
“There is no truth to either of those statements reported in the Sunday Star Times.”
The Prime Minister, then, told a national newspaper that the reports in front of her contained a phrase that was absolutely damning in its implication that the Commissioner of Police had improperly intervened to prevent a breath test. Yet the phrase does not appear in those reports, and is denied by the police officer it was allegedly said to.
Not only did the Prime Minister say it once. She was contacted again by Alley on the 15th of January, and also by the paper’s editor Sue Chetwin, and repeated her assertions that Doone used those words.
Naturally, when the Sunday Star Times published this hitherto unreleased information on January 16, all hell broke loose in the media and Peter Doone’s position as Commissioner became untenable.
It was behind the scenes, however, that the newly released documents disclose how events were falling nicely into place for Labour’s plans to oust Doone from his job. For a start, there had been bad blood between Labour and the Police Commissioner for months leading up to the election because of the INCIS computer debacle. Doone and National’s police minister Clem Simich had taken the brunt of Labour’s INCIS attacks in parliament. Politically, Doone was already seen in Labour circles as a lame duck, long before the alleged drink driving incident happened.
Sir Humphrey’s published a cabinet briefing paper dated 21 January – five days after the bombshell Sunday Star Times article now known to have been caused by the Prime Minister’s leak of false information to two journalists.
In the cabinet paper, Attorney-General Margaret Wilson tells her colleagues that “Serious issues of confidence were raised by…the perceptions created by the incident in terms of the wider public perception of the integrity of the law enforcement system.”
In other words, crucial to the issue of whether Doone should keep his job was the amount of media opprobrium bouncing around the case. And that’s why the Prime Minister’s decision to up the ante by leaking false incriminating information is directly relevant to the events that followed.
That Labour was making the issue a top priority is confirmed in the briefing paper, with Margaret Wilson acknowledging that she’d been asked by Helen Clark to take over the Government’s handling of the matter as early as January 5, instead of leaving it to Police Minister George Hawkins.
Wilson admits that Labour had known as early as December 17 that there were no grounds for criminal prosecution of the Commissioner or his partner, and she admits the Government had also been told at the same time by Deputy Commissioner Rob Robinson that “it was the PCA’s report, and not his, which would be authoritative in terms of any adverse findings.”
In other words, Labour was clearly on notice that it should not rely on the Robinson report if it wanted to criticize Doone.
The cabinet paper reveals just how much knowledge Helen Clark had of this. It says the Prime Minister, Deputy PM Michael Cullen and Attorney General Margaret Wilson met on January 11 with the Solicitor General, the head of the Prime Minister’s Department Mark Prebble and the head of State Services, Michael Wintringham.
At that meeting, full copies of the authoritative Police Com-plaints Authority report, the Robinson report, and submis-sions made on behalf of Peter Doone, were tabled and dis-cussed, along with their legal implications. The document reveals that public perception of the Doone affair was identified at that meeting as a critical factor in whether the government would be within its rights to dismiss Doone.
This meeting took place three days before Helen Clark leaked false and damaging information about Doone to the Sunday Star Times. In other words, knowing the adverse media coverage was likely to be a determining factor, the Prime Minister turned up the heat.
In her briefing paper, Margaret Wilson also acknowledges that the issue was not serious enough, but for the publicity, to warrant sacking:
“A decision to advise the Governor-General to remove the Commissioner is one with considerable personal and financial impact for the Commissioner. His reputation would inevitably suffer. He would also suffer significant adverse financial effects.
“Given the mitigating factors found by the PCA, a decision to recommend the Commissioner’s removal would be a severe sanction.”
The briefing paper released by Sir Humphrey’s also shows Margaret Wilson gave specific advice to her cabinet colleagues, including Prime Minister Clark, on the basis of the findings of the Police Complaints Authority:
“On account of the findings in the PCA’s report, my advice is that Ministers should proceed on the basis that the Commissioner is being truthful, in particular as to the amount of alcohol consumed [very little] and in stating that it was his belief at the time the car was stopped that no road safety issue was involved.”
The cabinet briefing paper was dated Friday, January 21, in preparation for the following week’s cabinet meeting where Doone’s position would be discussed. Before that, the Sunday Star Times had another go at the Commissioner on January 23:
“Last chance to resign, Cabinet ready to ask Doone to fall on his sword,” screamed the headline.
“The Government is set to ask beleaguered Police Commissioner Peter Doone to quit this week,” it began, quoting unnamed government ‘sources’ as saying Doone would be asked to fall on his sword.
In the released document, Oskar Alley reveals that his ‘source’ was none other than Prime Minister Helen Clark. Again. He believes he spoke to her on Friday January 21, the same day Margaret Wilson’s memo had gone to all cabinet ministers.
Alley says Clark told him that Constable Main definitely had the sniffer device – “she quoted a passage from the Robinson report on that subject” – and she said she “would hang tough on this one if she were the Sunday Star Times.”
“I took comfort from the Prime Minister’s comments,” says Alley. “She had the relevant documents and reports, parts of which she read to me over the telephone…she confirmed that there was nothing to worry about in the story the previous week. In effect, she confirmed that, despite Peter Doone’s statement, the 16 January 2000 article had been accurate.
