May Day 2008

Rev. Wright and His Fellow Travelers Insist AIDS Is a Government Plot

© By Peter Barry Chowka

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. at the National Press Club Washington D.C. April 28, 2008

(May 1, 2008) Every day brings a plethora of fresh stories and news related to health, innovative medicine, medical freedom, and the politics of health care, especially as they relate to the 2008 U.S. presidential race. “Surprising” and “unexpected,” if not “mind boggling,” are adjectives that might be used to describe some of these developments, as well.

A new story that emerged on April 28 – potentially opening a can of worms on many fronts – involves the man currently enjoying his fifteen (plus) minutes of fame, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. As most everyone probably knows by now, Wright for over 35 years was the leader of Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC) of Chicago, which describes itself as having “a non-negotiable COMMITMENT TO AFRICA” [emphasis original]. For two decades, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, currently the leading candidate for the Democrat nomination for president, has been a member of the church. In addition to being Obama's pastor, Wright was also Obama's friend, mentor, inspiration, and teacher; Wright provided the title, and many of the themes, for Obama's best-selling book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.

The controversies involving Wright (“God damn America!”), and his long and close relationship with Obama, have been major news stories for weeks and will not be revisited here. What is new on the eve of May Day 2008, however, is the emergence of some fresh reporting and insights into an outrageous allegation by Wright, which began to gain increased attention recently when an official recording of Wright's April 13, 2003 sermon at TUCC started to be shown and reported widely in the mainstream media. In the sermon, Wright, amidst a laundry list of allegations he made about the United States, said, “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

This writer has had a lot of experience reporting on HIV/AIDS, almost since HIV was officially identified as the cause of AIDS at a National Institutes of Health press conference on April 23, 1984. The curious way the supposed cause of AIDS was announced to the world, the unprecedented international mega meme that quickly evolved to envelop HIV/AIDS, the billions of dollars that immediately started to be spent on the problem, the creation of an enormous international AIDS research and treatment Establishment, and the persistent lack of a successful vaccine while relying exclusively on treatment strategies (all of which involved expensive, profitable, toxic drugs), ensured that critics of “AIDS, Inc,” as it came to be known in some quarters, would emerge.

Many of the critics of official AIDS were and are drawn from the ranks of independent, but often well credentialed (highly respected, in some cases), clinicians and researchers. One of the first ones to gain note was Peter Duesberg, Ph.D., professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. On March 1, 1987, in an article in Cancer Research titled “Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality,” Duesberg got the ball rolling when he challenged the scientific consensus that HIV, a retrovirus, is the cause of AIDS. Many other scientists, including iconoclastic Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis, Ph.D., joined the debate, more or less taking Duesberg's side. The power of the AIDS Establishment, however, which quickly grew to mind boggling dimensions and reach, has mostly succeeded in keeping the challenges at bay and the challengers marginalized.

Starting in the mid-1980s, a corollary – if essentially unrelated – critique was occasionally heard, especially in underground circles, alleging that AIDS was “man made,” created in one or more secret U.S. government labs for any variety of nefarious purposes. Conspiracy theories grew up around these critiques, involving the Rockefellers, the Illuminati, the CIA, and so on.

Anyone interested can quickly find, via an Internet search, hundreds of thousands or more references to such theories. Most of the more reliable AIDS “dissidents,” as they have been called, like Duesberg, have decided for obvious and sensible reasons to shy away from the AIDS-is-man-made theories.

Enter Rev. Wright

The U.S. presidential election campaign of 2008, especially on the Democrat side, has been the best reality show running and a new highpoint in the drama (or comedy) that it represents may have been reached when Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. spoke at the National Press Club (NPC) in Washington, D.C. on April 28, 2008 – an appearance covered live on all three U.S. cable news channels. After being little heard from other than in recordings of his past sermons, Wright had spent the previous several days emerging into the bright light of the national media, expanding and updating his searing critiques to large audiences beginning with an hour long appearance on Bill Moyers Journal on PBS on April 25.

In response to a journalist's question about Wright's 2003 allegation about AIDS (read to Wright by the moderator of the National Press Club April 28 event), Wright said this:

MODERATOR:  In your sermon, you said the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.  So I ask you:  Do you honestly believe your statement and those words?

WRIGHT:  Have you read Horowitz’s book, “Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola,” whoever wrote that question?  Have you read “Medical Apartheid”?  You’ve read it?

(UNKNOWN):  Do you honestly believe that (OFF-MIKE)

WRIGHT:  Oh, are you — is that one of the reporters?

