Washington - The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, former long-time pastor to Sen. Barack Obama (D.Ill.), said at the National Press Club on Monday that he believes the U.S. government is "capable" of having invented HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, as a means of committing genocide against people of color.

Wright's statement was a modification of the claim he made in an April 2003 sermon that the U.S. government had "lied" about inventing HIV as a means of perpetrating genocide.

"Based on the Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything," Wright said at the press club.

(The Tuskegee experiment was a notorious study conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service in which a group of black men were not told they had syphilis and were denied treatment for 40 years, starting in 1932, so that researchers could study what the disease did to them. The secret study was terminated in 1972 after its existence was publicly reported.)

Wright made the assertion about what he believed the United States was "capable of doing" on Monday when he was asked about what he had said about HIV in his controversial April 2003 sermon at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where Obama is a member. "Governments lie," Wright said in that sermon. "The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color."

At the press club, the moderator asked Wright: "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 responded by first asking the moderator if she had ever read two books, one of which was Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola by Leonard Horowitz.

According to a brief summary from Booknews.com that is posted on the Barnes and Noble Web site (where the volume is offered for sale), the book is "characteristic of a 'conspiracy genre.'"

The author's "bias toward the theory that HIV was introduced into the general population by vaccine experiments conducted in New York City and Africa is apparent," says the Booknews.com summary. "He generalizes from this thesis that the AIDS epidemic may have been deliberately deployed as a genocide tactic as part of the CIA foreign policy activity in Central Africa."

"I read different things," Wright explained at the press club. "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," said Wright, "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," he said.

In a 1998 interview with National Public Radio, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Horowitz's theories about how HIV developed were "really not founded in reality."

"The evolution of HIV, AIDS epidemic from an epidemiological, a molecular biological, and public health standpoint is really quite incompatible with those theories that are really rather far-fetched," said Fauci.