From: nytransfer@igc.org (Blythe Systems)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Subject: ANALYSIS:A Secret "AIDS Contract?"
Date: 13 Jan 92 20:18:58 GMT
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Organization: PACH

Via The NY Transfer News Service 718-448-2358, 718-448-2683

>From gn!asco.zer!m.morrissey


                    Burying the Public Record:
                  Was There an "AIDS Contract"?

                       by Michael Morrissey
                           May 6, 1991

There is a brief but potentially explosive piece of testimony
buried in the Congressional Record of 1969 that has never made the
papers; it will not be hard to see why:

"Molecular biology is a field that is advancing very rapidly, and
eminent biologists believe that within a period of 5 to 10 years
it would be possible to produce a synthetic biological agent, an
agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural
immunity could have been acquired...a new infective microorganism
which could differ in certain important aspects from any known
disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it
might be refractory [resistant] to the immunological and
therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our
relative freedom from infectious disease...A research program to
explore the feasibility of this could be completed in
approximately 5 years at a total cost of $10 million."

This was part of the testimony of Dr. D. M. MacArthur, then Deputy
Director of Research and Technology for the Dept. of Defense,
before the House Subcommittee on Appropriations on June 9, 1969.
Let us be clear about what it means. It does NOT mean that the
U.S. government created AIDS. It DOES mean that the U.S.
government wanted, and considered it feasible, to create an AIDS-
like virus as early as 1969.

It would hardly be surprising if the government wanted to keep
this quiet, but what about the press? The significance of
MacArthur's testimony has not been overlooked by everyone--only by
the mass media. (Cf. Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, A Higher
Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Chemical & Biological Warfare
[NY: Hill & Wang, 1982] and articles by Robert Lederer and
Nathaniel S. Lehrman in CovertAction Information Bulletin 28 and
29 [summer 1987, winter 1988].) On Feb. 10, 1988, Jeremy Rifkin
petitioned the Secretary of Defense (Carlucci) on behalf of the
Foundation on Economic Trends, demanding information as to the
further disposition of the 1969 MacArthur/DOD proposal. Needless
to say, there was no substantive reply.

Likewise, the name Jakob Segal, according to my DIALOGUE search,
has never appeared in a major U.S. newspaper, magazine, or
scientific journal. (But cf. CAIB references above.) He has been
saying since 1986 that AIDS is an accidental product of U.S.
biological warfare research (a.k.a. "defense research"--on which
90.6 million tax dollars were spent in fiscal 1985-86, for
example). Segal is a biologist and professor emeritus at Humboldt
University in (formerly East) Berlin, but as far as the
"scientific community" is concerned, he is a non-entity. This
would not normally bar him from the popular press as well, but in
this case, larger forces seem to be at work.

Why is Segal taboo? If he is right, the U.S. government is
responsible for AIDS, which makes the answer obvious enough. If he
is wrong, one would expect to hear more from the experts than
dismissive snorts and echoes of arguments that have long been
repudiated (such as the claims of African origin in green monkeys
or "isolated villages"), even by their original proponents, though
they continue to circulate in the press. There is no middle
ground. He is either right, wrong, or it cannot be determined
either way. The last possibility seems to me unlikely, but even if
that is the case, it means he may be right and therefore cannot be
dismissed. As a matter of fact, however, the whole question of the
origin of AIDS seems to have become taboo. The African monkey
business has stuck in the public's mind, and it is convenient for
the corporate press to leave it at that, presumably under the
assumpton that the 40 million people who will be infected by the
year 2000 (according to the latest WHO estimate) are no longer
interested in where the virus that will cause their death came
from.

Consider the Peter Duesberg theory, by way of contrast. Duesberg
suggested in 1987 that AIDS is not caused by a virus at all, a
highly speculative, but convenient, thesis. If the virus (HIV-I)
does not cause the disease, the question of whether it is a
laboratory product is irrelevant, or at least defused. Perhaps
this explains why the Duesberg thesis has been hotly debated in
both the scientific and the popular press, while Segal has been
completely ignored. It smells of disinformation to me. As long as
we bother with Duesberg, the queston of the government's possible
role in creating the virus can be deflected.

