Hunting around to find out more about the Alan Cantwell piece about AIDS I posted earlier, which one reader suggested was disinformation, I came across this announcement from the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies.
It doesn’t mention the Cantwell theory, but takes aim at another widely-circulated conspiracy theory about AIDS, that it came out of bio-weapons research at Fort Detrick:
Tuesday, 28 October, 2014,
Event description: In the second half of the 1980s, the KGB conducted an international disinformation campaign accusing the US of having artificially constructed the virus that causes AIDS at the Pentagon’s laboratory for biological warfare in Fort Detrick, Maryland. On the basis of his research with scholar Christopher Nehring in the archives of the former communist secret police in Bulgaria, Germany, and the Czech Republic, Douglas Selvage will present new details about the disinformation campaign and the key supporting role played by the KGB’s “fraternal organ,” the East German Ministry of State Security, or Stasi. Among the findings: The free media in West Germany played a central, if unwitting role, as multipliers of the KGB’s disinformation thesis; a cycle of misinformation and disinformation arose between conspiracy theorists in the US and the Soviet bloc’s secret police; and the Fort Detrick-thesis continues to circulate around the globe yet today with dire political and medical consequences. “
Here is a bit about Douglas Selvage himself. I am not sure how far one can trust state-employed historians.
Douglas Selvage is currently Project Director in the Education and Research Division of the BStU (Federal Commission for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic) in Berlin for the project “International Cooperation of the East European Security Services.” Before he joined the BStU in 2008, he served as a historian in the U.S. Department of State and as an assistant professor of history at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach. He has published widely on German-Polish relations during the Cold War, on the Helsinki Process, U.S. foreign policy, and the history of the Soviet bloc. “
I would not dismiss anything that the boys at Fort Detrick worked on as they imported all the Nazi scientist they could get there hands on plus the research papers of Japanese Unit 731. There was no limit on what they developed , You name it they would try to duplicate it.
Yes. After I read the historian’s background, I began to wonder if he was spinning it to.
Hard to tell fact from fiction these days.