From: sheryl@seas.gwu.edu (Sheryl Coppenger)
Subject: Re: AIDS and the CIA (was Question)
Organization: George Washington University
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 00:49:22 GMT

In article <11NOV199217023108@tm0006.lerc.nasa.gov> dpm1960@tm0006.lerc.nasa.gov (snopes) writes:
>
>The Tuskegee Experiment was admittedly the nadir of government/medical research
>into diseases, but there's still a huge difference between studying the effects
>an age-old disease has on human beings, and genetically engineering a
>deliberately deadly virus.  And there's just as much of a chasm between
>developing weapons of biological warfare and developing a virus aimed at
>eradicating specific ethnic groups.
>

I think you describe the Tuskegee Experiment in a much more benign way
than it deserves.  The people in the experiment were not told what they
had, they were not treated even though treatment was available, and they
were actively discouraged from getting treatment if they found out
independently that they had syphillis.  Additionally, there was a reckless
disregard for the effects of the disease on the men's sexual partners and
offspring.  I saw an interview on TV with the last director of the
experiment and he was asked about why they used poor black people as the
subjects.  He was very open about the desire to have someone who would
be trusting of authority and not educated enough to know what was going on.
When asked where he would have found subjects if blacks hadn't been available,
he speculated that poor whites/hillbillies would have been used.  He
exhibited an ability to use other human beings as test animals which I
would have hoped was limited to Nazi Germany.

The use of unwitting subjects for LSD tests and similar drugs by government
agencies in the late 50s/early 60s also is pretty well known.  I think that
the argument that the government can't or won't enter into conspiracies to
destroy people individually or in groups (and put the best possible "spin"
on it) is naive at best.  Go get a good book on the Cherokee removal and
see how you like what Andrew Jackson and the governor of George were up
to, for instance.

I don't know if there was a conspiracy to transmit AIDS.  I doubt it, but
I don't dismiss the possibility.  The world is just too strange and I don't
claim to understand why monsters do what they do.  The question is, what
good will it do me or people with AIDS here in 1992 if it was a conspiracy
or even incompetence instead of a biological accident.  Don't get me wrong -- 
if there was a conspiracy I want those conspirators to fry.  And if there
was incompetence I at least want them to sweat a little.  If that many
people were involved, somebody will want to get it off their chest eventually
and then we've got them.  It's like those ministers in France recently
who were found to have caused hundreds of hemophiliacs to contract AIDS
because they were more interested in protecting business than in protecting
their people.  Eventually somebody talks.

However, now that AIDS is here I think it's more useful to focus on the 
bigotry that has been working against people with AIDS.  We can't prevent
that first AIDS case, it's already done.  What we need to work on is the
attitudes of people who think that AIDS is divine punishment or that
"only THOSE people" have AIDS and they don't matter so "let them die,
then and relieve the excess population".  First things first.

-- 

Sheryl Coppenger    SEAS Computing Facility Staff	sheryl@seas.gwu.edu
		    The George Washington University	(202) 994-6853          
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban