CONTEXT AND HISTORY
"In the late
1960s, I heard about Mary Sherman's
| "Do you know what happened to the Romans?
connection to an
underground medical laboratory run by |
The last 7 Roman were fags. When the
suspect in the
murder of President Kennedy. I was told they | Catholic Church went to
hell, in, I don't
were using monkey viruses to create
cancer. The possibility | know, 3 or 4 centuries ago, it was
of this being used as a biological weapon was clear.
| homosexual. And it finally had to be
The dark
specter of unleashing a designer virus on the world | cleaned out...
And let's look at strong
haunted me. I even offered a
sarcastic comment at the time. | societies. The Russians. God
damn it,
"The
good news is if there's a bizarre global epidemic
|
they root them out...
involving cancer and a monkey virus thirty years from now,
|
at least we'll know where it came
from."
| ... You
know what I mean?
- Ed Haslam, "Dr. Mary's Monkey" | - President Richard M. Nixon,
05/13/1971, -- Oval Office taped conversation 498-5
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
I am a reader of Skeptical Inquirer magazine which
showers contempt on "conspiracy theory",
which it tars with a broad
brush, as if the whole of it were in the same league as believing
in
"Bigfoot" or "UFOs". It makes no acknowledgment that such things
could exist as
skeptically or scientifically oriented, legitimate
conspiracy theorists, who have researched
their subject matters in depth
and paid attention to all the conflicting alternatives.
I have great
faith in pure science. I have little faith that our science is
pure.
Particularly when science intersects with such
corrupting influences as profit motives
or politics. The distinguished scientists who
write for Skeptical Inquirer are outside of
their areas of expertise when they venture into the world
of deep politics, where
their writings reveal themselves as political
neophytes, as best. At worst, they are
not lacking in political
sophistication, at all, but are really quite sophisticated-
as for-hire
political propagandists, paid to cover up some of the very conspiracies that
would like to pretend are in the same vein as "UFOs".
They would of course laugh at the "paranoia" of anyone
who suggested some of them might
be skilled propagandists, but that would only be
revealing their political naivety and lack
of perspective. Even if mistaken, that
suspicion would be reasonable, based on history.
To justify that statement, consider revelations that came
out during the Church Committee
hearings in the 1970s, which gave Americans a rare
glimpse of the sorts of things had
been going on in the CIA, under a veil
of secrecy. In what was called "Operation
Mockingbird", the CIA attempted to infiltrate and control
media. They wanted to dominate
what the American people would be
allowed to see and hear.
A reporter once asked a top honcho at the Washington
Post, how many of their writers
were on payroll of the CIA.
The response was "I have no idea". Another reporter asked
the same question of a former CIA director, not just
concerning the Washington Post, but
of American media in general. The CIA director's
response was to boast that:
"We own anyone of any significance."
With that kind of control of the media, what might be the
kinds of things that could be
kept from public awareness?
In another episode called "Operation Paperclip", the CIA
had brought former Nazis into
the United States - some 1500 engineers, scientists,
technicians- shielding them from
prosecution, so that the United States military and
intelligence empires could benefit
from their services. Similarly, the U.S after WWII
shielded Japanese biological warfare
scientists from prosecution - in
spite of their having body parts of U.S. prisoners of war
in jars of
formaldehyde- so that the U.S. could benefit from that knowledge and skill
concerning biological warfare.
Another revelation
of the Church Committee Congressional hearings was a revelation
by former
CIA director William Colby, who demonstrated a "nondiscernible
microbioinoculator", which was basically a dart-gun
intended for biological warfare,
to inject a victim with a toxin, so painlessly that the
victim would not be aware that
they had been injected with anything. Whether that
weapon was intended for
use in selected assassinations or wholesale elimination
of "undesirables" is something
that we can no longer ask Mr. Colby, who
later drowned under suspicious circumstances
that were questioned by his
own wife, who said that Colby was deathly afraid of water
and never went without a life preserver, yet he was found
without one.
Ralph McGehee was a decorated, 25-year veteran of the CIA
who worked under William
Colby. McGehee supported the Vietnam
war initially, but came to realize eventually that
American conduct in that war was unbecoming, that the
real wishes of many Vietnamese
people were being ignored. When he dared to
relate such conclusions to William Colby,
McGehee was immediately seen as unfit and promptly
shafted. McGehee became a
whistleblower, for which he claims strenuously that he has
been viciously harassed
over the years, almost certainly coming
from the intelligence empires that he criticized,
as many others have
similarly claimed concerning campaigns of illegal harassment
(as, by the
way, does the author).
It was a link on Ralph McGehee's CIABASE, which became a
respected resource for journalists,
that the author found the first clue to AIDS origin, and
helped set the course of a lifetime
that led to this website.
