For more than five decades, foreboding fear of death and destruction has been exploited to further the drive for world government. The principle is simple enough: Individuals become more inclined, sometimes even eager, to surrender freedom, resources, and national sovereignty once they have been persuaded that the alternative is suffering or annihilation.

From the bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II through the end of the "Cold War" -- during which the "free" West and the communist East were portrayed as nuclear-armed antagonists prepared to unleash an apocalyptic nuclear conflict -- the false alternatives offered by internationalists were world government or nuclear destruction. Unless the United States and other nations divested themselves of nuclear weapons and submitted to a centralized "peacekeeping" authority, the nuclear "arms race" would inevitably lead to the destruction of humanity.

In the late 1980s, as former adversaries were morphed virtually overnight into cooperative compatriots, the nuclear arms race lost much of its urgency. Accordingly, a new verse was added to the alarmist song book: "World government or environmental destruction!" In 1990, Earth Day suddenly became the holiest of political holidays. Buzzwords like "greenhouse effect," "ozone depletion," and "acid rain" became part of the popular vernacular. Similarly, pop entertainment reflected the new trend toward environmental alarmism, as green themes were injected into television programs, cartoons, and movies. The "crisis" may have changed, but the "solution" remained the same: World government, as foreshadowed at the 1992 UN "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro.

In recent years, yet another alarmist refrain has been heard: "World government or pestilence!" This latest crisis requiring global management is the threat presented by supposedly new infectious diseases. Where once we were menaced by megatons, the danger now supposedly comes from microbes -- and familiar voices are insisting anew that only world government can save humanity from destruction.

As a tool for manipulating public opinion, the threat of pestilence actually has an advantage over the earlier scare scenarios: Nuclear annihilation of humanity, while a horrifying prospect, is simply too abstract to have a visceral impact. The same is true of environmental collapse. But everybody has been sick and can individualize the horror of succumbing to an incurable disease. Thus, the pestilence scenario may have far more potential as a tool for selling the public on globalist "solutions."

One illustration of the willingness of public policy elites to play off of media-generated public fears of infectious disease is provided by the Committee on International Science, Engineering, and Technology Policy (CISETP) of President Clinton's National Science and Technology Council. A recent CISETP report noted that "the past few years have been marked by a recognition of renewed vulnerability to infectious diseases. Bestselling books and Hollywood thrillers have triggered public fascination with 'new,' deadly, and unpredictable microorganisms." The report noted that protecting the health of the "global village" demands "a worldwide response," and " recently, public discussion has been further focused on the global issue of emerging diseases by ... popular movies such as 'Outbreak,' starring Dustin Hoffman."

In Outbreak, an airborne virus that originated with an infected African monkey migrates to the U.S. and starts killing Americans at an epidemic rate. Hoffman plays Colonel Sam Daniels, head of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control, who strives to contain and conquer the virus. Should he fail, the military is prepared to liquidate infected populations -- a subplot intended to illustrate the supposed necessity of extreme measures in dealing with a crisis.

Outbreak is but one example of the recent epidemic of entertainment products peddling pestilence propaganda. In the television miniseries Robin Cook's Invasion, a latent virus that had lain dormant within humans for millennia is activated by a meteor shower. In the miniseries Pandora's Clock, an airliner bound for JFK Airport in New York has the misfortune to be carrying a passenger infected with a doomsday virus. The plane is not allowed to land, lest the virus be loosed, and the government plans to shoot the plane down instead -- another effective pitch for the idea that crises must be dealt with through extreme measures.

CISETP's eagerness to cite Outbreak and similar entertainment products typifies a distressing willingness on the part of some public health officials to focus on lurid scenarios at some expense to sound science. The average American is largely at the mercy of domestic and international public health bureaucracies for information about infectious disease. This trust has been abused by public health authorities in recent decades.

More than any other recent public health issue, the AIDS "epidemic" has created a great deal of politically useful public alarm. The HIV virus, which has been identified as the sole cause of AIDS, has served as a microbial heavyweight for instilling fear, generating federal research funding, and promoting the homosexual political agenda, despite the fact that an impressive body of credible scientific data raises serious questions about the role, if any, that the virus plays in causing AIDS.

