Accuracy in Media

Asked
during the question-and-answer period following his National Press Club speech
on Monday why he charged the U.S. Government with manufacturing the AIDS virus
to kill black people, Barack Obama’s “former” pastor Jeremiah Wright cited a
1996 book by Leonard Horowitz, Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola. This
rang a bell. I had exchanged correspondences with Horowitz several years ago
because I caught him promoting an old Soviet disinformation theme that has been
disavowed by former Soviet and KGB officials.

Is
Wright parroting communist propaganda? If so, he may also have seen it on the
CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.

The
charge that AIDS is a plot against blacks has been used by people like Jeremiah
Wright and Louis Farrakhan to inflame race relations. Louis Farrakhan’s
newspaper, The Final Call, ran
an article (December 15, 1999) quoting Horowitz as saying that AIDS is a
“genocidal plot” against blacks. The paper’s on-line version carried a link to
the Horowitz website. Horowitz claims a copy of his book was used in the Will Smith movie, “I Am
Legend,” about a plague that kills most people on earth and transforms some
that are left into mutants.

As
a skeptic of some of the claims about AIDS, I examined the Horowitz book.
Horowitz, who has quite a following and speaks around the country, raises some
legitimate questions about AIDS, vaccines, and the medical establishment. The U.S. certainly
studied the feasibility of using viruses or germs as weapons. But the claims
about AIDS being manufactured by the U.S. Government as a weapon of population
control have been debunked. 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.

He
replied, in part: “I am happy to
learn that the Nation of Islam’s The Final Call, a newspaper that issues Louis
Farrakhan’s concerns regarding HIV/AIDS as genocide, has a direct link to our
website. I applaud Minister Farrakhan, and a half dozen other Black leaders,
who have grasped the truth about HIV/AIDS as a utilitarian population control
plot, and have the guts to say it.”

Horowitz
released another book, Death in the Air, which purports to include
information about the “intentional targeting of black Americans and Africans
for population control, including depopulation, as is being accomplished by the
AIDS epidemic today.” The release for the book cited an alleged “secretly
dispatched National Security Memorandum 46 to cabinet chiefs only” from
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser in the Carter
Administration. The release said, “This document, the most telling, authorized
the FBI and CIA to initiate genocidal policies.”

This
document was reproduced in “Soviet Active Measures: Hearings before the
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House of Representatives,
Ninety-Seventh Congress, Second Session, July 13, 14, 1982.” These 1982
hearings produced evidence that the document was a forgery, possibly of Soviet
origin, designed to hurt U.S.
relations with Africa. An analysis showed that
one of the individuals involved in its distribution was a former member of the
Communist Party USA who became affiliated with the World Peace Council, a
Soviet front.

The
document, an obvious hoax, included no reference to genocide. Rather, it
outlined a bogus government effort to monitor and provoke blacks at home and
abroad. There was an authentic Presidential Review Memorandum 46, but it
concerned events in Central America. It can be
found in a listing of Carter presidential National Security Council documents.

Wright
isn’t the first public figure to repeat the claim that AIDS is a U.S. weapon to
kill people. The claim that AIDS was manufactured by the United States
was reported by CBS Evening News anchor Dan
Rather on a March 30, 1987, broadcast. Rather was widely criticized for playing into a
Soviet KGB disinformation campaign. The charge had appeared in a number of
Soviet and Third World publications before
Rather picked it up.

Horowitz
went farther than Rather, suggesting the charge is backed up by “evidence.” In
his book, Emerging Viruses, on page 363, he wrote that “For years
preceding the end of the Cold War, the KGB gathered evidence, that Russian
officials ultimately reported, suggesting an American origin of AIDS. Officials
alleged that the AIDS virus had been a Pentagon invention―a germ unleashed for
political purposes in Zaire.”

The
Soviet KGB had planted charges in a propaganda operation designed to conceal
the hand of the KGB. This is the nature of an “active measures” campaign. A
report on this matter is “Soviet
Influence Activities: A Report on Active Measures and Propaganda, 1986-87,”
published in August 1987 by the U.S. Department of State. The published
hearings of the House Intelligence Committee are also very useful.

The
Horowitz book, on page 364, reproduced a Soviet “Pravda” cartoon depicting the “American origin” of the AIDS
virus. He gave “courtesy” credit to Covert
Action Information Bulletin. In fact, he cites individuals associated
with Covert Action Information
Bulletin as legitimate sources of information on this topic. Yet this
publication, according to 1980 hearings of the House Intelligence Committee,
published a Soviet forgery of a NATO document as if it were authentic. Covert Action Information Bulletin
was associated with Philip Agee, the CIA defector who collaborated with the
Cuban Communists.

The
AIDS charge against the Pentagon was disavowed in late 1987 by then Soviet
President Mikhail Gorbachev, who said, “No more lying. No More disinformation,”
in an effort at a more open foreign policy. (In fact, the Russians have
continued these disinformation campaigns since the fall of the old Soviet Union, as the book, Comrade
J, documents).

At
the time, however, Russian officials were trying to put on a fresh face. In
fact, four years before the Horowitz book was published, Yevgeni Primakov,
former head of the KGB, admitted that “the KGB planted stories in the late
1980s which alleged that the HIV virus was the result of a Pentagon
experiment.”

In
1992, two former officers of the East German intelligence service, the Stasi,
published a book in which they described how they collaborated with the KGB to
promote the AIDS disinformation, using Russian-born East German professor Dr.
Jakob Segal. This is mentioned in John O. Koehler’s 1999 book, Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German
Secret Police.

Former
KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky admitted the Soviet KGB role in spreading the AIDS
charge against the U.S.
in his 1990 book, The KGB – The Inside
Story. Gordievsky called the charge a “fabrication” that “also took in some
of the Western media.” The leading Soviet AIDS expert, Viktor M. Zhdanov, also
repudiated the anti-American charge.

All
of this is not to say that questions should not be raised about the science
behind and even origin of AIDS.

Journalist
Celia Farber wrote a provocative piece, “Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of
Medical Science.” The daughter of famed radio talk-show host, Barry Farber, she
will be honored by the Semmelweis
Society on May 13 in Washington, D.C., with its Clean Hands Award. The
organization is dedicated to ethical conduct in science and medicine.

April
23 was “Rethinking AIDS Day,” dedicated to
questioning the basic HIV=AIDS connection. There is a growing “HIV Survival”
movement of people who have been diagnosed with HIV but avoid AIDS treatments
and lead healthy lives.

It
would be a tragedy if Wright’s wild charges prevent an open and honest debate
about the nature of AIDS. After all, 24 years after HIV was declared at an
April 23, 1984, Washington
news conference, as the probable cause of AIDS, there is still no cure or
vaccine. About $200 billion has already been spent by the U.S. Government on
HIV/AIDS but investigations have found corruption in the various programs that
test and distribute anti-AIDS drugs. The United Nations has been caught
red-handed inflating the number of AIDS cases, even while a U.N.-backed
international airline tax is being implemented country by country to spend even
more money.

But
now that Wright  has reaffirmed his
belief in the outrageous claim that AIDS is a weapon waged by the U.S. against
black people, Senator Obama should be asked by the media what he thinks of it.

If
the media want an issue in this campaign, they’ve got it.  
          

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