Another of McGehee's topics of which he had
intimate knowledge was "Operation Phoenix",
which was basically a CIA-conducted murder campaign, not
against combatants, but against
civilians for the crime of having the
wrong political beliefs. Some 20,000- 30,000 persons were
murdered
in that campaign, alone.
The Agent Orange that was spread over an area the size of
Massachusetts in Vietnam
scarred the DNA of a nation and created a legacy of birth
defects that would be something
fitting for a horror movie. This was not fighting
"for freedom" as American soldiers were
told, but for the sake of economic interests, global
domination and the paranoia of a wealthy
class that felt threatened by an alternative economic
philosophy. The hypocrisy of claiming
to fight for the sake of
freedom and democracy is highlighted by U.S. support for the
dictator Diem, a Catholic dictator in a Buddhist country
who abused praying Buddhist
monks by spraying toxic chemicals over their heads, when
they defied his banning of the
Buddhist flag. Diem gained such a bad reputation
that the CIA which had supported him
came to view him as a liability.
On a trip to Vietnam, I asked whether the Vietnamese believed
that the CIA assassinated Diem, to which the response was
affirmative.
Agent Orange could rightly be called "chemical warfare"
and was a massive crime against humanity.
In the Korean War, there were also allegations of
biological weapons used by the United States
and a revelation how
American military officials stood by and watched while refugees were
machine-gunned into a mass grave, for the suspicion that they might have the
wrong political
sympathies.
You will find references in Wikipedia as to how President
Richard Nixon stopped all biological
warfare research. This is stated as if fact, taking
Nixon at his word, as if Gospel.
You can also find references describing how Nixon once
schemed to burglarize the Republican
headquarters and blame it on
Democrats, to make it look like both sides were doing the same
things, and take off some of the heat for Watergate.
How Nixon wanted to use Teamster thugs
and "hurt anti-war protesters, really bad". How he
told the IRS to "get the Jews". How blacks
"lived like dogs". His response to mass killings in
Vietnam was "Good! We need more of that.
More killings. More
assassinations." Does this sound like a man whose word can be
taken at face
value when he is taking an uncharacteristically
humanitarian position about "stopping" biological
warfare research?
Nixon's show of "stopping" biological warfare was akin to
President Ford's supposed "ban"
on assassinations. It could almost
be taken as a warning signal that they were intending to do
just the
opposite and simply engaging in some window-dressing to cover up the fact.
The Russian KGB did not believe for one minute that Nixon
had stopped biological warfare research,
but had merely turned it into a "black op" under the
guise of "cancer research". Our media
dismisses this as a
"propaganda campaign", but more likely, the real propaganda is precisely the
other way around.
You will find in Wikipedia a page of
"discredited" AIDS origin theories, which are "discredited"
perhaps in
the eyes of Wikipedia editors or vested government interests, not in the
eyes
of the theorists who are granted no fair say or
opportunity for debate on that subject.
The theories are "discredited" with broad brush by
superficial arguments, such as concerning
supposed "early" AIDS cases, which prove nothing even if
the claims were credible.
Such claims are accepted uncritically in
the style that is supposedly and stereotypically
characteristic of
"conspiracy theorists", themselves. Certainly, there is
little credibility offered
by a source that would be so gullible as to
take the pronouncements seriously from such a
shamelessly corrupt figure
as Richard Nixon.
On a trip to Cuba, I discussed Latin American history
with a history professor. When I described
the kinds of tortures used by the CIA-installed and
supported dictator, Augusto Pinochet of Chile-
rape with dogs, bayonets up vaginas - the history
professor winced, and remarked how this
was difficult to hear, which led me to understand that
even as a history professor, he must not
have been aware of such gritty details which reflect as
much on the corrupt U.S. intelligence
establishment as on the Latin
American dictators, themselves.
The CIA has a long history of support for brutal
dictators who tortured and murdered thousands-
Pinochet, Somoza, Batista, Diem, the Shah of
Iran, D'Aubuisson, Torrijos, Noreiga, Duvalier, Suharto,
and others.
It becomes clear that mass murder and torture have long
been an unacknowledged but
deliberate instrument of American foreign
policy. In understanding the monster that had been
created in
Latin America, it should come as little surprise that the same venom would
have been
turned on the American gay population.
A patriot does not defend their country by turning a
blind eye to such things. A genuine patriot
would try to bring them
into full public awareness and atone for them. By the same token,
a genuine patriot or even someone who liked to think of
themselves as a decent human being
would not simply brush off an
allegation on such a subject of AIDS origin, without having fully
immersed in the rich context and the details.