Dr Wouter Basson, who headed the previous Defence Force’s chemical warfare section, was found guilt of unprofessional conduct by the Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA) today.
“In the light of all the circumstances, the breaches amount to unprofessional conduct… the respondent is guilty of unprofessional conduct,” HPCSA professional conduct committee chairman Prof Jannie Hugo said in Pretoria.
The ruling by the council comes after protracted attempts to prosecute Basson for his role in South Africa’s chemical warfare defense initiatives. Basson has maintained throughout that the previous government had developed a defensive capability in the face of chemical weapons being used by the Soviet Union, East German, Cuba and other Warsaw Pact nations during the Angolan war.
However, Prof. Jannie Hugo said that Basson “had contravened international protocals and conventions. The respondent confused ethics of a doctor with that of a soldier while discharging his duties. A doctor cannot rely on military orders to escape the consequences of his duties.”
In a protracted criminal court case which went on appeal to the Constitutional Court and cost the government R50 million, Basson was found not guilty of any offense.
Basson practises as a cardiologist in Cape Town where he is lauded by his patients. Depending on what sanctions the HPCSA is going to apply against him, he could lose the right to practise as a doctor. The body’s decision will be made known in 20 and 21 February 2014.
A former SA Defence Force surgeon general has refused to divulge details of meetings and discussions he had with former president Nelson Mandela.
Dr Niel Knobel told Wouter Basson’s unethical conduct hearing at the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) on Wednesday there was information he could not disclose as it was top secret.
“I may not refer to documents that are top secret and that could jeopardise South Africa’s position internationally, as well as compromise … Mandela.
“Please understand my position as an officer who retains my ranks until the day I die and my commission stands. I am not going to jeopardise it and I’m certainly not going to make any remarks about [former] president Mandela,” Knobel said.
The council’s professional conduct committee is holding a hearing into allegations of unethical conduct against Basson, a Cape Town cardiologist.
Earlier, Knobel said he had meetings with Mandela and noted there was a lot of interest among the South African Defence Force (SADF) members when he returned from the meetings, wanting to know what they had discussed.
An affidavit made by Knobel during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission proceedings was presented before the committee.
The affidavit is a statement regarding the chronology of events around the SADF’s chemical and biological weapons programme, with special reference to Basson’s role.
Cross-border kidnappings
Knobel argued that he could not give evidence on the affidavit as some of the appendices which were supposed to be attached to it were not available.
The charges against Basson arise from his involvement in the apartheid government’s chemical and biological warfare programme in the 1980s and early 1990s.
He is accused of acting unethically by being involved in the large-scale production of Mandrax, cocaine and teargas, of weaponising teargas, and of supplying it to Angola’s Unita rebels leader Jonas Savimbi.
Basson is also accused of acting unethically by providing disorientating substances for cross-border kidnappings, and making cyanide capsules available for distribution to operatives for use in committing suicide.
In 2002, Basson was acquitted by the North Gauteng High Court of criminal charges arising from his conduct.
The HPCSA reviewed the judgment to establish if there were grounds to continue with an inquiry against him.
The state appealed the high court decision in the Supreme Court of Appeal, but the appeal was dismissed. The state then went to the Constitutional Court to appeal the decision. That was also dismissed in September 2005.
Unlawful and biased
In 2006, the HPCSA started its own process of investigating Basson’s conduct. A charge sheet was drawn up and the inquiry began in November 2007.
However, the inquiry was delayed when the HPCSA’s main expert witness fell ill. The inquiry resumed again in September 2008.
During the November 2008 hearing, Basson’s lawyers argued that the case brought against him was unlawful and biased.
Basson’s legal team then went to the High Court in Pretoria to stop the inquiry. The matter was heard in the high court in 2010. The court dismissed Basson’s application in May 2010. The next month, Basson appealed the decision in the same court, but lost.
The hearing then resumed officially in September 2011. In January 2012, Basson brought another application before the HPCSA’s professional conduct committee to dismiss the matter. However, this application was also dismissed.
The Health Professionals’ Council of South Africa (HPCSA) has excluded court testimony from the TRC (Truth an Reconciliation Commission) against Wouter Basson, nicknamed by leftwingers as Apartheid’s “Doctor Death”.
Basson is said to have had the support of Nelson Mandela, however.