“She also read to me parts of the Robinson Police Inquiry, which were quoted in the story.”
One of the pieces of information in the Prime Minister’s possession, however, was advice originating from the January 12 legal briefing that she should not be relying on the Robinson report. In fact, the cabinet briefing paper from Margaret Wilson specifically says, “I do not propose to refer further to the Robinson report. I suggest Ministers likewise focus on the PCA report.”
So what game, exactly, was the Prime Minister playing, by continuing to feed the media titbits from a report her own Attorney-General was backpeddling from?
“I specifically put it to the Prime Minister that they would ask Peter Doone to fall on his sword. It was confirmed to me he might, that that ‘was in the plan’, and that that was what the Government were going to ask him to do,” recalls Alley.
Not content, SST editor Sue Chetwin was back on the phone to Helen Clark as well, and came away reassured.
“She encouraged the newspaper to continue its investigation as the matter was reaching its critical stages.”
It is now a matter of record that Helen Clark was the Sunday Star Times secret source on Doonegate. But what hadn’t emerged, prior to the election, was a complete set of documents revealing for the first time exactly what the Prime Minister knew and when she knew it. It is this paper trail that the Sir Humphrey’s blog published on September 8, and which almost the entire parliamentary press gallery were then tipped off about via email.
So why wasn’t the story covered during the election campaign? In the midst of a media scrum over whether National leader Don Brash knew the specifics of the Brethren pamphlet campaign, and Labour calling that an “issue of integrity”, why did the media fail to cover the release of the Doonegate documents?
When Investigate approached One News executive producer John Gillespie, his first words on the document release were, “That’s news to me. First I’ve heard of them. I’ll get back to you.” Investigate is still waiting to hear, although that may have more to do with the Grim Reaper of the Stars currently stalking TVNZ’s news corridors than any attempt to obfuscate. However, we can confirm that three of TVNZ’s senior parliamentary bureau reporters were emailed in the early afternoon of Thursday 15 September by a journalist from a business publication, mystified as to why there’d been no coverage of the matter.
Investigate has emailed all the press gallery journalists concerned directly, only one, from a major newspaper, has replied:
“I don’t seem to remember this email. Probably because on the dates you mention, I wasn’t in the office - like most down here, I was on the road six days a week, at least 12 hours a day, and this mail probably got deleted en masse among the hundreds from Nigerian scamsters, Dutch lottery win, penis enlargement pills and offers of free viagra on the very odd late night I came back into the office.”
TV3’s news director Mark Jennings says his team never brought it to his attention.
“I was never aware of it, which is surprising.”
At the stage we approached the New Zealand Herald’s editor Tim Murphy in early October, we were more guarded in revealing exactly what we were investigating, so we simply asked the question whether he was aware of any significant stories that went unreported by the Herald during the election campaign?
“Hell No!!! We didn’t run some comments from the Tauranga woman against Clarkson because they were arguably defamatory. And we took a day or so to get to the bottom of the first wave of Taito Philip Field allegations before publishing throughout that final few days. And Owen McShane has told anyone who will listen that he had some tip about Christian churches and the Green pamphlet but I’ve not been able to run that down, and not at all sure that it was of tremendous moment in the great scheme of things anyway. “But I’m certainly not aware of — and am pretty sure there aren’t — any stories that could have in any way been thought ‘significant’ that we didn’t run. Quite the opposite. We ran far more ‘significant’ stories than anyone, anywhere.”
TV3’s Jennings, likewise, says he also played it cautious during the election campaign when choosing whether or not to run stories like the alleged “leaked National Party emails”.
“We had some knowledge of that prior to the Sunday Star Times, but I decided not to go with it because what we had was these emails going to Brash, and we did not have any emails going from Brash back the other way. So it was just people giving Brash advice, seemingly unsolicited advice, and I wasn’t comfortable running with it unless I had an email from Brash going back saying ‘Yeah, I really want to take that on board’, or ‘Yeah, if we get in power I really want to follow that agenda’. So I just didn’t have a high enough comfort level.
“To me, people like the Business Roundtable sending advice to a prospective National Party prime minister did not seem that odd, if you know what I mean. But there has been discussion within our own ranks as to whether we made the right decision on that.”
The leaked emails story, like the Doonegate one, raises fascinating issues about how far the media should go to expose the people deliberately leaking politically-damaging material at strategic moments.
“Yeah, that’s a tricky one,” concedes Jennings, “because on that email thing it was a confidential source issue. There were also thoughts going through our minds about the reasons for this going out and where it was coming from, but it came to us through quite a trusted confidential source so we weren’t going to investigate further on that. We accepted that the source was going to be confidential before we knew what the story was going to be about or presented to us. A Catch 22.
“I take your point, that at some stage it wouldn’t be bad to actually blow one of these people wide open, but it’s always the case – are you biting that hand that feeds you!”
“So the Doone story was one that you personally were never told of?”
