The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

Enter Doctor Robert B. Strecker, MD PhD. In 1983 Strecker was conducting research for the Security Pacific Bank in the US into the risks of providing health cover for people who were HIV positive. During this research Strecker and his attorney brother Ted allegedly discovered thousands of documents which proved that AIDS was a manmade disease. When they sent their proof to politicians and government, they were ignored, so they made the video The Strecker Memorandum. According to the Streckers’ own advertising:

It [The Strecker Memorandum] is 96 minutes of the most startling, controversial, and information-packed video you will ever see. It disputes virtually everything the American public is being told by the government, the so-called AIDS experts and the media. In fact, after seeing it YOU will know more about AIDS than 99 percent of all doctors in America.

The controversial truth revealed to those who paid $30.95 (at 2007 prices) for The Strecker Memorandum was that HIV was a virus artificially created by the US military which had then been distributed by the World Health Organization under the auspices of its smallpox vaccination programme. Strecker claimed also that the HIV virus was so minute it could pass through the molecular structure of condoms (thus rendering the «safe sex» campaign useless), and indeed that HIV could be transmitted human-to-human without exchange of body fluids.

In 1988 Ted Strecker was found dead at his home in Springfield, Missouri. Officially the verdict was suicide. The Strecker Group claimed that Ted Strecker left «No note, no message, no goodbyes to anyone. Very untypical of him.»

Strecker was by no means the only AIDS conspiracy theorist to identify the Chemical Biological Warfare department at Fort Detrick, Maryland, as the lab where HIV was manufactured. So did Jakob Segal of the Humboldt University in East Berlin. In 1986 Segal and his wife Lilli announced that HIV was an artificial «splice» between visna virus (which affects sheep) and HTLV-1 (a retrovirus which affects humans), and that it had been created at Fort Detrick in 1977 and tested on nearby prisoners, who had then gone into the general community and spread the virus. The Segals’ «discovery» was later disclosed by KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin to be a Soviet disinformation campaign.

If the Segals posited HIV as the dirty work of the US government, William Campbell Douglass MD was equally convinced that HIV was a plot by the USSR. In «WHO Murdered Africa» in Health Freedom News, September 1987, Douglass asserted that the USSR, via its covert control of the WHO, was responsible for the AIDS holocaust on the continent. Despite being a white member of the reactionary John Birch Society, Douglass became, bizarrely, a major influence on Black American militants of the Nation of Islam, who claim AIDS is a genocidal attack on their ethnic kind.

After all, the evidence seems to fit the «black holocaust» scenario. The black/white ratio for new AIDS cases in the US is 5/1 male and 15/1 female. AIDS is the leading killer of black Americans aged 25–44. Approximately 60 per cent of all AIDS cases worldwide have occurred in black Africa. There is also the indisputable proof that the US government has experimented on black citizens. Starting in 1932, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study deliberately infected hundreds of black Alabama men with the sexually transmitted disease to monitor the effects of non-treatment. The experiment was not wound up until 1972 when a worker «blew the whistle».

The black-genocide thesis was given added fuel by Dr Leonard Horowitz’s 1996 Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola: Nature, Accident or Intentional? According to Horowitz, AIDS was invented at Fort Detrick (of course) and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research by proteges of the Nazi eugenics scientists brought to the US after the Second World War. The purpose of AIDS, Horowitz claimed, was to reduce the numbers of blacks, gays, Hispanics and Jews in the world in line with a 1974 memo by Dr Henry Kissinger, then US National Security Adviser: «Depopulation should be the highest priority of US foreign policy towards the Third World … Reduction of the rate of population in these States is a matter of vital US national security. The US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially less developed countries.»