MODERATOR:  No questions -

(CROSSTALK)

WRIGHT:  No questions from the floor.  I read different things. As I said to my members, if you haven’t read things, then you can’t — based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.

In fact, in fact, in fact, one of the — one of the responses to what Saddam Hussein had in terms of biological warfare was a non- question, because all we had to do was check the sales records.  We sold him those biological weapons that he was using against his own people.

So any time a government can put together biological warfare to kill people, and then get angry when those people use what we sold them, yes, I believe we are capable.

Largely because of the AIDS-conspiracy pronouncements made over the years by black leaders like Wright, Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan (a.k.a. Louis Eugene Walcott), comedian-activist Dick Gregory, and many others, “27 percent [of American blacks] agreed that 'AIDS was produced in a government laboratory,'” according to a study by the RAND Corporation published in on February 1, 2005, in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. (On April 27, 2008, a prominent page at Gregory's Web site linked to an article “AIDS: 'The Manufactured Virus'” – the Gregory site titled its link “'Aids' As a Weapon to Initiate Black Genocide Worldwide.” The Google cached version of the Gregory site page was here on April 30, 2008.)

Len Horowitz: Self-described “King David of Natural Healing”

“I personally trained more than 30,000 healthcare professionals in the most advanced ways to prevent and treat modern infectious diseases.”

–  Dr. Len Horowitz

Leonard Horowitz

In my opinion, one of the most interesting facts to emerge from the NPC exchange was Wright referencing Emerging Viruses: AIDS And Ebola: Nature, Accident or Intentional? by Leonard G. Horowitz, D.M.D., in effect identifying Horowitz as a major influence on his thinking that AIDS is manufactured and part of a plot to exterminate black people.

The bio at one of his Web sites describes Horowitz as a conventionally trained clinician and researcher, citing a “doctorate from Tufts University School of Dental Medicine in 1977” and a “Master of Public Health degree from Harvard University [that] focused on behavioral science and media persuasion technologies” [emphasis added], which, it says, Horowitz earned “before joining the research faculty at Harvard School of Dental Medicine to study psychosocial factors in oral health and disease prevention.”

In 1978, Horowitz said, he founded his company Tetrahedron. According to the “About Us” page at Tetrahedron's Web site, “The founding was precipitated by Dr. Horowitz's attendance at a seminar given by R. Buckminster Fuller and Warner [sic] Erhard [a.k.a. John Paul Rosenberg, the founder of est] called 'Making the World Work for Everyone.' During the program 'Buckey' reviewed scientific data proving civilization was on a crash coarse [sic] for self-destruction. He said, 'If you plan to make a difference, do it now! Don't wait.' Within a week, Dr. Horowitz, allied with his long time friend, Paris Perez, began the company in Rockport, Massachusetts in service to humanity. It was named in tribute to Dr. Fuller who taught the tetrahedron is the 'most stable structure in the physical universe.'”

According to the company's “Mission” Web page, “Incorporated initially in the State of Massachusetts, U.S.A., in 1978 as a nonprofit 501(C)(4) social welfare agency, the company has evolved into one of the premier educational publishers of 'health science and government cover-up' literature... In 1998, our company moved to the Idaho panhandle from Boston and relinquished our 501(C)(4) status in protest to regulatory agencies.” (A longer bio of Horowitz can be read at another of his Web sites here.)

A feature article published on July 18, 1999 in the Spokane, Washington Spokesman-Review, datelined Sandpoint, Idaho, where Horowitz and his family had recently moved, reported on Horowitz's budding unconventional business empire which by then was netting him $400,000 a year. A copy of the article, as well as several others relating to Horowitz, can be accessed here.

(Despite his obvious entrepreneurial success, Horowitz frequently plays the paranoid/”they're after me” card; on April 29, 2008, these words appeared prominently at one of Horowitz's sites: “According to our firewall attack surveillance program, many of our links, press releases, and articles have been destroyed - courtesy of the U.S. Naval Intelligence Center in Bethesda.”)

In recent years, even before the heightened publicity and presumably expanded sales that the references to him by Wright have stoked, Horowitz's entrepreneurial empire has grown considerably and he has taken his business(es) for profit. His Web sites and companies are numerous, selling hundreds if not thousands of different products and services, including a variety of sensational books, DVDs, audio tapes, downloads of Internet radio programs, health treatments (including “C-cure for skin cancers” at his Healthy World Store), “private phone consultations,” speaking engagements, seminars (including his “Love Seminar”), “personal support, education, and counseling,” and so on. It could take hours to peruse Horowitz's Web sites and follow the various links around to review everything that he has for sale.