On Monday, Basson won another victory in yet another hearing against him. Previous evidence which Basson himself presented in his own defence would not be considered in this week’s new hearing into whether he upheld the ethical standards required of a doctor, the council decided on Monday.
Basson’s supporters claim that he has been unfairly treated and has suffered for long enough, arguing that it is time to abandon the witchhunt against the respected cardiologist.
The Health Professions Council of South Africa’s lengthy hearing into the conduct of Dr Wouter Basson, the former head of the apartheid government’s chemical and biological warfare programme, which is now in its third year, was supposed to test the ethical standards to which medical doctors, including military doctors, are held accountable.
If found guilty by the HPCSA, Basson’s enemies say he should be barred from practising as a doctor in South Africa. Basson owns a private cardiology practice in Durbanville near Cape Town.
A “specialist” in reconciliation has suggested – without irony – that if Basson is not scrapped from the council’s doctors’ role, he should be forced to serve in public hospitals in underresourced areas, where “knowledge such as his is scarce”.
According to the director of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Steve Biko centre for bioethics, Ames Dhai, however, South Africa’s Constitution will be reduced to a “mockery of human rights” if Basson is not found guilty of “gross professional misconduct”.
In a marathon criminal trial that ran from 1999 to 2002, Basson was acquitted of the many charges the state brought against him. The council’s hearing is the only remaining forum that may hold Basson to account for his actions as head of Project Coast, the apartheid chemical and biological weapons programme.
The judge in the criminal trial found that Basson was head of a programme that was both offensive and defensive, in other words its purpose was to develop defences against chemical and biological weapons and to develop (among other things) chemical crowd-control agents.
It was also revealed both at the TRC and Basson’s criminal trial that scientists working for the programme under his leadership developed chemical and biological assassination weapons.
Scientific records from the Roodeplaat Research Laboratories, the facilities where chemical and biological agents were tested on animals, showed that scientists there conducted many experiments on baboons, dogs and rats in an apparent search for substances that could kill without leaving any trace.
Basson says: “I closed this chapter of my life about 20 years ago and now work as a dedicated medical practitioner helping hundreds of thousands of patients. This case is politically motivated. I just wish I could get on with my life.”
A witness, former surgeon general Dr Niel Knobel, testified this month, after an United States medical ethics expert Steven Miles previously testified that Basson violated the laws of humanity and various World Medical Association declarations and regulations.
In contrast, Knobel said Basson was a soldier and not a doctor when he headed the country’s chemical and biological warfare programme.
Knobel disagreed with Miles’s view, that once someone was a doctor they remained a doctor and that Basson made use of his medical knowledge and skills when he headed the programme.
Basson argued the surgeon general at the time was in charge of the programme and that he carried out orders as a soldier. – Sapa/M&G
Forget Wouter Basson and Project Coast! The British Ministry of Defence turned large parts of their country into a giant laboratory to conduct a series of secret germ warfare tests on the public.
Cardiologist Dr Basson faces charges of unprofessional and unethical conduct. The charges relate to his conduct as a medical doctor, when he headed the country’s chemical and biological warfare research programme for the defence force in the 1980s and early 1990s.
A British government report released in 2002 however provides insight into the comprehensive official history of Britain’s biological weapons trials between 1940 and 1979. The 60-page report reveals information about more than 100 covert experiments.
It may even have involved spreading germs for pharmaceutical companies, says a South African expert.
One chapter of the report, ‘The Fluorescent Particle Trials’, reveals how between 1955 and 1963 planes flew from north-east England to the tip of Cornwall along the south and west coasts, dropping huge amounts of zinc cadmium sulphide on the population. The chemical drifted miles inland, its fluorescence allowing the spread to be monitored. In another trial using zinc cadmium sulphide, a generator was towed along a road near Frome in Somerset where it spewed the chemical for an hour.
While the Government has insisted the chemical is safe, cadmium is recognised as a cause of lung cancer and during the Second World War was considered by the Allies as a chemical weapon.
Many of these tests involved releasing potentially dangerous chemicals and micro-organisms over vast swaths of the population without the public being told.
Military personnel were briefed to tell any ‘inquisitive inquirer’ that the trials were part of “research projects into weather and air pollution”.