“No, no. I’m actually fascinated by it right now. It’s still a good story, I would suggest!” says Jennings.
Radio New Zealand’s director of news, Don Rood, is another who wasn’t told.
“Not that I know of, no. It would depend on what else was happening on the day. When dumps like that happen, select your time very carefully. If it’s a dull day you’ll get a lot of attention, but if it’s really busy or someone is crook in the office it’ll be passed over. It’s all about timing, timing is everything!”
To her credit, Nine to Noon’s Linda Clark gave the Prime Minister a serve over the documents on September 9, to which the bloggers responded with glee.
“Yes folks, this is the interview to listen to. Helen gets asked the tough questions. There is a priceless moment where there is a frosty three second silence where I’m sure Helen is imagining flaying Linda alive for the audacity…I hope Linda still has a job after this,” posted one.
“Ouch, has RLWN [Radio Left Wing News] suddenly developed a spine?” queried another.
“If you listen to the beginning of the next hour, a number of emailers were horrified at Linda’s move to the right.”
But there is one other unresolved mystery – the role of the National and Act parties. Both organizations had the Doonegate documents, but apart from Act leader Rodney Hide trumping National by releasing the Prime Minister’s brief of evidence and those of the two SST staff back in May, neither party released the January 21 cabinet briefing paper, or Constable Brett Main’s statement themselves. Instead, the task was left to an internet blogsite.
The man behind the Sir Humphrey’s blog is another mystery, an internet secret squirrel who, aptly, plies his information trade under the pseudonym “Antarctic Lemur”, or AL for short.
“I’m the one who followed the Doonegate story and published the papers online. I’m not keen on revealing myself, as I work in an area not known for its sympathies towards people of my political leanings. In fact not a single one of the Sir Humphrey’s co-authors is aware of my identity.”
So what does he make of National and Act’s failure to move in for the kill, especially when the documents had been released with still-sensitive portions blanked out. Surely it had all the makings of a Brethrengate scandal for the centre right to enjoy 10 days out from a general election?
“This is all conjecture really. What’s most odd is how neither party released the documents through their websites earlier.”
AL sees three possible explanations:
“1. Hide jumped the gun when he released the Briefs of Evidence a day early. Perhaps he was trying to avoid irritating National even more.
“2) National was trying to avoid an overtly negative campaign. Bringing Doone back into it might have taken the campaign down a path of negativity they didn’t want to tread.
“3) Understanding the reports requires a deep understanding of the new facts and contradictions revealed by comparing the Briefs of Evidence to the news reports of the day to the official Police reports. Perhaps neither party had researchers capable or willing to do that.”
On the media’s failure to fire, he remains bemused.
“I’m surprised other print media competing with Fairfax didn’t cover the story, i.e. the Herald. And it’s obviously not ‘oversight’ given quite a few journos were emailed about it by our readers and the documents were available online. I went back through [one journalist’s] previous commentary on the matter and discovered she was more interested in analysing supposed little political games being played by Fairfax etc – who cares? The world doesn’t revolve around the media involved, far from it. I’m not surprised TVNZ and TV3 weren’t interested as it was a complex story damaging to the Left’s election hopes, and I regard most TV reporters as either centre-left or very left.”
Was it conspiracy theory, laziness, or just that the emails to the news media too closely resembled one of those Nigerian penis-enlarging Viagra pill spams?
Given the deafening silence from a large number of press gallery journalists to questions from Investigate, it may be that with the election running so close they simply couldn’t bring themselves to stick the knife into Labour.
The Monday morning that Investigate released its September cover story on John Tamihere and the pokie machine trusts, Prime Minister Helen Clark cancelled her scheduled media appearances on National Radio and Newstalk ZB, and her handlers told the press gallery she had come down with food poisoning.
“It’s the first time she’s ever done this,” a top National party aide told Investigate. “We think she’s pulled a sickie in case she gets questioned about your article.”
Clark needn’t have worried. It was another story the news media failed to cover, and once that fact became apparent by early afternoon, it coincided with a miraculously healed Prime Minister who was able to attend a photo opportunity at the Beehive after all.
With the election hanging on a 40,000 vote margin, we may never know whether the media’s failure to cover the last chapter in Doonegate effectively threw the election. But the question of socio-political bias in the mainstream media is one that isn’t going to disappear any time soon. What we do know is that the documents released on the internet 10 days before the election proved that Helen Clark had not just been mistaken in what she had told the Sunday Star Times – the Prime Minister of New Zealand appears to have knowingly lied, with the sole purpose of creating so much bad publicity that she could remove Doone from his job on the grounds of “public perception”.
Should the voting public have been told? You be the judge.
To see what others think on this, visit Investigate’s new weblog, thebriefingroom.com

Posted by Ian Wishart at 10:55 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Investigate Nov 05, Fetal Distress

Is it ethical to experiment on aborted humans?