And one of Horowitz's most famous, or infamous, products, of course, is Emerging Viruses: AIDS And Ebola - Nature, Accident or Intentional?, the self-published 1996 book that Wright cited, which alleges that AIDS is a government plot.

According to “Dentist Prescribes Conspiracies; Modern Medicine Spreading Plagues for Profit, Says Prolific Author, Speaker,” the 1999 Spokesman-Review article (which is generally positive), “Horowitz claims that scientists knowingly created AIDS by using infected monkeys to develop vaccines that were later tested on gay men in New York City and people in Central Africa. The disease made money for pharmaceutical companies and furthered a population-control agenda set decades earlier by wealthy families like the Rockefellers and even Britain's royals, Horowitz says.” According to an article published March 7, 1997 in All Africa News, Horowitz's book “blames Dr Henry Kissinger, United States Secretary of State at the time as the author of the campaign to develop anti-immune system viruses [including HIV-AIDS] for warfare purposes.”

Horowitz Endorsed by CAM Media

Horowitz is a big hit in certain circles of the expanding universe of CAM (complementary alternative medicine) and New Age media, especially on the Internet. He has also been a frequent guest on the #1 all night terrestrial radio program in North America, Coast to Coast AM.

A kindred spirit of Horowitz's is Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger, who has emerged in recent years as an omnipresence in the alt med/CAM community. Interestingly, Adams, much like Horowitz, operates scores of related Web sites. One of Adams' primary venues is naturalnews.com. After a few years of online activity, Adams' claims include having done “10,000 hours” of research on health, having written thousands of articles,” and having “built a following of over 800,000 people across the globe.”

On April 29, 2008, Adams published an article at his Natural News site, “Rev. Jeremiah Wright is Right about how U.S. Government Uses Blacks for Medical Experiments, Including AIDS.”

According to Adams, “Rev. Wright is telling people the truth about how the government has treated blacks. . . For the record, I don't know for sure whether the government introduced AIDS into the population, but I've read a lot of books on epidemics and the AIDS virus in particular (including books by Len Horowitz, who I highly recommend as an author), and I can state with certainty that I highly suspect AIDS was, in fact, engineered by the U.S. government and intentionally introduced into the population as either a weapon of genocide or a population control measure. [emphasis original]. . . Recommended reading: Emerging Viruses: AIDS And Ebola : Nature, Accident or Intentional? by Leonard Horowitz.”

Other examples of Adams' thinking can be gleaned from a June 19, 2007 article, “Why Michael Moore's SiCKO is a health care documentary every American must see.” The film is Moore's “best documentary yet,” writes Adams. “Moore shows us the universal health care systems in countries like Canada, the UK, France and even Cuba... all countries where health care is free to everyone. [emphasis original] It's called universal health care (or 'socialized medicine'), and it's a system followed by nearly every modern nation in the world... and even some not-so-modern nations. Only America practices medicine in the Dark Ages.”

(For another, very different perspective about Moore and SiCKO, see my July 1, 2007 article, “Feeling Sick After Watching SiCKO.”)

Fellow Travelers

In articles going back several years, especially ones reporting on the growing push for government-run universal health care in the U.S., I have traced the influence of the left, the extreme left, and the communist left on American health care policy today.

In the U.S. Presidential campaign of 2008, the influence, or role, of the extreme left never seems to be far from the center of things even if, according to the way the mainstream media report, the far left influences and relationships always seem to be hiding in plain site. To cite a few examples:

• The friendship Obama acknowledged with unrepentant Weather Underground domestic terrorist radicals and admitted bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who Obama's Web site described as “respectable fixtures of the mainstream in Chicago.” There is a well documented collaboration between Ayers/Dohrn and Obama going back to 1995. In an article published on September 11, 2001, Ayers told the New York Times, “I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough.”

• The influential role played by left wing radical Saul Alinksy during the formative years of both Obama and his leading rival for the Democrat nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton. Another of Obama's mentors was Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party member.

• Über left “journalist” Sam Graham-Felsen took a leave of absence from writing for publications like The Nation and Socialist Viewpoint to take a job as one of the Obama campaign's official bloggers.

• Wright, himself, has been revealed as holding many far left opinions. There are now over thousands of references at Google to a search using the keywords “Jeremiah Wright” and “left wing.”
  

Horowitz for his part, has praised or complimented Wright, and Louis Farrakhan.