Since the "AIDS industry" has a formidable investment -- both in money and reputation -- in the HIV hypothesis, the data challenging that hypothesis have been largely ignored, and its compilers ostracized rather than refuted. The politics of "AIDS awareness" have trumped sound science, despite the fact that early projections about the spread of the affliction have proven to be deliriously inaccurate. And the supposed "AIDS pandemic" remains one of the preferred themes for those who seek to create a centralized, globalized public health authority.

Although those who challenge the assumption that HIV is the cause of AIDS are ritually scorned as "revisionists," that number includes many accomplished physicians and scientists, as well as journalists and academics, who have soberly examined the available evidence and find the HIV hypothesis unconvincing.

In 1991, a gathering of credentialed observers created the California-based Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis, which published a brief open letter stating its position: "It is widely believed by the general public that a retrovirus called HIV causes the group of diseases called AIDS. Many biochemical scientists now question this hypothesis. We propose that a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis be conducted by a suitable independent group. We further propose that critical epidemiological studies be devised and undertaken."'

The Group's four-sentence letter, which simply requests that the HIV-AIDS hypothesis be submitted to independent scientific scrutiny, was submitted to the editors of such domestic and foreign medical and science journals as Nature, Science, The Lancet, and The New England Journal of Medicine, none of which saw fit to publish it.

Despite the political influence of the "AIDS industry," hundreds of signatures have been added to the Group's statement, including those of some academic heavyweights in relevant fields. Among those who have endorsed the call for a re-examination of the evidence is Dr. Kary Mullis, recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry, who has written: "We have not been able to discover any good reasons why most of the people on earth believe that AIDS is a disease caused by a virus called HIV. There is simply no scientific evidence demonstrating that this is true."

Another prominent endorser is Dr. Bernard Forscher, former editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, who maintains that the "HIV hypothesis ranks with the 'bad air' theory for malaria and the 'bacterial infection' theory of beriberi and pellagra. It is a hoax that became a scam."

The Group's statement also earned the support of Dr. Charles Thomas, former professor of biochemistry at Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities, who is convinced that the "HIV-causes-AIDS dogma represents the grandest and perhaps the most morally destructive fraud that has ever been perpetrated on young men and women of the Western world."

A growing number of accomplished scientific specialists are coming to conclude, as did journalist and former Hoover Institution researcher Tom Bethell after he conducted his own investigation, that "AIDS is not a disease at all -- it is a government program." There is reason to believe that the public at large is beginning to suspect the same, given that the early predictions about a pending AIDS catastrophe -- including the long-predicted "breakout" of AIDS into the general public -- have fallen dramatically short of the mark.

In the mid-1980s, government officials estimated that 1.5 million Americans were infected with HIV. The figure was later revised downward to around 450,000. In early 1987, both the UN's World Health Organization (WHO) and then-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop predicted that 100 million persons worldwide would be infected with the virus by the early 1990s.

In 1988, a videotape entitled The Strecker Memorandum, produced by Los Angeles internist Dr. Robert Strecker and associates, claimed that the government was underestimating the problem. Strecker asserted that within "three to four years the entire continent of Africa may well be infected [with HIV], and in five to ten years the entire continent of Africa could be expected to expire, if in fact the AIDS virus has 100 percent mortality, which we believe that it does." However, not only has Africa survived, but its population increased by more than 17 percent between 1988 and 1996.

Strecker's projections for the U.S. proved to be similarly unreliable. Strecker calculated that, assuming an estimated 50,000 diagnosed AIDS cases at the time, some five million persons would have been infected with HIV, and that within six years "the entire country could be infected" with the virus. Needless to say, this dire prediction did not come true.

To sustain the politically useful idea that AIDS is an expanding crisis, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has employed an ever-broadening definition of the disease; by adding new diseases every few years, statistics were inflated to create the appearance of an expanding "epidemic" which had in fact peaked in the late 1980s. A change in the definition in 1985 led to an increase in diagnosed AIDS cases of about two percent over 1984. Another redefinition in 1987 resulted in a 30 to 40 percent jump in new cases. The most recent definition, which went into effect on January 1, 1993, led to another huge increase in the reported AIDS cases attributable to the new definition alone.