It’s the hidden side of medical research. A massive industry harvesting pieces of dead children for experiments, or transplanting into animals. IAN WISHART discovers the University of Auckland has imported body parts from American babies for a research project, and asks some hard questions:

There are puddles of water in the gloomy corridors of Auck-land University’s School of Medicine, leftovers from a spring rainstorm and some bad building maintenance on this grey September afternoon. This nondescript urban edifice, now in the shadow of the new Auckland Hospital extensions, houses dark secrets. Or so Investigate has been told.
“They’re doing an undergraduate presentation next week in the Department of Optometry and Vision Science,” a source in Auckland’s optometry community confides in a cryptic email. “Thought you might be interested to investigate a research project involving tissue from aborted fetuses.”
Optometry. Eye doctors. Hardly the first branch of medicine that springs to mind as the cutting edge of macabre experimentation. But inside the Cole Lecture Theatre, safely sheltered from the weather and the waterlogged corridor, fifty or so medical students have filled the room almost to capacity as teams of fourth-year undergrads present the results of this year’s main research projects.
An American woman holds court, a scientific Mistress of Ceremonies taking clear pleasure in parading her protégés to their medical colleagues as they make audio-visual presentation after presentation. She is Dr Keely Bumsted O’Brien, and this is her baby, so to speak.
Across the road, in the big hospital’s emergency rooms and oncology units, specialists, intensivists, nurses and registrars are working frantically to save the living. Here, in the School of Medicine, it turns out O’Brien’s team has been dissecting the dead. And not just any dead.
“The title of the project,” tipped our source, “is ‘Photoreceptor-associated gene expression in human fetal and embryonic chicken retina’. As far as I am aware this project is unlikely to have received regional ethics approval from the Ministry of Health. The tissue has been obtained from elective abortions in the United States and was transported here for the experiments. This may be the first research of its kind in New Zealand and I am sure the public are quite unaware of it.”
Just how did body parts from a group of aborted American infants end up in New Zealand for students to conduct experiments on? To find the answers, we began investigations in the United States, and a controversy that blew up there six years ago.

***

It was an interview that shocked America. An Insider, spilling the beans on massive malpractice to a reporter on ABC’s 20/20. Only this time, it wasn’t Big Tobacco in the gunsights, it was the US abortion industry, exposed as harvesting the organs from aborted babies. According to former abortion clinic technician Dean Alberty, clinics were harvesting eyes, brains, hearts, limbs, torsos and other body parts for sale to the scientific market: laboratories wanting to test new drugs or procedures, or researchers trying to find the causes of genetic disorders or discover new ways of treating disorders like Parkinsons.
To make matters doubly embarrassing for authorities, the trafficking was taking place inside abortion clinics run by Planned Parenthood, the US affiliate of New Zealand’s Family Planning organization.
Alberty worked for a Maryland agency called the Anatomic Gift Foundation, which essentially acted as a brokerage between universities and researchers seeking body parts, and the abortion clinics providing the raw material. Alerted by the clinics about the races and gestations of babies due to be aborted each day, AGF technicians would match the offerings with parts orders on their client lists. Alberty and his colleagues would turn up at the abortions that offered the best donor prospects to begin dissecting and extracting what they needed before decay set in.
“We would have a contract with an abortion clinic that would allow us to go in...[to] procure fetal tissue for research. We would get a generated list each day to tell us what tissue researchers, pharmaceuticals and universities were looking for. Then we would go and look at the particular patient charts—we had to screen out anyone who had STDs or fetal anomalies. These had to be the most perfect specimens we could give these researchers for the best value that we could sell for.
“We were taking eyes, livers, brains, thymuses, and especially cardiac blood…even blood from the limbs that we would get from the veins” he said.
Alberty told of seeing babies wounded but alive after abortion procedures, and in one case a set of twins “still moving on the table” when clinicians from AGF began dissecting the children to harvest their organs. The children, he said, were “cuddling each other” and “gasping for breath” when medics moved in for the kill.
Alberty had been asked by a pro-life group, Life Dynamics, to provide information about activities in the clinics, and the issue caused enough national scandal to see an episode of ABC’s 20/20 devoted to it in March 2000.
On that programme, as in this magazine, the imagery was highly sanitized so as not to upset sensitive viewers. The closest 20/20 got to screening images of trafficked human fetal tissue was a pea-sized fragment of unidentifiable tissue in a glass Petri dish.
Life Dynamics founder Mark Crutcher later told media:
“We are sympathetic to the explanation offered by the ABC producer who told us after the show that the network could not broadcast footage of dismembered babies, baggies full of tiny human eyes or any other accurate footage of the ‘commodity’ being sold by the baby parts merchants. But this should have been stated in the programme. Showing scientists poking at slivers of flesh in a Petri dish through a microscope was deceptive and it dehumanizes this debate.”
In America, late-term abortions are permitted, even up to 30 weeks gestation. It’s a three day procedure and involves forcing the mother to go into labour but killing the baby with a spike to the base of the skull before it leaves the birth canal. Even so, according to Alberty, it wasn’t unusual out of the 30 or 40 late-term abortions each week to see several babies born alive on the operating table before clinicians could perform the procedure.
“They were coming out alive. The doctor would either break the neck or take a pair of tongs and basically beat the foetus until it was dead.”
Alberty’s testimony was verbal, and in many cases it was challenged by abortion providers who questioned his motives and accused him of “embellishing” the sordid details of the abortion industry. But Alberty the whistleblower wasn’t alone. Another former clinic manager, Eric Harrah, gave a video interview disclosing live births as the abortion industry’s “dirty secret”:
“It was always very disturbing, so the doctor would try to conceal it from the rest of the staff.”
One incident in particular haunts him. The clinic had begun inducing a woman 26 weeks pregnant, but sent her overnight to a nearby motel to await the full procedure in the morning. Instead, in the middle of the night she gave birth to a child and was brought back to the abortion clinic with the baby wrapped in a towel.
“I was in the scrub room when I saw the towel move,” says Harrah. “A nurse said, ‘Eric, you’re just tired. It’s three in the morning.’ Then we both looked and a little baby’s arm raised up out of the towel and was moving like a newborn baby. I screamed and ran out. The doctor came in and closed the door and when we went back in to process the baby out of the clinic into the lab, [the baby] had a puncture wound in his chest.”
In the United States, trafficking in baby parts for profit is a criminal offence. But to get around the problem, universities and researchers pay a fee – not for the parts themselves but for the “cost of extraction”. Thus, there are different fees depending on the amount of work involved. And shipping and handling is extra.
Harvesting fetal tissue is not yet illegal in the US. In fact, the programme at five major universities including the University of Washington is part funded by the US National Institutes of Health. It is the University of Washington that has been supplying Keely Bumsted O’Brien at the University of Auckland, with some of her eyeball retinas of aborted children.
The reality of the ethical boundaries wasn’t lost on the stu-dents gathered in the Auckland School of Medicine lecture theatre when fourth year undergrads Tim Eagle and Kimberly Taylor wrapped up their presentation on genetic testing the eyeballs of chicken embryos and human fetuses. They told the audience they’d used tissue from a 10 week human embryo, a 12 week and a 16 week foetus. When Keely Bumsted O’Brien called for questions from the audience, the first was an ethical one, from a female student somewhere up the front of the crowded auditorium. Had Eagle and Taylor, she wondered, run their project past the Auckland University Ethics Committee?
“We have ethical approval under Keely as referee, which is obvious by itself. Her current ethical approval worked for what we were doing so we basically used hers, which was obtained as far as we’re aware from America,” Taylor responded.
When Investigate rang O’Brien to clarify, she confirmed her teams were working on something big.
“There’s a large ongoing project, and I don’t think I need to tell you when and where I actually do specific things. Are you aware that importation of human tissue into New Zealand does not require any sort of permit?,” she countered.
Apparently, she’s right. Under current New Zealand law, you can import body parts to your heart’s content as long as you do it in a biosafe manner. But what about seeking approval from the Ministry of Health’s Northern Region Ethics Committee? Surely there must be laws governing the carrying out of experiments on aborted human infants in the name of science?
“No,” says O’Brien emphatically, “because you’re not required to, because it’s tissue, not alive.”
In other words, thanks to a loophole in New Zealand law, it is perfectly legal to conduct experiments on aborted human embryos. For all we know, there may be dozens of experiments being carried out on aborted children in research labs throughout New Zealand. The fetal eyes, O’Brien says, arrive in the country having been “snap frozen cryogenically” just minutes after death, then placed in formaldehyde.
So who supplies Auckland University with infant eyeball retinas? O’Brien repeatedly talks of the “organizations” that supply her, but names only one, the University of Washington.
“These organizations, like for example the University of Washington has a tissue programme. The UOW oversees the collection of tissue, they have their own ethics committee. So they have to be overseen by another committee. So to use fetal human tissue in NZ I have to go through the local ethics committee, and in addition the tissue that I’m gathering has to be gathered under a separate ethics protocol. That ethics protocol is overseen by the ethics committee that’s on site.”
When Investigate suggests that the body parts could be coming in without mothers even realizing their aborted baby had been harvested moments after death, O’Brien is outraged.
“Working with human fetal tissue is not taken lightly. You have to have respect for the donation of the tissue. Now the child obviously cannot give consent, it’s the mother that’s giving consent.”
“Do you think they’re asking these women, ‘do you mind if we keep the baby for medical research?’,” we ask.
“You absolutely have to! You absolutely positively have to! Do your homework man! You simply cannot take fetal tissue from an aborted foetus without informed consent from the mother. Oh my goodness, I’m shocked to hear you suggest that. I’m upset and shocked that you suggest that. Totally off base.”
But is it really off base? O’Brien insists that women seeking abortions are asked to sign consent forms authorizing the use of their dead babies for medical research. It leads to a terse exchange with Investigate.
“There is an informed consent form that the mother signs. She is not coerced, she is not paid any money. She is informed of all of her options. That informed consent was part of my approval that was produced and shown to the ethics committee here [in Auckland].”
Great, we thought. So O’Brien actually knew the names of the mothers involved and had presented copies of their consent to her peers?
“Absolutely not! That is so unethical! All I know is that the tissue was donated by the mother, and the mother has signed an informed consent form.”