This is not the place to go into detail (see Jakob Segal, AIDS:
Die Spur fuehrt ins Pentagon [Kaninenberghoehe 2, 4300 Essen 1:
Verlag Neuer Weg, 1990]). The arguments are technical, and the
place for the debate is the technical journals. My point is that
this debate has not taken place. Segal is not only ignored by the
journals; he cannot find an English or American publisher for his
book, and no one has been willing to debate with him publicly for
three years.

If anyone should be interested in such a debate, it is Robert
Gallo. Richard Crewdson's articles in the Chicago Herald Tribune
in November, 1989, have put Gallo's claim as the co-discoverer
(with Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris) of the
AIDS virus in a very suspicious light, but Segal says Gallo
actually created it, in 1978 (which would imply that his "re-
discovery" in 1984 was feigned). Gallo is generally credited with
being the first to isolate a human retrovirus, HTLV-I, as early as
1978/79 (the publications appearing somewhat later), but Segal
maintains that two of Gallo's publications indicate that he had
already accomplished this in 1975. By early 1978, according to the
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Segal scenario: Gallo succeeded in splicing HTLV-I into VISNA (a
virus causing AIDS-like symptoms in sheep), thereby making the
deadly sheep virus infectious to humans. This was HIV-I, the
"synthetic biological agent," the "new infective microorganism,"
which the DOD had proposed developing in 1969.

Gallo, as head of the National Cancer Institute, also had
authority over the Frederick Cancer Research Facilities, formerly
(before 1975) the virus section of USAMARID, the Army biological
warfare research center at Fort Detrick, Maryland, which would
have given him access to the P-4 (top security) laboratory that
went into operation at Fort Detrick in the fall of 1977. When the
virus was ready in early 1978, Segal says, prisoners who had
volunteered as guinea pigs in exchange for their freedom were
injected with it and, when no symptoms of disease appeared after 6
months or so, released. Some of them entered the homosexual scene
in New York, where the disease broke out in the spring of 1979.
(An incubation period of one year, though short for AIDS, is
conceivable if the infection was by injection of large doses of
the virus.)

In short, according to Segal, the 1969 DOD project was carried out
successfully, thanks to the genius of Robert Gallo, and AIDS is
the result of a biological warfare experiment gone awry.

This is not just a who-done-it. If Segal is right, AIDS
researchers should be working with sheep, not monkeys. Sheep with
VISNA die, he says, because the macrophages (large white blood
cells) become infected in the earliest stage, not the T-4 cells.
The infected macrophages then eventually destroy the thymus gland,
which prevents the further development of T-4 cells and destroys
the immune system. This is why HIV-infected chimpanzees do not
develop AIDS: the T-4 cells are infected but the macrophages
remain healthy. In humans, the macrophages are infected, as in
sheep. If Segal is right, then, the key to therapy may lie not in
preventing the infection of T-4 cells, but in preventing the
infected macrophages from destroying the thymus.

The question of origin is thus important, perhaps essential, for
finding a cure, and it is totally unconscionable to ignore it. Yet
that is precisely the situation. For example, Corbitt et al.
published an article in early 1990 in The Lancet, a respected
English medical journal, which claims to show that a British
sailor died indisputably of AIDS in 1959. Segal challenged this
claim, as he has all the purported evidence of AIDS before 1979.
Corbitt et al., he says, proved only that the sailor was infected
with a retrovirus, not necessarily one that causes AIDS. (It is
now known that many people, perhaps half the population, are
carriers of non-pathogenic retroviruses which have nothing to do
with AIDS.) But Segal was forced to publish his rebuttal, though
technical, in the one newspaper which seems willing to publish him
at all, a (West) German Marxist weekly called Rote Fahne
(8/25/90). I sent a copy of Segal's article to The Lancet, as well
as to Science, Nature, and Scientific American, asking for a
reply, but none was forthcoming, not even a perfunctory "He's
crazy."

