[R-G] Blum: Rev. Wright, the CIA and the AIDS Thing

[Anthony Fenton]

Weekend Edition
May 3 / 4, 2008
The Search for Ethnic Weapons
Rev. Wright, the CIA and the AIDS Thing
By WILLIAM BLUM
http://counterpunch.com/blum05032008.html


"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" T.S. Eliot

Barack Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, held a press conference at the  
National Press Club in Washington on April 28, during which he was  
asked about his earlier statement that the US government had invented  
the HIV virus, which causes AIDS, "as a means of genocide against  
people of color".

Wright did not offer any kind of evidence to support his claim. Even  
more important, the claim makes little sense. Why would the US  
government want to wipe out people of color? Undoubtedly, many  
government officials, past and present, have been racists, but the  
capitalist system at home and its imperialist brother abroad have no  
overarching ideological or realpolitik need for such a genocide.

During the seven decades of the Cold War, the American power elite was  
much more interested in a genocide of "communists", of whatever color,  
wherever they might be found. Many weapons which might further this  
purpose were researched, including, apparently, an HIV-like virus.  
Consider this: On June 9, 1969, Dr. Donald M. MacArthur, Deputy  
Director, Research and Engineering, Department of Defense, testified  
before Congress:

     Within the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to  
make 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. [Hearings  
before the House Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations,  
"Department of Defense Appropriations for 1970."]

Whether the United States actually developed such a microorganism and  
what it did with it has not been reported. AIDS was first identified  
by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1981. It's  
certainly possible that the disease arose as a result of Defense  
Department experiments, and then spread as an unintended consequence.

If you think that our leaders, as wicked as they are, would not stoop  
to any kind of biological or chemical warfare against people, consider  
that in 1984 an anti-Castro Cuban exile, on trial in a New York court,  
testified that in the latter part of 1980 a ship traveled from Florida  
to Cuba with "a mission to carry some germs to introduce them in Cuba  
to be used against the Soviets and against the Cuban economy, to begin  
what was called chemical war, which later on produced results that  
were not what we had expected, because we thought that it was going to  
be used against the Soviet forces, and it was used against our own  
people, and with that we did not agree." [Testimony of Eduardo Victor  
Arocena Perez, on trial in Federal District Court for the Southern  
District of New York, transcript of September 10, 1984, pp. 2187-89.]

It's not clear from the testimony whether the Cuban man thought that  
the germs would somehow be able to confine their actions to only  
Russians. This was but one of many instances where the CIA or Defense  
Department used biological or chemical weapons against Cuba and other  
countries, including in the United States against Americans, at times  
with fatal consequences. [See: Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press  
by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, and Rogue State by  
William Blum.]

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA  
Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World's  
Only Super Power. and West-Bloc Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir.

He can be reached at BBlum6 at aol.com