Once again, it is politics, more than science, that has provoked the redefinitions, as special-interest lobbies seek access to AIDS-related funding. The Associated Press reported in June 1991 that "AIDS activists have been clamoring for a more inclusive definition. That would enable more HIV-infected women to get Social Security disability and other benefits, eligibility for which is linked to whether they have AIDS." Compliantly, the 1993 redefinition of AIDS incorporated three previously excluded diseases, including invasive cervical cancer. Soon, reports of a burgeoning AIDS epidemic among women began circulating.

Between January and September 1992, 60,656 people were diagnosed with AIDS. Between January and September 1993, in the wake of the new definition, 85,526 new cases were reported to the CDC -- a huge 41 percent increase compared to the equivalent period the previous year. It was on the basis of these definition-driven figures that the CDC was able to announce in October 1993 that AIDS had become the top killer of U.S. males between ages 25 to 44, a claim only recently abandoned. Yet even Dr. John Ward, chief of the CDC's AIDS surveillance branch, candidly acknowledged at the time that the expanded definition had "dumped into the system" many people who did not truly qualify as new AIDS cases.

Dr. Robert Root-Bernstein, associate professor of physiology at Michigan State University and author of Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus, noted in the Wall Street Journal for December 2, 1993 that "the CDC itself admits that over half of the new cases reported this year are due to the new definition: 48,915 of the 85,526. In other words, only 36,511 of the AIDS cases reported so far this year would have qualified as AIDS cases according to the old definition."

The CDC correctly anticipated that as the impact of its misleading definition diminished, the number of new AIDS cases would also fall. With public concern about the issue subsiding rather than bolstering the "epidemic" with yet another redefinition, the CDC now claims that for the first time since AIDS reared its ugly head in 1981 both new cases and AIDS-related deaths fell during 1996. The agency also states that AIDS is no longer the number one killer of men in the age group 25 to 44.

But the CDC credits the encouraging trend not to its own manipulation of definitions, but rather to the recent discovery of supposedly effective anti-HIV treatments based on protease inhibitors (a class of drugs usually used in three-drug combinations with other anti-viral medicines). Predictably, many AIDS organizations and advocates of socialized medicine are now demanding that the federal government increase spending to assure that anyone who might benefit from the expensive new regimen ($12,000 per person annually) receive it. Yet even if the drug combination does effectively contend with the HIV virus, it is irrelevant to AIDS unless the virus is indeed the culprit responsible for the immune suppression that enables the litany of diseases presently included in the CDC's definition of AIDS to flourish -- which, as previously noted, is an assumption challenged by a growing number of leading medical and scientific authorities.

The upshot of all of this is that whether the politically defined malady known as AIDS is expanding or contracting, the reaction of the AIDS lobby remains consistent: It demands more power, more money, and more intrusive government management of public health issues. AIDS also figures prominently in the effort to craft global mechanisms of social control in the name of fighting disease. The threat posed by infectious diseases such as AIDS was on the "global issues" agenda of the June Summit of Eight in Denver. That confab's final communiqué affirmed: "In the coming year, our governments will promote more effective coordination of international responses to outbreaks; promote development of a global surveillance network, building upon existing national and regional surveillance systems; and help to build public health capacity to prevent, detect and control infectious diseases globally." Central to the effort, the communiqué continued, "will be strengthening and linking existing activities in and among each of our countries, with developing countries, and in other fora, especially the World Health Organization." In fact, empowering WHO is a crucial element of the incremental strategy to create a world government.

In spite of the best efforts of professional alarmists, public concern over AIDS has begun to subside, much to the dismay of global-minded medicrats. A booklet promoting World Health Day entitled Emerging Infectious Diseases: Reduce the Risk, produced by the American Association for World Health (AAWH), lamented that "attention to and resources for sustaining an active community defense against infectious diseases are waning.... [We] have let public health spending spiral downward and essential surveillance systems and laboratory services fall into disrepair. Cutbacks in prevention programs, lack of trained staff, and neglect of outbreak detection systems allowed infectious diseases to gain a strong foothold in the United States and abroad."