In another chapter, ‘Large Area Coverage Trials’, the MoD describes how between 1961 and 1968 more than a million people along the south coast of England, from Torquay to the New Forest, were exposed to bacteria including e.coli and bacillus globigii , which mimics anthrax. These releases came from a military ship, the Icewhale, anchored off the Dorset coast.
The report also reveals details of the DICE trials in south Dorset between 1971 and 1975. These involved US and UK military scientists spraying into the air massive quantities of serratia marcescens bacteria, with an anthrax simulant and phenol.
Similar bacteria were released in ‘The Sabotage Trials’ between 1952 and 1964. These were tests to determine the vulnerability of large government buildings and public transport to attack. In 1956 bacteria were released on the London Underground at lunchtime along the Northern Line between Colliers Wood and Tooting Broadway. The results show that the organism dispersed about 10 miles. Similar tests were conducted in tunnels running under government buildings in Whitehall.
Experiments conducted between 1964 and 1973 involved attaching germs to the threads of spiders’ webs in boxes to test how the germs would survive in different environments, across Britain. The report also gives details of more than a dozen smaller field trials between 1968 and 1977.
A spokeswoman for Porton Down, said: ‘Independent reports by eminent scientists have shown there was no danger to public health from these releases which were carried out to protect the public.
Asked whether such tests are still being carried out, she said: ‘It is not our policy to discuss ongoing research.’
Dispersion of compounds and other microorganisms were conducted in America too without informing the public. The official rationale for these trials was that they were done to learn about germ warfare. Areas included large cities like St. Louis, Corpus Christi, Winnipeg, and Fort Wayne.
In the English study, the following admission is included:
“Cadmium accumulates in the body, especially in the kidneys and to a much lesser extent in the liver. About 5% of cadmium is absorbed through the gut. When cadmium is absorbed through the lungs or the gut it becomes bound to albumen or to the cystine-rich protein, metallothionein. In the kidneys, the lysosomes of the proximal tubules degrade the metallothionein and so release the bound cadmium. Once there, the kidneys cannot make enough metallothionein and the free cadmium will damage them. The most sensitive indication of cadmium-induced renal damage is an increased urinary excretion of low molecular weight proteins, and particularly of beta-2-microglobulin, as there is a decrease in renal tubular absorption. There is uncertainty about the fate of ZnCdS when it is breathed deep into the lungs. It is known that cadmium ions can enter the cell surface fluid and pass into cells in the lung. Like other transition metals cadmium participates in oxidation and reduction reactions.”
In a report from the National Academy of Sciences it states that “The U.S. Army released the chemical compound zinc cadmium sulfide from airplanes, rooftops, and moving vehicles in 33 urban and rural areas as part of a Cold War program to test the way biological weapons might disperse under different conditions.”
“Information on how zinc cadmium sulfide affects human health is sparse,…”
This statement was made 30 years or more after the tests were conducted.
Cardiologist Dr Wouter Basson’s professional conduct hearing was postponed on Tuesday because presiding Judge Frikkie Eloff was ill.
The matter was being heard before the Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA) tribunal.
A witness in the case, former surgeon general of the defence force Neil Knobel, who was scheduled to be cross-examined on Tuesday, could also not make it as he had open heart surgery earlier this month.
Knobel gave evidence before the inquiry was postponed in March.
Chairman of the inquiry, Prof Jannie Hugo, postponed the matter to December 6 and 7. Parties will hold a consultative meeting in October where the health of the two would be reviewed.
Earlier, Basson’s defence counsel Jaap Cilliers suggested the matter be deferred until March next year.
Hugo indicated that a replacement for Judge Eloff would have to be found, if he is not ready to take up the matter in December.
He said if a new adjudicator is brought on board, that person will be given time to become familiar with the long-running case.
Eloff was said to be suffering from pneumonia.
Basson faces four charges of unprofessional and unethical conduct.
The charges relate to his conduct as a medical doctor, when he headed the country’s chemical and biological warfare research programme for the defence force in the 1980s and early 1990s during the apartheid era.
He is accused of acting unethically in the 1980s by co-operating in the large-scale production of Mandrax and cocaine, and for ‘weaponising’ teargas and supplying it to rebel leader Jonas Savimbi in the Angolan war.
