AIDS: A Biowarfare Scourge

House subcommittee meetings can be dull affairs and, therefore, not well attended. But, on occasion, the subcommittee on military appropriations can be eyebrow raising. For example, a Department of Defense Biological Research administrator arrived at a June 9, 1969 session to request funds to carry out an untoward research project. Dr. Donald MacArthur made this prediction: "Within five to ten years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which would differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease." The simplest explanation for Dr. MacArthur's statement is the creation of a virus that would destroy the immune system. MacArthur received the funds when he offered that any enemy would deploy the virus if that enemy developed it. By 1978 the first cases of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) emerged in Africa.

A coincidence is readily apparent: Is AIDS the zenith of biowarfare experiments?

Theodore Weiss, a US Congressman from New York, represents a large gay electorate. Weiss opined in 1983 that "attitudes toward homosexuals and homosexuality by some segments of society, the possible utilization of biological weapons must be seriously considered."

The groups the AIDS virus targets suggests an biowarfare slant. Keep in mind no one is actually immune from this virus, certain groups are more vulnerable: Africans, drug users, gays. Evidence for a biowarfare angle is sparse. The interesting thing is the same holds for the US government's theory for the spread of AIDS in the human population. Monkeys spread the virus. This premise is flimsy.

The generally accepted origin of AIDS is the virus tagged HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) was identified by Dr. Robert Gallo in 1984 and by a group of French scientists at about the same time. Essentially, Dr. Gallo observes the smimilarity between a simian virus (STLV-III) and HIV. Gallo observed that a monkey (so called green monkeys) carried this virus transmitted it to an African. Within a brief span of years, people were dying from having sex and blood transfusions. The monkey transmission system is a mere educated guess.

All of this gets to a horrendous notion: the government can be callously ruthless on occasion. One particularly horrific example is the 1931 Puerto Rico cancer research study. Several Puerto Ricans were purposely infected with cancer by Chief Pathologist Cornelius Rhoades of the Rockefeller Institute. Thirteen of those subjects died. How did Corkey justify those unnecessary deaths:

"The Porto (Rhoades' intentional misspelling) Ricans are the dirtiest, laziest, degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere." Rhoades continued, "I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off eight and transplanting cancer into several more . . . . All physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects."

Rhoades' is brutish and bigoted, but never charged in court for abusing his position. He was termed only "mentally ill," but the US DoD saw him differently and gave Rhoades responsibility for two large chemical warfare projects during the 1940's. Eventually, he was given a Legion of Merit and a seat on the Atomic Energy Commission.

What of the biowarfare research? A particular virus that attracted the military's attention was the canis strain of brucella. The symptoms are known ones: headaches, fever, general malaise, muscle pain, pharyngitis, and lymphadenopathy--the same symptoms seen in the AIDS-Related Complex, the percursor to AIDS itself.

Interestingly, the first report of the biowarfare nature of AIDS was printed in a New Delhi, India newspaper, The Patriot, for July 4, 1984. This article incorporated citations from an official US Army research publication about "natural and artificial influences on the human immune system."

What was really intriguing was that this Indian article stated that Fort Detrick researchers (home of the National Cancer Institute's Frederick Cancer Reserch Facilty, originally styled the US Army Biological Warfare Laboratory) safariied into Africa to search for "a powerful virus that could not be found in Europe or Asia." The gathered data was studied at Fort Detrick and "the result was the isolation of a virus that causes AIDS."

Eventually, two French-born East German scientists, Jakob and Lilli Segal authored a pamphlet AIDS: USA Home-Made Evil. The pamphlet's central premise was that AIDS was the product of biowarfare experiments. The Segals claimed that HIV is the product of genetically engineering a hybrid of the visan virus (a virus causing a sheep-borne brain disease) and a virus called HTLV-I (HIV was originally named HTLV-III), which causes white blood cell cancer. The Segals identified Fort Detrick as the inventing laboratory for this virus. One problem. Scant evidence exists that HIV was synthesized at Fort Detrick, or elsewhere, but the National Institutes of Health did ask Fort Detrick military scientists to assist in developing an AIDS cure.

The AIDS saga gets better. In 1987 Col. David Huxsoll, US Army (the US Army recurs throughout the AIDS story) gave away a bit of information in a tirade regarding the AIDS as a biowarfare weapon. The colonel said, "Studies at army laboratories have shown that the AIDS virus would be an extremely poor biological warfare agent." Col. Huxsoll retracted his statement, but the reporter who penned it, stands by the colonel's remark.

AIDS first broke out in the US in the gay male population at the same time that Reganism and the decrying of homosexuality arose. The biowarfare premise assumes that gay men were singled out for decimation and, even, scapegoating.

Consider in 1978 1000 plus, multiple partner gay men received experimental vaccinations against Hepatitis B, courtesy of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. Within six years, 64% of those gay men had developed AIDS. There is more to consider. Another vaccination program, for smallpox, in Africa. The World Health Organization (WHO) ran this program. The regions for the vaccinations became the most AIDS prone ones in Africa. The problem with these two vaccination programs is coincidence of the AIDS pandemic outbreak.

Dioxins and dengue virus have been mentioned as catalysts, as has a mutated form of syphilis.

In any explanations, AIDS/HIV is stealthy, prone to mutation, resiliant to vaccine. The underlying belief is that the human element cultivated it with a sinister motive.

References

Krupey, G.J. "AIDS: Act of God or the Pentagon?" Steamshovel Press, 4 (1992).

Rappaport, Jon. AIDS Inc.: Scandal of the Century. Foster City, CA: Human Energy Press, 1988.