A similarly alarmist note was struck by Dr. Jonathan M. Mann, professor of epidemiology and international health at the Harvard School of Public Health, in his preface to The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance, a 1994 best-seller by liberal Newsday health and science writer Laurie Garrett. Dr. Mann portrayed the "globalization of disease" as justification for a "worldwide 'early-warning system'" operating "at a truly global level," lest we remain "essentially defenseless" against disease. Garrett reinforced that conviction by citing Nobel laureate Dr. Joshua Lederberg's observation that the world is "one village," and "our tolerance of disease in any place in the world is at our own peril." According to Garrett, microbes "are our predators and they will be victorious if we, Homo sapiens, do not learn how to live in a rational global village that affords the microbes few opportunities." From her perspective, either we embrace the "global village," or "we brace ourselves for the coming plague" -- in short, world government or pestilence.

Dr. Lederberg, whom Garrett cites as an authority, has long agitated on behalf of world governance as a means to combat infectious disease. He is also a significant player in one of the most potent sources of politically useful alarm: the so-called Gulf War Syndrome (GWS). In 1988, Lederberg published a paper entitled "Medical Science, Infectious Disease, and the Unity of Humankind," which argued his case for globalism in the pages of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). This year, Lederberg was selected to serve as co-editor of the special August 6th issue of JAMA, which was devoted to biological warfare (BW) in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the 1972 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction. In a signed editorial, he stated that the theme of biological warfare "touches on a set of timely concerns that unite national security and public health, concerns that cry out for well-articulated convergence of the human community worldwide." The task, he continued, is to build an international "moral consensus" regarding biological weaponry that will "give it sustainability and priority over more transient aspects of perceived national interest...."

Noting that several of the JAMA articles "point to recent progress, and a long way still to go, in the coordination of resources among a host of U.S. governmental agencies -- federal, state, and local" -- to fight disease outbreaks, Lederberg urged: "In view of the rapid dispersal of people via jet aircraft, that coordination needs to be extended to a global venue...."

In November 1996, Newsday revealed that Dr. Lederberg had from 1990 to 1996 been a director of a Maryland-based firm, American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), which, according to congressional sources, made some 70 government-approved shipments of anthrax and other pathogens to Iraqi scientists between 1985 and 1989. In his JAMA editorial, Lederberg noted that "Iraq was proven to have developed and militarized a repertoire of BW agents, notably anthrax spores." But he did not mention the apparent role which the company on whose board he served played in facilitating the creation of that threat. Lederberg claims that he did not know about the shipments until news reports about them were brought to his attention in 1994.

Lederberg's case becomes even more curious. In 1993, he was selected by President Clinton to chair the Defense Science Task Force Board on Persian Gulf War Health Effects. In its final report, the Lederberg team claimed that "there is no scientific and medical evidence that either chemical or biological warfare was deployed at any level against us, or that there were any exposures of U.S. service members to chemical or biological warfare agents in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia." That appears to be the case for biological weaponry, since even the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) has yet to find credible evidence that Iraq was able to develop the pathogens into usable battlefield weapons. Our government has since admitted, however, that some of our troops may have been exposed to small amounts of nerve gas after Iraqi chemical weapons were blown up by the U.S. after the war. Nonetheless, in 1995 President Clinton appointed Lederberg to serve on the Presidential Advisory Commission on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, which, despite more than 30 public hearings, remains seriously divided over the possible causes of the veterans' complaints. Its final report is pending as we write.

Just as with the AIDS "pandemic," the Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) is an issue that displays a very unfavorable ratio of alarm to documented fact. Millions of Americans are justifiably outraged over the idea that U.S. military personnel who served in the Gulf War may have been exposed to insidious health threats subsequently downplayed or covered up by political elites. While stipulating to the contention that those elites are quite capable of perfidy and cynicism of this magnitude, we must confront some very important questions. First, is there sound evidence to support the GWS claims? Second, can either the reality or even the mere concept of GWS prove useful to those who present mankind with the "world government or pestilence" ultimatum?

