April 2009 Archives

AT the height of the cold war the US government was pouring billions of dollars into highly classified biological weaponry projects.
The plan, as early as the 1950s, was to develop a disease so deadly, so potent, that it could wipe out whole communities, even paralyse an entire nation.
Most of this research remains buried in top secret files, and we may never know just how far these experiments went, and how close the US came to perfecting the deadly biotechnology they craved.
But what if we are already witnessing the devastating results of their tampering?
What if one of those experiments got out of the lab?
What if AIDS, a disease that has claimed almost 40 million lives since the early 1980s, was created by the American scientists who dedicated their lives to creating a weaponised virus?
The origins of the deadly disease are still shrouded in mystery.
The official story about monkeys in deepest Africa transmitting the infection to humans is scoffed at by conspiracy theorists, who are sure that AIDS began as part of a dastardly government plan to eradicate those groups hit hardest by the disease - homosexuals, drug users and black people.
Many leaders in the African American community, including the Black Panthers and the new Nation of Islam, have leant their support to the conspiracy theories, making them widely accepted.
Could it be that the worst epidemic of modern times is a man-made nightmare?
Or are theorists simply turning a tragedy into a conspiracy?