He is also accused of acting unethically by providing disorientating substances for cross-border kidnappings and making cyanide capsules available for distribution to operatives for suicide purposes. – Sapa
The investigation of Doctor Wouter Basson by the Health Professionals’ Council of South Africa is expected to be continuing today in Pretoria. Basson, a biological weapons expert, has to answer to four charges before the council, including participating in the manufacture of the drugs Mandrax and Ecstacy and that he supplied former government spies with cyanide capsules.
During a previous hearing, Wouter Basson said that the drugs were manufactured for research purposes and were never used during riots or a war situation.
One of the witnesses against Basson during a previous hearing of the HPCSA, Professor Steven Miles, gave a lecture at Wits University in April. He is described as “an expert in medical ethics and an advocate for human rights”.
[ad 1]
He is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and a Faculty member at its Centre for Bioethics. Miles is the author of Oath Betrayed, “a book based on the profound betrayal of traditions that have shaped the medical corps of the US armed forces and of America’s abdication of its leadership role in international human rights”.
Cardiologist Dr Wouter Basson told a professional conduct committee on Tuesday that president Nelson Mandela had re-appointed him to the SA National Defence Force in 1995 because the United States and British governments regarded him as a threat.
Basson was in the witness stand for a second day to fight charges of unethical and unprofessional conduct before the Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA).
The charges arise from his involvement in the apartheid government’s chemical and biological warfare programme in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Basson testified that a co-ordinating committee and the Surgeon General at the time had been in overall charge of the programme and that he only carried out orders as a soldier.
“His decision was final and I had to see to it that the work was done,” he said.
He said that although he retired from the then SA Defence Force (SADF) in 1992, he was called back in a civilian capacity to oversee the destruction of substances and weapons forming part of the project.
Only the teargas was saved, and several tons of it was handed to the police.
Basson reiterated that his task had been to create a defensive chemical and biological warfare capability for the SADF, but said a limited offensive capability was also necessary to equalise battle conditions.
The SANDF was established after South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, replacing the SADF, but incorporating personnel from the SADF, the homeland forces and the armed wings of political parties.
According to Basson, former president FW de Klerk re-appointed him to the SANDF, on a civilian level, to help dismantle the chemical and biological warfare project.
There followed several meetings with the US and British governments, after which former president Nelson Mandela again appointed him, in a civilian capacity, as head of cardiology at the military hospital.
“The American and British governments at that stage regarded me as a threat and wanted to get me under control. The initial suggestion was that they should appoint me and that I work for them as a chemical and biological warfare consultant.
“My role would have been to ensure that technologies that were developed in Western worlds were carried over to developing countries for peaceful purposes.
“The South African government did not like the idea of one of their citizens working for other governments and president Mandela gave orders that I must be appointed in the defence force again in a civilian capacity,” he said.
He claimed that the regulations were bent for a day to allow his re-appointment in 1995.
He was thereafter a member of the SANDF until he started a private cardiology practice in Cape Town in 2003, but had no further involvement with chemical and biological warfare.
According to Basson, he re-enrolled at the University of Pretoria for retraining as a cardiologist to satisfy his colleagues and patients that he was on par as a cardiologist.
Basson reiterated his stance that the 1980s were “crazy years” and that his actions should be seen in the context of the times.
“People did things. Doctors planted bombs. decisions were made in the context of the time.
“Nothing I did was aimed at harming anyone. In fact it was aimed at preserving life and minimising loss of life.
“… I never acted unethically or unprofessionally,” he said.
Salie Joubert SC, acting for the pro forma complainant, accused Basson of “telling half truths” about, among other things, his chemical qualifications to try and remove his training as a medical doctor from his activities while he headed the germ warfare programme.
He put it to Basson that he was reappointed to the SANDF because he had collaborated with Libya and was regarded as a threat which had to be brought under control.
Basson admitted visiting Libya on several occasions over a 10-year period, but said he had no idea what was discussed with president Mandela at the time.
Basson admitted that his training was in physiological chemistry, but said he was appointed to head the project because he had a better knowledge of chemistry than most of his military and medical colleagues and had used that knowledge for the project.
“… Stop any doctor on the street and ask him if he would have been able to do it,” he said.
He denied that it had come as a shock when the HPCSA decided to continue with the professional misconduct charges against him, but said he had thought that he would be able to “get on with his life” after the Constitutional Court confirmed his acquittal in 2005.
The hearing continues.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