But hang on, we asked, how do you know, if you don’t have a signed form with a name on it?
“I don’t keep those records on site.”
No, but somebody must.
“Yes, they are kept by the organization that coordinates the donation.”
So what, physically, does O’Brien have that proves there’s been informed consent from the mother?
“You cannot collect the tissue without informed consent from the mother. It is unethical for the organization that coordinates the collection of the tissue to provide me with any sort of information that might link it back to the mother.”
In other words, there’s no signed paperwork for O’Brien or the ethics committee to see. It’s done on trust. To Investigate’s knowledge, O’Brien has never seen a signed informed consent form.
So for all you know, we pushed her, it could be somebody in an office somewhere chucking out these forms on a word processor saying ‘yeah, we do all this’ and of course they don’t. “If you’ve never seen a signed copy, how do you know?”
And when Investigate went searching, those are exactly the kind of discrepancies we began to find. Like this extract from the Seattle Post Intelligencer newspaper in the wake of a congressional visit to the University of Washington lab:
“Women who agree to the use of their aborted babies for research sign a simple “informed consent” document at the abortion clinic, which includes no information on where the particular “donation” will be sent or how it will be used. This oversight is inconsistent with the regulation requiring “informed” consent, according to a physician familiar with research protocols, and could be problematic for the University of Washington laboratory.”
The newspaper also discovered other discrepancies in the University of Washington paperwork, such as the University letting outside labs fill in forms instead of doing the paperwork themselves. Nor was the University of Washington doing the actual organ harvesting at the abortion clinics, so the University itself was one step removed from the informed consent process in terms of verifying whether the consent was genuine. In other words, the University of Washington’s ethical oversight could not have included whether the tissue was harvested ‘ethically’, because the University has never been in a position to know.
The congressmen went away sufficiently concerned that six separate pieces of legislation were drafted to combat the harvesting of tissues. But with a change in administration, those bills went onto the backburner.
Then there’s the issue of the other ‘organisation’ O’Brien refers to but doesn’t name. Investigate traced two scientific papers published by O’Brien in the past 24 months. One, “Expression of photoreceptor-associated molecules during human fetal eye development”, was published in the journal Molecular Vision in 2003 and can be found on the internet through a Google search. In the paper, O’Brien discloses she used body parts supplied by the University of Washington, but also by a private broking firm like the controversial Anatomic Gift Foundation referred to earlier; this one is named Advanced Bioscience Resources, or ABR, and is based in California. After Anatomic Gift Foundation was sprung thanks to the testimony of insider Dean Alberty, Advanced Bioscience Resources moved to fill the fetal tissue power vacuum. In an industry now estimated to be worth around $2 billion globally, ABR is believed to be a major player, particularly as it’s prepared to supply organs harvested from second trimester late-term abortions, which the University of Washington refuses to do.
Investigate has confirmed that an early second trimester baby was dissected for the Auckland University study, making ABR the likely supplier to O’Brien. And O’Brien has used babies up to the fetal age of 22 weeks, according to her published studies.
Her Molecular Vision paper describes how experiments were “prepared from snap frozen intact human fetal eyes ranging from fetal week 9 to fetal week 19…labeling was performed in a large number of eyes within an age group.”
There is no disclosure in the internet version of the paper how many eyes were harvested for the experiments. At least ten babies from fetal weeks 9 to 22 are known to have been harvested for O’Brien’s second scientific paper we found, published in Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science in August 2004. Again, suppliers were both ABR and the University of Washington. One paper on eyes supplied by ABR
describes how the baby’s eyes are “enucleated” from the skull – medical talk for being scooped out with a knife.
Although she was working at the University of Auckland at the time, O’Brien has told Investigate the experiments detailed in her published papers were carried out “elsewhere”.
And what do we know of Advanced Bioscience Resources? According to O’Brien, her suppliers operate with transparent ethical rules and committees. But Advanced Bioscience Resources appears far from transparent. At least one American news report says the company has refused to comment on its body parts trade, making it impossible to ask whether ABR’s practices comply with federal US law.
“We’re a biotechnology firm, we don’t talk to the press,” a company spokeswoman is quoted as saying on another occasion.
Investigate has confirmed that ABR supplied aborted baby brains to be injected into mice, as part of experiments creating a part human/part mouse chimera. The genetically-engineered mice have been given – all courtesy of aborted fetuses from ABR – a human immune system, a human fetal thymus, liver and lymph node. The mice are then infected with HIV as part of AIDS research.
The US National Institutes of Health, which funded the grisly harvesting and experiment, has refused to provide any written proof that ABR holds informed consent forms, nor has the NIH confirmed that mothers were told by ABR that organs from their dead babies would be transplanted into genetically-engineered mice.
ABR has also supplied baby hearts for transplantation into pigs, and fetal stem cells.
We asked O’Brien whether she felt modern scientists were stepping into a dark pedigree.
“Do you see a correlation between the boundaries of science and experimentation on humans in this area, and the dreams of Nazi Josef Mengele and others back in World War 2 and the kind of experiments they were conducting?”