Perhaps the most prominent activist dealing with GWS is Captain Joyce Riley (USAF Reserve, retired), a registered nurse who heads the Texas-based American Gulf War Veterans Association (AGWVA). In speeches, videotapes, radio talk shows, and full-page advertisements, Captain Riley and her organization have advanced the claim that a number of exotic and deadly new diseases have arrived on the scene since the Gulf War, at least some of which were supposedly engineered by the Defense Department. According to Riley, many Gulf War veterans are plagued by a deadly contagion contracted during their service in the Gulf, either from biological warfare, vaccines tainted with manmade microbes, or both. If true, the responsible -- indeed imperative -- public health policy would require that Gulf veterans be quarantined, along with their families, close associates, and even pets (which Riley claims are also threatened). Fortunately, however, the evidence underpinning Riley's contagion theory is anecdotal and to date unconfirmed by reputable medical sources. However, the lack of solid evidence has not deterred Riley from propagating her shocking message.

Speaking to a gathering in Adrian, Michigan, Riley asked her audience how many had seen the movie Outbreak, then advised: "That is your homework. You must see the movie Outbreak. It is incredibly real and true and frightening and you need to see it." Riley elaborated on this theme during another speech in Houston, Texas: "Have you seen anything in the newspaper about dengue fever in South America, about these strange viral hemorrhagic diseases that all of a sudden [are] attacking us from nowhere? Guess what. They came out of the Gulf War.... The Ebola virus. You didn't hear about that before the Gulf War, did you? Well, they are calling them hemorrhagic fever viruses now.... I've been a nurse for 25 years and I've never heard about them. But now, you see, some of the Gulf War illnesses contain hemorrhagic fever viruses."

In the same speech, Riley asserted: "I have some microbiologists and some physicians that attended one of my meetings, and they said that they had never heard of a lot of these things before. And now, all of a sudden, they're coming out of nowhere. How many of you heard of the hantavirus before the Gulf War?... You didn't hear about flesh-eating bacteria before 1991, did you?"

That Riley had never heard of these afflictions until recently does not mean that they have been unknown to medical science. "Emerging and Re-Emerging Viruses," a scholarly paper by Alison Jacobson of the Department of Microbiology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, points out that medical authorities have been aware of dengue hemorrhagic fever since at least the late 1940s, when population congestion and poor sanitation led to an outbreak in Southeast Asia. As to Ebola, a virus that causes internal bleeding and death, it was first specifically identified from blood samples taken in Zaire by a Belgian nun in 1976. hantavirus, which was thrust into the limelight during an outbreak in the four corners area of the Southwest earlier in this decade, is hardly a new disease either. The CDC is aware of U.S. cases of hantavirus illness dating back to at least 1975. A paper by Dr. Brian Hjelle of the Department of Pathology from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine documents that the illness "was first recognized in the western world after a 1951 outbreak among U.S. troops stationed in Korea."

Nevertheless, Riley has continued to weave a tapestry of alarm from anecdotal scraps. On numerous occasions, she has claimed that Gulf War disease can be spread by such casual activity as coughing. An undated flyer circulated by her organization entitled "The Saddest Chapter of America's History Is Now Being Written," states that "GWI [Gulf War Illness] is a Communicable Disease, spreading worse than AIDS, by mere casual contact, through perspiration, or by being close to someone who coughs." Indeed, the flyer asserts, "You can become infected by brushing by someone at a store. Your children can be infected at a playground or at school."

Yet, Nurse Riley claims that this highly contagious disease that can be acquired merely by "brushing by someone" is somehow mostly incommunicable at GWS meetings with Gulf War veterans. Asked about the danger during a Des Moines radio appearance, Riley, who happened to be speaking that night at just such an event, suddenly became a voice of reason. "I would not be concerned about it," she soothingly assured her listeners. "I'm around Desert Stormers all the time. Many people are, and we have exposure to them, but unless there's some type of contact like that, where there's spread of bodily fluids, I wouldn't worry about it."

