Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (46 page)

There was one other theory on the origin of AIDS: that it was man-made, genetically engineered in some laboratory and released, either accidentally or deliberately, on a world unprepared for it. It was a claim that cut across political and sexual lines, and caused a war of words between the two belligerent superpowers, then at the height of renewed cold war tensions.

On July 4, 1984, the New Delhi, India, newspaper,
The Patriot,
published an article making the first detailed charges of AIDS being a CBW agent. An anonymous American anthropologist was quoted claiming that AIDS was genetically engineered at the US Army’s Biological Warfare Laboratory at Fort Derrick, near Frederick, Maryland. To prove its point, articles from the Army’s own official magazine
Army Research, Development and Acquisition
were cited. The authors of one cited article were Lt. Col. Karl Pedersen, Jr. and Col. John Albertson, the (then) director of the Institute of Infectious Diseases and Director of the Medical Engineering Laboratory, respectively. The article cited dealt with “natural and artificial influences on the human immune system.”
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The
Patriot
article also claimed that “Fort Derrick scientists, with the help of the Centers for Disease Control, and under Pentagon contract, travelled to Zaire and Nigeria, and then to Latin America, to collect information on a ‘powerful virus that could not be found in Europe or Asia.”
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But it wasn’t until the Soviet journal
Literaturnya Gazeta
repeated the charges made by the Indian newspaper on October 30, 1985, that the accusation became an international controversy. The story was picked up worldwide, but American newspapers, predictably, ignored the story until the US government officially denounced the Soviet article as anti-American disinformation, and leaving it at that.

But the Soviets continued to cover the story, quoting two physicians, John Seale, a London venereologist, and Nathanial Lehrman, an American psychiatrist, to back their claims. This gained an official protest from the US ambassador to the Soviet Union.
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But in 1986, a pair of East German scientists, Jakob and Lilli Segal, issued a 52 page pamphlet, “AIDS: USA Home Made Evil; Not Imported from Africa,” which they distributed in English-speaking African countries. Just more commie agitprop?

The Segals were visited by two American embassy officials in East Berlin on October 10, 1986. “The officials claimed to be a historian and political counsel, respectively. But Segal said, ‘I am positive they were from the CIA — and that they were deeply concerned that the cover-up over the origin of AIDS was going to be exposed.’ The officials questioned Segal about `what he knows, what he thinks, where he got his information from, and what he intends doing with the report.’ The State Department acknowledged sending officials to the Segal home, but said it was merely `to point out the fallacies of the report.’”
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This account was found in the
London Sunday Express
of October 26, 1986. This tabloid interviewed Segal (stressing that, although resident of a communist country, he held no particular political views), Seale, and an American, Dr. Robert Strecker, another proponent of the AIDS as bio-warfare agent theory. The
Express
story alarmed the State Department more than any other incident prior to it because it was the first time the charge had been made in a Western paper, and a conservative one at that. On April Fools Day in 1987 the State department accused the
New Delhi Patriot
as being a communist front for publicizing the AIDS as bio-warfare story. (Was this timing merely a coincidence, or does someone in the State Department possess a sophisticated sense of humor?)

Ignored by both sides was the fact that speculations about the possible deliberate deployment of AIDS had circulated throughout the alternative and gay press for years before the
Patriot
story. As an example, a gay newspaper,
New York Native,
ran a letter from an anonymous source who claimed to have worked at Fort Detrick’s Biological Warfare Lab, and that it had deliberately released AIDS with the intention to infect gay men as part of a program called “Operation Firm Hand.”
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In 1969, after Richard Nixon’s supposed ban on the production of CBW agents, part of the grounds at Fort Detrick’s Biological Warfare Laboratory were renamed the Frederick Cancer Research Facility and given to the National Cancer Institute for “civilian medical research” The military’s grounds were also renamed as US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, dedicated exclusively, in conformity with Nixon’s great humanitarian crusade, to “defensive” research into CBW. But, “within two years of its foundation, the Institute’s staff and budget had trebled.”
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Even one who does not accept the AIDS as military conspiracy theory must wonder exactly what use the National Cancer Institute and the Army’s Bio-Warfare Lab would have for each other. Odder still was the fact that the NCI’s AIDS Task Force, directed by Dr. Robert Gallo, anounced in 1984 that it had discovered the cause of AIDS, a virus dubbed HIV — Human Immunosuppressive Virus; and this only a year after the search was begun — in conjunction with the Frederick Cancer Research Facility. At first glance this would seem to deny the possibility of Fort Detrick being the birthplace of AIDS. After all, if the military were engaged in a clandestine program to kill off homosexuals or other minorities by disease, why would they let the civilian researchers discover the means by which they did it and threaten to blow their cover?

The government often has its own reasons for leaking otherwise “sensitive information,” often highly selective, to certain individuals at special times. If the army accidentally released into the civilian population a bio-warfare experiment that became known as AIDS, and felt compelled to find a cure for it, they might find it more expedient to invite civilians, on various “need-to-know” bases, to do the dirty work of cleaning up their mess, possibly even manipulating them into thinking they “discovered” the culprit all by themselves. Remember, Dr. MacArthur was seeking funding for a study of a CBW micro-organism that would be resistant to immunological processes, a disease with no known cure. It isn’t likely that army scientists, considering the business they’re in, would first think of its cure.