It is interesting to consider two descriptions that have largely gone out of fashion and are considered a bit arcane or quaint. The term “fellow traveler,” similar to “useful idiot,” refers to a person who sympathizes with the beliefs of a particular organization, but does not formally belong to that organization. The two descriptions were most often applied to a sympathizer of communism, or particular communist states - especially the old Soviet Union.

And lo and behold, as revealed by Cliff Kincaid in a striking piece of investigative journalism, “Jeremiah Wright’s Controversial AIDS Charge,” published by AIM on April 28, 2008, the theory that the U.S. government created HIV/AIDS likely started, or was certainly spread, by agents of the old Soviet Union!

Specific to Horowitz's role in the spread of the disinformation, Kincaid writes that “I had exchanged correspondences with [Leonard] Horowitz several years ago because I caught him promoting an old Soviet disinformation theme that has been disavowed by former Soviet and KGB officials. . . The charge that AIDS is a plot against blacks has been used by people like Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan to inflame race relations. . . I told him the evidence showed the Soviets had used the AIDS charge against the U.S. to divert attention from their own biological weapons program.”

The detailed and compelling correspondence between Kincaid and Horowitz is reproduced here under the title “Author Caught Promoting Soviet AIDS Disinformation in Book on 'Emerging Viruses.'”

Kincaid's entire April 28 article is highly recommended and deserves to be read and carefully considered in full. Adding additional interest to it, the reader comments section at the end includes several fascinating posts including (as of April 30, 2008) two by Celia Farber, who has reported on controversies in HIV/AIDS for 22 years. Kincaid, and Farber, in fact, are two (among very few) journalists who are able to navigate the complexities of the ongoing HIV/AIDS miasma, including the distinctions between vital dissent and valid criticism of the dominant HIV/AIDS paradigm/meme and the type of narcissistic buffoonery represented by certain other players. Farber's comment #9 time stamped April 29 at 11:22 AM is especially noteworthy.

[To be continued as developments warrant.]

Peter Barry Chowka is a widely published writer and investigative journalist who writes about politics, health care, and the media. Between 1992 and 1994, he was an advisor to the National Institutes of Health. His Web site is: http://chowka.com

Galileo's Lawyer:
Courtroom Battles in Alternative Health,
Complementary Medicine And
Experimental Treatments

Richard Jaffe

"Infused with sharp, often puckish perceptions of major events and players in the cases recounted, the memoir reads like a storyteller's book," writes Marcus Cohen in a Townsend Letter review of Galileo's Lawyer, a new book from veteran alternative medicine attorney Richard Jaffe.

The back cover of the book gives hints of the stories inside: "Galileo’s Lawyer in an insider's view of the alternative health care field as told from the perspective of the legal battles involving the most popular and controversial complementary and alternative health care practitioners. Go inside the courtroom during the government's attempts to shut down a cancer clinic which was saving hundreds of terminally ill patients, and see how the U.S. Congress came to the clinic's rescue; Meet a group of New Jersey Chiropractors who sued the government for "racketeering" for employing an illegal extortion scheme; Watch the nutritionists battle the dietitians over dietary supplements; and Find out why naturopaths are prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license. Galileo's Lawyer is a living history about the struggles between medical mavericks, their patients, and the government."

The first page sets the stage by explaining not only the book's title, but the essence of the conflict between proponents and opponents of alternative medicine:

I defend medical mavericks. Some of my clients have invented new treatments. Those who haven’t, use the latest or greatest complementary and alternative health remedies in the field that is now called “integrative medicine.”

These medical heretics are idolized by their patients, and ridiculed and reviled by their detractors. Their supporters believe that alternative remedies are natural, non-toxic, holistic, groundbreaking and life saving. Opponents claim that the very same remedies are unproven, dangerous, life threatening and fraudulent.

Galileo fought the prevailing scientific theory of his time - that the sun revolved around the earth - and was forced to defend his beliefs before the ruling authority, the church. Many of my clients have defended their treatments in modern day medical inquisitions before state medical boards and in federal and state courtrooms. They are like Galileo fighting the medical Inquisition, or they are quacks and charlatans like the Russian faith healer and con man Rasputin who duped desperately ill patients out of their money.

I am Galileo’s lawyer, or Rasputin’s mouthpiece, depending on your perspective. This book tells the stories of medical mavericks and their legal battles against the church of medical orthodoxy.

The book's table of contents and a few extracts are online at galileoslawyer.com. Advance copies are available at galileoslawyer.com or thumbsuppress.com. Coming May 2 to amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, and in July to selected bookstores nationwide.