In a full-page ad published in the national weekly edition of the Washington Times for July 6, 1997, Captain Riley claimed without qualification, "There is a deadly Gulf War biological disease ravaging our troops, and it is contagious!" According to Riley, "These Gulf War diseases are contagious, and 75% of GW veterans report the disease now spread to their spouses and children." Riley predicted that unless "the whole truth is told and those involved in the silent murder of our nation's guardians are brought to justice by the court of public opinion, every American will be at risk."

The ad concluded with the demand that "All Gulf War Veterans and Their Families That Have Filed Claims Receive Immediate Treatment and Compensation." It dispensed with the need for veterans to obtain actual medical confirmation by stating: "It is truly a tragedy when the Gulf War veterans must prove they have an illness...."

The lengthy list of maladies linked, with varying degrees of credibility, to military service in the Persian Gulf War makes GWS an almost foolproof diagnosis. Furthermore, that roster of infirmities includes some which were supposedly triggered by a manmade virus specially engineered in United States laboratories to undermine the human immune system and defy all known antidotes. This exotic pathogen, it is claimed, was spread (intentionally or inadvertently) to unsuspecting victims via contaminated vaccines and possibly, during the Gulf War, by germ warfare agents.

The most widely cited bit of evidence "documenting" this sensational scenario is an alleged $10 million Department of Defense appropriation, requested by the Pentagon and approved by Congress in 1969, to initiate development of the deadly microbe. Long buried in classified testimony, the scheme was supposedly unearthed and made public in the late 1980s after a hearing on the appropriation was declassified in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Actually, however, the saga of the $10 million virus appears to be simply another in a growing litany of apocryphal tales, based on diaphanous "documentation," that have served as speed bumps on the road to the truth about what may have happened in the Persian Gulf to erode the health of some of our veterans.

The hearing in question was held in July 1969 by the Subcommittee on Department of Defense Appropriations of the House Appropriations Committee. Page 129 of the transcript, which has been copied and widely circulated by advocates of the manmade virus premise, includes the testimony of Dr. Donald M. MacArthur, who was at the time director of defense research and engineering in the office of the Secretary of Defense. Under the caption "Synthetic Biological Agents," he told the subcommittee: "There are two things about the biological agent field I would like to mention. One is the possibility of technological surprise. Molecular biology is a field that is advancing very rapidly, and eminent biologists believe that within a period of five to ten 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."

It is clear from the context of Dr. MacArthur's comments that the "eminent biologists" were lamenting such a dire development, rather than celebrating it. Representative Robert L.F. Sikes (R-FL), a member of the subcommittee, asked Dr. MacArthur, "Are we doing any work in that field?" MacArthur replied, "We are not." The congressman wondered, "Why not? Lack of money or lack of interest?" When MacArthur responded, "Certainly not lack of interest," Sikes asked if he would "provide for our records information on what would be required, what the advantages of such a program would be, the time and the cost involved?" Dr. MacArthur replied, "We will be very happy to."

The subcommittee was subsequently informed that "within the next five to ten 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" and that "a research program to explore the feasibility of this could be completed in approximately five years at a total cost of $10 million."

"It is a highly controversial issue, and there are many who believe such research should not be undertaken lest it lead to yet another method of massive killing of large populations," continued the statement. "On the other hand, without the sure scientific knowledge that such a weapon is possible, and an understanding of the ways it could be done, there is little that can be done to devise defensive measures. Should an enemy develop it there is little doubt that this is an important area of potential military technological inferiority in which there is no adequate research program."

While it is important to recognize the Faustian nature of the research contemplated in this report, the last two sentences make clear that the discussion was focusing on what the United States should -- or should not -- do to cope with the possibility that a potential enemy might develop a virtually impervious biological warfare microorganism. There was no request for an appropriation. A time frame and cost estimate were provided, as Representative Sikes had requested, to assist Congress in deciding whether or not to fund the described project.

