Another sidelight on Ft. Detrick...
http://www.burstnet.com/cgi-bin/ads/sk1874j.cgi/2381/z gFFFFFFx000000l000000v000000k000000/RETURN-CODE Part of the prevalence of the AIDS origin rumor that pins responsibility for the virus on the CIA (or another group within the American government) may be due to deliberate Soviet misinformation designed to discredit the USA. An article charging AIDS was the product of U.S. germ warfare experiments first surfaced in the Soviet newspaper Literary Gazette in 1985 and claimed the AIDS virus was created at a supersecret Army research laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland. The only source cited was the Patriot, a leftist Indian newspaper that, U.S. experts charged, was a favored conduit of the KGB for its disinformation campaigns. In 1986 at a summit held in Zimbabwe, what purported to be a scholarly paper linking the U.S. military with AIDS was widely circulated. The authors did not have any expertise in AIDS research, but their offering was taken somewhat seriously by many who read it. The paper charged the disease had been introduced into Africa from Europe - not through homosexual practices or intravenous drug use, but by tainted blood supplies, which may have originated in the U.S. Its conclusion was unambiguous: AIDS was let loose on the world by biological warfare experimenters at Fort Detrick. That the rumor might well have been deliberately formulated by a foreign government at odds with the USA was an interesting curiousity. Thatcher, Gary. "Soviet Use Forged Documents to Deceive." Christian Science Monitor. 11 December 1986 (David Gilbert of the Weather Underground on AIDS conspiranoia on Ft. Detrick.) http://www.tao.ca/~solidarity/texts/dg/aidsreviews.html http://www.tao.ca/~solidarity/texts/dg/aidsreviews.html ...When first introduced to a conspiracy theory in 1987, 1 believed it because of the sordid history of U.S. chemical and biological warfare. The version I saw then was based on the work of two East German scientists, Jakob and Lilli Segal, and was published by the Soviet news agency Tass on 3/30/87. They claimed that HIV couldn't have possibly evolved naturally and that it was obviously an artificial splice between visna virus (a retrovirus* that infects the nervous system of sheep) and HTLV-1 (the first retrovirus known to infect humans). They argued that the splice was created at the notorious CBW lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland and then tested on prisoners in the area... ...Since the Segals there have been a number of related theories that HIV was man-made. One posits a splice of visna virus and equine infectious anemia virus; another, a splice of visna virus and bovine leukemia virus. One sets the date at Fort Detrick back to 1967; another implicates the World Health Organization (WHO), starting in 1972. Most of these other theorists (such as Robert Strecker, John Seale and William Douglass) come from the far right politically and charge that - - whether it was engineered at Ft. Detrick and/or by WHO -- the AIDS virus is a Soviet biological warfare assault on the Western world... ...Douglass sees AIDS as a diabolical plot perpetrated by WHO, which "is run by the Soviets." (p. 118). He weaves an elaborate and intricate plot for how the Communists -- much like an invading virus -- took over the machinery of the U.S. Army CBW labs at Ft. Detrick and the U.S. National Institutes of Health in order to use them to create and propagate AIDS...