What kind of "scientific community" is this? Segal is ignored, I
am ignored, and the public is ignored. Who is calling the shots?
Can one help but think the worst? Here is another examle. I wrote
to a well-known American virologist and AIDS researcher (who has
been a consultant to the Frederick Cancer Research Facilities),
asking him what he thought of Segal's theory. He said he knew
about it, but judging from his reply, he must have been either
incredibly misinformed, or disingenuous:

"Your question is one that has come up many times before. The
answer is simple. The virus is not man-made. Segal gives us too
much credit since this is the most complex virus we have seen. We
can't even make a simple one. If it were as he says we would also
have the technology to eliminate it and we do not, as yet."

I heard the same argument a couple of months ago on a WorldNet
(USIA) satellite "Dialogue" program from Todd Lowenthal, the
USIA's top gun for "countering Soviet disinformation" (if I have
that job title right). His introductory example, to show what
disinformation is, was the Segal theory. For him, Segal is paid by
the KGB to disseminate his theory for propaganda purposes,
although the theory itself is absurd, since "the virus is much too
complex to have been made by a scientist." Robert Gallo also
described Segal's theory as "KGB propaganda" (in a 1987 interview
published in De Volkskrant, a Dutch newspaper).

But I must assume the role here of "countering countering Soviet
disinformation," i.e. countering what appears to be American
disinformation, because Segal plainly does not claim that the
virus was "made" in the sense of "made from scratch." (You can't
"make" a mule, either, but you can sure as hell put a horse and a
donkey in the same corral.) Whether Segal is right or wrong, he is
very clear about what he says, and I don't think anyone could
honestly misunderstand him on this point: VISNA + HTLV-1 = HIV-1.

The virologist's reply to this was simply to deny it: "VISNA plus
HTLV-I in any arrangement does not make HIV-I, now or in 1978." I
could not get him to elaborate beyond this, though he did add: "If
Segal is so convinced, why doesn't he make the construct and see
what kind of virus it makes?" This is indeed the crucial question,
but if it is a question, why was my correspondent so sure of the
answer? Still, the suggestion is a good one. Segal says that any
trained lab technician could make HIV-I in two weeks today, and
that in 1978 it would have taken about 6 months. The problem is,
who will provide him with the P-4 laboratory and component viruses
to conduct the experiment? Let us turn the question around: Why
doesn't someone with access to the requisite facilities (e.g. the
U.S. government) do the experiment and prove Segal wrong? Segal
could be invited to participate and, if the experiment failed,
forced to retract his monstrous allegations, admit that he is a
KGB spook, and Todd Lowenthal will get a promotion.

As for the spook bit, Segal is an unlikely candidate, I would
think. He is 80 years old, a Lithuanian Jew who grew up in Germany
but fled the Nazi regime and finished his studies in France,
taking up his professorship in East Germany in 1953. Furthermore,
if his theory is as patently absurd as the experts I have talked
to seem to think, it is hardly an effective propaganda ploy. The
fact is that both the Soviets and the East Germans dissociated
themselves from Segal several years ago, which he says Soviet
sources told him resulted from a realpolitik deal made at the
Reykjavik summit. (Perhaps SDI wasn't the only thing Reagan was
surprised and upset about.)

In any case, Segal is totally isolated now. He will be dead in a
few years, and it is unlikely that anyone equally scientifically
competent will have the guts to take up the cudgels in this Brave
New World Order of ours. There will be no experiments, and the
seemingly answerable questions will smolder on, unanswered, year
after year.

Wait a minute ... we've been here before. This is not the
Wonderful World of Science--it's Dallas. We're caught between a
lone nut (Segal is wrong) and a coverup of the usual mammoth
proportions (Segal is right).


Michael Morrissey
Am Ruesteberg 6, W-3501 Niestetal, Germany
Tel. 0561-527327, FAX 0561-8043341

P.S. I am very curious to know where this message might be read.
Please reply via private e-mail to (m.morrissey asco.zer.de).

[NY TRANSFER NEWS EDITOR'S NOTE: See also "Cancer Warfare," by
Richard Hatch, in the Winter 1991-92 issue of Covert Action
Information Bulletin (No.39), pp.14-19, published after this piece
was written. Hatch concludes it is likely that biological warfare
experiments continued at Ft. Detrick after Richard Nixon
supposedly closed them down in 1969-71, via covert military
funding supplied for National Cancer Institute research under
the Viral Cancer Program (VCP). Hatch's article does not mention
Segal, either.]

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