“No.”
Mengele had taken particular interest in dissecting live infants for medical experiments.
“You see no correlation?”
There was a pause as O’Brien drew in her breath. “What you’re trying to get me to say is that research on human fetal tissue is morally and ethically wrong, and I’m not going to say that. Because obviously I’m working on the tissue. I think the information to be gained is extremely valuable and it’s not something taken in lightly. I don’t think the information I use can be interpreted and used for eugenics. The reason that we have ethics committees is so we don’t have a scientific free for all.”
Other ethicists, like Paul Ramsey in the US, disagree however.
“Far from abortion settling the question of fetal research, it could be that sober reflection on the use of the human foetus in research could unsettle the abortion issue.”
Are human children, ask ethicists, any less-deserving of protection from medical experiments and execution than animals?
Pittsburgh-based researcher Suzanne Rini, who interviewed Ramsey and whose 1995 book Beyond Abortion: A Chronicle of Fetal Experimentation brought to light a body parts trade that’s existed since the 1950s, believes the very fact that scientists need the elixir of youth from fetuses may be the ethical catch-22 that kills the abortion industry. On the one hand, she says, medical researchers try to argue the foetus is not a live person. On the other, whether it’s a cure for Parkinson’s, diabetes, Huntington’s, MS or a range of other disorders, medical researchers claim the life in fetuses is the only thing that can save adults. But only if you kill the foetus first.
University of Auckland’s Deputy Vice Chancellor, Research – Tom Barnes – says it is ethical under current NZ law to harvest organs from fetuses for the sake of improving the lives of adults.
“As you know [Keely’s] research is looking at eyes. She’s trying to solve the problem of macular degeneration which is a disease that affects 60% of more of people who are 70 years old or over. She’s also trying to solve some problems to do with eye disease in younger people as well.”
It is a modern, relativistic idea that you can sacrifice the few for the good of the many. Indeed, this was one of the justifications Hitler used in whipping up hatred against Jewish, Gypsy and gay minorities. In 21st century form, the argument is more subtle: that if a cure for crippling diseases can be found by harvesting fetal organs from abortions, or growing human embryos in the laboratory for stem cell harvesting, then the deaths of those infants are justifiable because of the perceived greater good to the community at large.
Indeed, O’Brien makes a similar appeal when we ask what the ultimate benefit of dissecting children’s eyeballs is:
“You achieve knowledge, so that you can start to try and find therapies to help people regain their vision, or intervention so that you can help people who have congenital abnormalities that we might be able to fix them.
“Obviously I don’t think there should be a blanket ban on the use human fetal tissue because I think the information that you get out of the use of human tissue is very valuable in trying to help people.”
But is that a valid line of reasoning that justifies made-to-order abortions?

At the Nuremberg War Crimes trials, evidence was presented of horrific scientific experiments being performed on cap-tives in the concentration camps. The Nazi medics on trial attempted to justify it by saying the test subjects were due to die anyway and the knowledge gained would benefit the rest of humanity.
Needless to say, the Nazis were shot down in the courtroom (and later simply shot outside it) and Nuremberg issued a declaration condemning the role of the medical profession in experimentation and slaughter of innocents.
University of Auckland’s Keely Bumsted O’Brien resents modern scientists being likened to Hitler’s gruesome genetic engineers, and points out that when Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Brain
Research recently discovered it possessed the brains of many Down’s Syndrome people slaughtered by the Nazis, the Institute did the decent thing.
“Rather than use [the brains for research], it was the decision of the Director to give those brains a decent burial. Which one could argue might be the ethical way to do it, if they were gathered by the Nazis in an unethical way dealing with eugenics. Now I don’t compare what I do to eugenics.”
But Investigate challenged O’Brien on her example.
“There is an arguable case that in 50 or a hundred years time society will look back and say the current Western practice of mass abortion was a similar sort of thing to what the Nazis did and they’ll look at it the same way, what’s your response to that?”
“I don’t think they will,” exclaims O’Brien. “And I think we take much more care in how we carry out the research than the Nazis did.”
It is clear to Investigate after an hour long interview with O’Brien that she is sincere in her beliefs, and she makes special mention of the fact that she respects the humanity of the tissue. She also attends an annual memorial service, she says, that the medical school has for the cadavers and tissue used during the year. Nonetheless, our inquiries into the baby parts business give no reason to think that the harvesting of organs in America from dead or dying infants is done more humanely than the Nazis did.
For a start, the death toll alone from abortion far eclipses anything Hitler was able to achieve. In fact, one estimate of the abortion tally in the West in the past 30 years is that more than 58 million lives have been lost. Once you kick in the figures for the rest of the world including China, more people have been killed by abortion in the past 30 years than in all wars in recorded history. For the record, international studies like a 1999 paper from International Family Planning perspectives suggest 46 million lives a year are taken throughout the world.
At the Mayfair Women’s Clinic in Aurora, Colorado, staff admitted under cross examination in court that they had so many aborted babies to get rid of that clinician Dr James Parks used to put the bodies of larger babies (up to week 22) into meatgrinders so the remains could be reduced to the consistency of toothpaste and flushed down sinks.
