Excerpted from
"The Continuing Heartbreak of our Human Experimentation Culture: The AIDS Establishment Endorses the Experiments on Foster Kids at ICC," by Celia Farber.
The City Council Hearing on May 5 in New York was packed and the air was electric. It felt like an historic event. ACS Commissioner John Mattingly started out fairly arrogant but quickly became deferential when the rage in the largely black crowd in the room became almost tangible. He had made the mistake of calling those who were furious about the trials "fringe groups" and was put in his place, as though by the swipe of a mighty lion paw, by Councilman Bill Perkins who said in a low, rich voice: "An apology is in order, I believe, for your use of this phrase 'fringe groups.' To use that phrase diminishes the substance of what we are talking about. There is nothing of greater concern to communities of color than what we are talking about here today. This has grave racial and historical connotations, and you, sir, have opened a real can of worms."
The audience roared. After that Mattingly was meek and contrite, vowing to "find out what happened to these children. Every one of them."
Damn right.
Public Advocate Dr. Betsy Gotbaum, who had written letters to ACS and ICC inquiring about details of the trials and the children in them, all of which were unanswered, said: "This is so outrageous. It is literally unbelievable."
The meeting went on for about five hours, concluding with three-minute testimonies from dozens of people, including parents whose children had been taken into custody by ACS for little or no reason then swept into the medical experiments.
The film "Guinea Pig Kids" was shown — depicting a world that looked more like apartheid era South Africa than post Civil Rights America. Many people cried openly. The black community — represented by several groups that Bergman dismissed as "denialist" and "grandstanding," including the Dec. 12th Movement and Parents in Action — made it very clear that this "issue" is to them, "bigger, even, than police brutality," and likened it to the Tuskeegee syphilis experiments.
