Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (47 page)

But what is the origin of AIDS in Africa? Both human beings and green monkeys have co-existed in Africa for countless eras, why did this disease suddenly surface in the late twentieth century? Why not earlier? Why now?

“An attempt should be made to ascertain whether viruses can in fact exert selective effects on immune function, e.g. by affecting T cell function as opposed to B cell function. The possibility should also be looked into that the immune response to the virus itself may be impaired if the infecting virus damages more or less selectively the cells responding to the viral antigens.”
²⁰

That was not from Dr. MacArthur`s testimony before Congress in 1969, but comes from a 1972 bulletin of the United Nations’ World Health Organization. Once again it would appear that AIDS or something that preceded it, was on the minds of many researchers prior to its official “discovery.”

On May 11, 1987, on a front-page, headline story, the
London Times
declared “Smallpox Vaccine Triggered AIDS”. The vaccination program took place throughout Africa in the mid-1970s and was conducted by WHO. In exactly those areas where the WHO vaccination program was undertaken are to be found the areas most devastated by AIDS. It would be interesting to know who was the major funder of the program, and which nation furnished the key personnel.
²¹

According to Dr. Robert Strecker, AIDS was predicted (and in medical science, prediction does not so much mean a projection into the future of a personal opinion, but making an educated guess based on probabilities and knowledge of current research in the field) as early as 1975 by a cancer researcher from Denmark, a J. Corbensen, who, at a convention of cancer researchers in Tokyo warned that a pandemic — a worldwide epidemic — of viral cancer was imminent. He warned that it would cause more deaths than the great flu epidemic of 1918, which killed an estimated one-fifth to one-third of the world’s population, and blamed it all on scientists irresponsibly growing animal viruses in human tissue cell culture. When contacted by Dr. Strecker regarding his predictions, Corbensen denied ever having made the speech, despite its being printed in the
Bibliographica Haemologica,
a professional journal, the same year. (22) Corbensen worked for, according to Dr. Strecker, the World Health Organization.

Dr. Strecker himself deserves more attention. He got into AIDS research by accident. A private practitioner from the Los Angeles area, he and his brother Ted, a lawyer, were asked to prepare a proposal for a HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) for Security Pacific Bank of California. What they needed to know was how much money for potential AIDS treatments for infected employees their health insurance would be required to pay out. In their research, the Strecker brothers came to the stunning conclusion that AIDS was a man-made disease, that it was not a homosexual disease nor a venereal disease, that it could be carried and transmitted by mosquitoes, that there were at least six different AIDS viruses worldwide, and that condoms would not prevent the spread of AIDS. AIDS was, Dr. Strecker concluded, actually a form of viral cancer, and contagious. He theorized that AIDS was a hybrid, the splicing together of bovine (cow) leukemia virus and sheep visna (brain-rot) virus, a lethal combination and one hard to understand as emerging spontaneously from nature.

Dr. Strecker’s vision of a humanity infected with the fatal product of some military research laboratory gone insane is a grim one. He estimated the complete decimation of Africa by the turn of the century, and the complete overnight death of Japan. Strecker warned that unless a cure for AIDS was found — soon — that the entire human race faced extinction.

Strecker’s opinions were treated by the mass media in the usual fashion: he was either ridiculed or simply ignored. He was one of those accused by Sidney Hook of being a Soviet disinformation agent. Strecker may be an alarmist with a particularly pessimistic viewpoint, but for a man who supposedly doesn’t know what he is talking about, strange and tragic coincidences have plagued him since he began to lecture the public on the real cause of AIDS and its creator(s). The first of these was the mysterious death of his brother Ted, who helped him pursue the AIDS investigation. He was found dead of a gunshot wound in his Springfield, Missouri home on August 11, 1988, apparently self-inflicted. Dr. Strecker admits that “in the past he suffered from depression and monumental frustration at the relative lack of interest in his findings.”

Dr. Strecker spoke with him the night before his death. Ted was cheerful, in good spirits, and looking forward to certain new developments that promised progress. The next day he was found dead, his 22 caliber rifle next to him. No note, no message, no goodbyes to anyone. “Very untypical of him.”
²³

Another fatality close to Dr. Strecker was Illinois State Representative Douglas Huff who was found dead in his home of an overdose of heroin and cocaine on September 22, 1988. Huff had been beating the drum on the AIDS cover-up in both the Illinois State House and through the media, one of the few politicians who took Dr. Strecker seriously enough to try to present his views to a larger and a more influential audience.

Perhaps Dr. Strecker’s brother really committed suicide in a fit of deep depression. Perhaps Rep. Huff was only a drug-addled paranoid trying to gain notoriety. Perhaps that is exactly the impression somebody wanted these two men to leave behind them, in order to discredit themselves and Dr. Strecker.
²²

Perhaps the main reason why the AIDS-Biowarfare conspiracy theory seems to be less palatable to many these days might have something to do with the discrediting of the HIV-AIDS theory as a foundation to be built upon, the emergence of new, alternative treatments and therapies that have had much success in helping AIDS patients to regain their health and lives and cast serious doubt upon the official CDC/NIH position on HIV. AIDS patients treated as if they were suffering from syphilis, given massive doses of penicillin and typhoid vaccine showed remarkable turnaround. Co-factors were begun to be seen as increasingly important, and even Dr. Luc Montagnier who isolated HIV before Robert Gallo (Montagnier called it LAV and decided to share credit for its discovery — and royalties for the blood test which detects the antibody to the virus — with Gallo after a long litigation that included a war of words between the US and French governments, and donate the royalties to an AIDS research foundation. All this while people were dying slow, lingering deaths) has now repudiated the HIV hypothesis, claiming that the real culprits are mycoplasmas, microbes that seem to be the deadly co-factor to the HIV virus.
²⁵

Yet while research continues to unravel the mystery surrounding the cause of AIDS, disturbing connections to military germ warfare continue to arise.