Whether or not the military conceived AIDS, they definitely were curious about it once it became known:

“On February 18, 1987, the
Philadelphia Daily News
carried a McClatchy News Service report that Col. David L. Huxsoll, chief of UAAMRIID, told a meeting of scientists that the Soviet charges [of US creation of AIDS] were unfounded ‘disinformation.’ In his zeal to disprove the allegations, Huxsoll reportedly added, ‘…studies at the Army laboratories have shown that the AIDS virus would be an extremely poor biological warfare agent.’ When contacted by the author [Robert Lederer] Huxsoll denied having made the statement… The McClatchy reported told the author that Huxsoll had been quite clear. ‘He specifically said that once it [AIDS] surfaced, they screened it as they do any infectious agent. He said they had definitely looked at it.”
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The Pentagon itself admitted in a press release in April, 1987 that it was involved in research to find a cure for AIDS. But why? What possible motivation could the military, of all institutions, have in combatting AIDS? What would be its reason for helping to find a cure for a disease that primarily infects gays and non-white peoples? Compassion? Not bloody likely.

The military’s interest in a cure for AIDS is more sinister. According to a 1987 story in a California newspaper
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, “The US military is stockpiling vaccines and drugs to be used to protect the armed forces — but not civilians — during a biological war… But the military’s research in the field — including a search for an anti-AIDS drug — is unclassified, and the treatments do find non-military uses, said Col. David L. Huxsoll.”

Col. Huxsoll, whom we have previously met, claimed that the institute had developed “16 vaccines and drugs against natural toxins and viruses,” but didn’t have the “budgets big enough to lay down a sizable stockpile of these kinds of materials.” What the military did have was stockpiles “intended for about 3 million people, including all the armed forces, reservists, and the national guard.” Colonel Huxsoll maintained that the researchers at Fort Detrick did not over-step the bounds of the anti-biowarfare treaty. “Talking about altering an organism, I’m not going to try to second-guess how somebody could alter that… There’s enough bad organisms out there that you don’t have to fiddle around and make new ones.” He related that after animal-testing of a drug or vaccine, tests were then made on humans, “volunteer servicemen.” According to Dr. Jacob Segal, the testees were neither “volunteers” nor servicemen, but prisoners promised their freedom for their participation as guinea pigs. These contaminated ex-cons then were set loose to spread the ADDS virus with which they had been infected.

Colonel Huxsoll didn’t mention the Pentagon’s other plans, made public less than a year before, to contain the spread of AIDS by “mandatory and overt identification” of AIDS inflicted by a “Star of David” concept — as in the yellow badges Jews in Nazi Germany were required to wear in public, all the easier to identify them when it came time to cart them off to concentration camps. This seems to have been a proposal the Pentagon was keeping on hold until the right time, such as when public hysteria reached a high enough peak for such a blatantly authoritarian proposal to become palatable to the masses.
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The proposal, based on the completely false claim that AIDS can be transmitted through casual contact (such as touching a doorknob or toilet seat), “was initiated by two [San Francisco] Bay Area-based centers with a long history of military research… AIMS (Advanced Investigation of Medical Science) Group, has done classified work on biological and chemical warfare… [and] the Hoover Institute, the anti-Soviet think tank which lists Ronald Reagan as an honorary member.”
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Another Hoover Institute member embroiled in the AIDS controversy was the late philosopher Sidney Hook, who was active in the US counter-campaign against Soviet claims of US engineering of AIDS. To Hook, anyone who suggested the possibility of AIDS being the product of US military research, such as Dr. Robert Strecker, was a Soviet disinformation agent. A self-described “humanist” and “democratic socialist,” Hook’s membership in the reactionary Hoover Institute and “loyal oppositionist” defense of the US government raise some interesting questions.

Again it must be asked, what was the Pentagon up to with this frightening proposal? To round up and eliminate the loose ends of their botched experiment, perhaps? What jurisdiction does the military have in a public health crisis, and more importantly in a supposed democracy, should it have any? Was AIDS an agent provocateur created to produce just the sort of internal “clear and present danger” that would justify suspension of civil liberties and the imposition of martial law?

If the military-security apparatus did indeed create AIDS and targeted homosexuals as scapegoats, how was it accomplished? The answer might lie in the trial of a hepatitis B vaccine conducted in New York City in November, 1978. Candidates were specified to be only non-monogamous males between the ages of 20 and 40, and according to one source
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, “homosexuals received a different vaccine from heterosexuals.” The tests were conducted under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control, two institutions that would figure prominently later in the AIDS story. Between 1040 and 1083 gay men were inoculated. Two months later, in January, 1979, the first known case of AIDS was diagnosed. By 1981, 25-50% of those homosexual men who had received the vaccine had AIDS. By 1984, it was 64%, the figures for subsequent infection rates of participants in that suspicious study are allegedly “unavailable”, safe in the hands of the Justice Department.
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Then, in 1982, more gay men were “vaccinated” in Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, a total of 1402.
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The gay plague was on.

But if this “vaccination program” was the source of the AIDS virus among the white homosexuals, what is the connection to Haitians, IV drug users, and hemophiliacs? And what is the source of the nearly continent-wide AIDS plague in Africa?

The official mainstream media AIDS theory, courtesy of Dr. Robert Gallo, official (American) discoverer of HIV/HTLV-III, went like this: AIDS originated in Africa (remember the Green Monkey) where it was transmitted to Haitian teachers in the former Belgian Congo. These Haitians brought back with them to Haiti, where slumming white gay American tourists contracted it from Haitian male prostitutes — and the rest is history. Obviously IV drug users are brought into this easily, some gay junkie supposedly passing his needle to another though non-gay junkie. Hemophiliacs come in from contaminated blood supplies.