Leaked documents from inside abortion clinics have hit the headlines across the US, and they make dark reading. They’re order forms from scientists to agencies like Advanced Bioscience Resources, instructing what parts they need and how to get them.
“Dissect fetal liver and thymus and occasional lymph node from fetal cadaver within 10 (minutes of death).” “Arms and legs need not be intact.” “Intact brains preferred, but large pieces of brain may be usable.”
Or this, from a scientist studying the “Biochemical Characterization of human type X Collagen,” who requests “Whole intact leg, include entire hip joint, 22-24 weeks gest.”
The harvesting technician is asked to “dissect by cutting through symphasis pubis and include whole Illium [hip joint]. To be removed from fetal cadaver within 10 minutes.”
Another, from University of Colorado’s Gary J. Miller, a professor of pathology, seeks the prostate glands of 24 fetuses from the first and second trimesters. The glands, he says in his request to Anatomic Gift Foundation on November 10, 1998, are “To be removed and prepared within 5 minutes ... after circulation has stopped.”
According to World magazine in the US, which broke the story, other specifications state that they are to be “preserved on wet ice,” “picked up immediately by applicant,” have “low risk no IV drug abuse or known sexually transmitted diseases,” and no prescription medications used by “donor” mother. The contract is signed both by Dr. Miller and, for the Regents of the University of Colorado, by “Sharon Frazier, Director of Purchasing.”
O’Brien refuses to believe there is anything dodgy about the fetal tissue harvesting operations in the US.
“I have to put my faith in the fact that the organizations that I’m obtaining tissue from are obtaining it in an ethical manner.”
But let’s look at that more closely. The American Society For Cell Biology, an association of cell biologists, lobbied hard against regulating the fetal tissue harvesting industry, including a suggestion that researchers should have to “verify that the tissue was obtained properly”. This condition, and others, were regarded as too onerous for the scientists to accept.
None of the many articles and papers Investigate has read on the issue suggest that the abortion clinics or tissue har-vesting organizations are subject to ethical oversight com-mittees. In fact, the Anatomic Gift Foundation, which is similar to ABR, openly puts the onus on its clients – the researchers – to get ethical approval before they make an organ purchase application. Investigate has found no evidence that AGF or ABR are themselves audited by anyone.
And how ethical is the behaviour of another big fetal tissue provider (until it was sprung in the ABC 20/20 programme), Opening Lines?
A division of Missouri and Illinois-based Consultative and Diagnostic Pathology Inc, Opening Lines made no bones about the fact it was in business to make money. A 20/20 producer, posing as a potential investor in the 11 year old company, visited its founder, pathologist Dr Miles Jones.
Jones, unaware he was being recorded on a hidden video camera, explained how his company obtained fetal parts from clinics across America for shipment to research labs. “It’s market force,” Dr. Jones told the producer about how he sets his prices. “It’s what you can sell it for.” He said he was looking to set up an abortion clinic in Mexico in order to get more fetal tissue by luring women in with cut-price abortions.
“If you control the flow — it’s probably the equivalent of the invention of the assembly line.”
As to the financial benefits of his business, Jones was brutal about the demand from researchers: “If you have a guy that’s desperate for, let’s say, a heart, then he’ll pay you whatever you ask,” he said.
“That’s trading in body parts. There’s no doubt about it,” Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics, told the Alberta Report newspaper after reviewing Jones’ statements.
The Opening Lines corporate brochure reads more like a supermarket advertisement than an ethical, dignified approach to the death of a baby.
“The freshest tissue prepared to your specifications and delivered in the quantities you need it.”
Despite compiling a baby parts price list and charging fees, an FBI investigation concluded that Opening Lines had broken no laws in what it had done and how it had done it. So if the American ethical rules are tough, there’s been no evidence of it to date.
Then there’s the question of whether the University of Auckland Human Ethics Committee is tough enough in demanding proof of informed consent in cases like O’Brien’s. You’ll remember O’Brien is insistent that she could not provide the University of Auckland with copies of the informed consent because it would be unethical for her to know the identities of the mothers who’d signed them.
“It is unethical for the organization that coordinates the collection of the tissue to provide me with any sort of information that might link it back to the mother.”
Contrast O’Brien’s statement with this extract from the ethical guidelines imposed on fetal tissue research by the University of Texas at Houston:
“An investigator proposing to use fetal tissue must complete an application form for full [Ethics Committee] review and approval. The application must include a copy of the consent form used to obtain consent for donating the tissue. [Ethics Committee] must be assured that the woman donating tissue has been given an opportunity to understand the procedures, any possible risks to her privacy and well-being, and to assure that she has an opportunity to give free and informed consent to the donation.” [emphasis added]
Additionally, the University of Texas requires that the consent form cannot be generic, and must relate to the actual research project that is planned, with “a short description of the reasons for the research.”
While O’Brien claims it would be unethical for her to know the donor or talk to them, the University of Texas requires its researchers to include on the woman’s copy of the consent form “the name and telepho