A scientist with the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, Shyh-Ching Lo, identified a previously unknown infectious agent in people with AIDS, a mycoplasma microbe which caused AIDS-like symptoms and death in monkeys, something that the injection of merely HIV into animals has supposedly never done. Lo named his discovery VLIA for Virus Like Infectious Agent. Lo has kept a low profile, partially because “army security is keeping a very tight lid on Dr. Lo’s findings.”
²⁶

Once again the military’s interest in this phenomenon raises questions as to the nature of their concern with AIDS. Why does the military always seem to be hovering on the periphery of AIDS research, if not in the middle of it? The government’s, especially the military’s, covert experimentations on unwitting American citizens, both individuals and large populations, is precedented and documented, more than can be summarized here
²⁷
. So it hardly seems responsible to dismiss those who insist upon a military connection to AIDS as mere paranoids or political opportunists until serious investigations into the matter have been made.

Unfortunately, such investigations, should they be conducted, would encounter one greater obstacle after another, because the problem is not merely the military and any covert biowarfare experiments (or worse) that it may be conducting, but the entire system. Now more than ever, the American government is a power unto itself, the apparatus that serves the interests of an elite, amoral clique and not that of the people as a whole. To expect truth and justice from a state that can block every inquiry with the excuse of “national security” is to expect too much. To solve the AIDS mystery may well require a radical cure of more than a medical nature.

1
) Department of Defense Appropriations for 1970, Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee of Appropriations, House of Representatives, Ninety-first Congress. First Session, Part 6, Chemical and Biological Warfare, Monday, June 9, 1969, p. 104. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1969.

2
) The other witnesses were: Dr. B. Harris, Deputy Assistant Director of Chemical Technology, DDR&E Dr. K.C. Emerson, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for R&D (Research and Development) Brig. Gen. W.S. Stone, Jr., Director of Materiel Requirements, Headquarters, US Army Materiel Command Col. J.J. Osick, Chief, Systems and Requirements Division, Directorate of CBR and Nuclear Operations, Office of the Asst. Chief of Staff for Force Development.

3
) Ibid.

4
) Ibid.

5
) Ibid.

6
) Patton, Cindy;
Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS,
1985, Boston, South End Press, pp. 22-4; Brown, Tony; “What Killed Max Robinson?”,
Tri-State Defender,
December 31, 1988

7
) Lederer, Robert; “Precedents for AIDS?: Chemical-Biological Warfare. Medical Experiments, and Population Control”,
Covert Action Information Bulletin
#28, Summer 1987, pp.36-7.

8
) Ibid.

9
) Ibid, pp.38-9.

10
) Ibid.

11
) Ibid, p.36.

12
) Ibid, p.40.

13
) Ibid.

14
) Kiernan, Vincent; “US Storing Vaccines for Military”, Hayward, Ca.,
The Daily Review.
Wednesday, February 18, 1987.

15
)
San Francisco Chronicle,
February 9, 1986;
San Francisco Examiner,
February 9, 1986; both as quoted in Anonymous, “Nazi-Style “‘Final Solution’. Next?: Pentagon Wants to Brand AIDS Victims,”
Worker’s Vanguard,
April 11, 1986.

16
) Ibid.

17
) Waves Forest; “Designer Diseases: AIDS as Biological and Psychological Warfare”,
Now What,
#1, Fall 1987, PO Box 768, Monterey, CA 93942.

18
) Ibid.

19
) Brown, Tony; “What Killed Max Robinson?”

20
) Waves Forest; “Designer Diseases”; Douglass, William Campbell, MD,
WHO Murdered Africa,
no date, Clayton, Ga.

21
) Brown, Tony; transcript of a speech given by Dr. Robert Strecker May 25, 1990 at the Garvin Theater, Santa Barbara, Ca.

22
) Strecker, Robert (?),
Is AIDS Man Made?:
The Strecker Memorandum, no date, The Strecker Group, 1501 Colorado Blvd., Eagle Rock, Ca. 90041.

23
) Ibid.

24) Ibid.

25
) Farber, Celia and Anthony Liversidge, “AIDS: Words From the Front”,
Spin,
September, 1990, p. 71, 87-8; Farber’s AIDS column has been a regular feature in Spin, a popular music magazine, since its debut in the February 1988 issue. Farber has covered alternative treatments for AIDS, the controversy over AZT, and the political infighting among AIDS medical researchers (she was apparently the first to spotlight Dr. Peter Duesberg’s claim that HIV does not cause AIDS by itself, leading to a debate within her column between Duesberg and Gallo, architect of the official HIV theory). Yet Farber has not, to my knowledge, once mentioned the possibility of the bio-warfare agent theory.

26
) Regush, Nicholas; “AIDS: Words from the Front”,
Spin,
January, 1990, pp. 69-70.

27
) Mitford, Jessica;
Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business,
1976, New York, Knopf. Jones, James H.;
Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,
1981, New York, The Free Press. Harris, Robert, and Jeremy Paxman;
A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare,
1982, New York, Hill and Wang. Consult your library for more depressing examples.