Portrayal of what has come to be known as the "Page 129 testimony" -- a nefarious Pentagon plot to raise biological warfare to a whole new level of malicious destruction -- appears to have first surfaced in publications circulated in 1988 by Dr. Robert Strecker, whose contribution to the AIDS scare we have already reviewed. Dr. Strecker is best known for The Strecker Memorandum, a 1988 videotape in which he expounded his theory that, as summarized by Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz in Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola -- Nature, Accident or Intentional?, "the AIDS virus was 'requested,' 'created,' and 'deployed' and its effects were predicted long before the epidemic began." According to Dr. Horowitz, a Massachusetts dentist who has championed the manmade virus thesis, "Strecker obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act that showed that the United States Department of Defense secured funding from Congress in 1969 to perform studies on immune-system-destroying agents for germ warfare."

The Strecker Group, according to Dr. Horowitz, claimed that in 1969, the "Defense Department requested and got $10 million to make the AIDS virus in labs as a political/ethnic weapon to be used mainly against Blacks" as a "political/ethnic weapon." This hoary old canard was disseminated in the early 1980s as anti-American propaganda by the KGB.

In any case, the appropriation bill which is said to have contained funding for the biological warfare research, H.R. 15090, was actually not introduced until December 3, 1969, some five months after the July hearing. It was approved by the House on December 8th, by the Senate on December 15th, and was signed into law by President Nixon on December 29th as Public Law 91-171. Careful scrutiny of the measure reveals no mention of $10 million (or any other figure) to create an invulnerable virus. And neither Strecker, Horowitz, nor other advocates of the manmade virus theory have supplied the slightest shred of credible evidence that the appropriation was actually made, rather than simply discussed briefly at the hearing level.

In spite of this, Captain Riley has made the 1969 hearing, and the apparently apocryphal $10 million appropriation, a centerpiece of her own Gulf War illnesses scenario. "Remember this as long as you live," Riley admonished her audience in a speech in Houston. "This ought to be like the day Kennedy died." Pointing to the "Page 129 testimony," Riley announced: "This document ... I believe to be the origination of the appropriation of the money to make the AIDS virus.... The Department of Defense appropriated $10 million in 1970 to make a synthetic biological agent." In similar fashion she told her audience during a December 1995 address in Topeka, Kansas that the Page 129 testimony "ought to literally shock you into hopefully understanding that we are involved in something that is much, much bigger than us. This is a demonic activity that is so large, and so encompassing, and hopefully you will never forget the time that you saw this document."

There are indeed Gulf War veterans suffering from mysterious ailments, and they are entitled to both sympathy and material help. Captain Riley's concern for Gulf War vets is commendable, and her outrage over any mistreatment some of them have suffered is understandable. But neither they nor the public will be served by unfocused alarmism. It is tragically ironic that Riley may actually be aiding those who seek to capitalize on public alarm over mysterious diseases as a way of advancing a globalist agenda.

Global disease control mechanisms provide some of the bricks being used to build what Professor Richard N. Gardner, a onetime Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, referred to as the "house of world order." In his infamous essay "The Hard Road to World Order" in the April 1974 issue of Foreign Affairs (the flagship journal of the Council on Foreign Relations), Gardner advised that "an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault."

Gardner elaborated on that incremental strategy in the Spring 1988 issue of Foreign Affairs in an essay entitled "The Case for Practical Internationalism," specifically citing the "AIDS Challenge" as one of the "crucial global problems that can only be dealt with effectively through multilateral agencies." According to Gardner, "The World Health Organization's system of global health cooperation led years ago to the elimination of smallpox and dramatic progress toward eradicating malaria. This system is now mobilized to deal with the spread of AIDS.... There should be a national constituency in the United States to support WHO ... as it helps member countries to establish national AIDS programs and sponsors research and exchange of information on prevention, control, immunology, international travel, safety of blood supplies and other urgent AIDS issues."

Foreign Affairs proudly -- and plausibly -- refers to itself as the most influential journal in print, and the recommendations published by Gardner in its pages have been embraced by policy makers. The 1995 CISETP report, for example, speculated that "AIDS might have been identified before it became established in the United States" if only a "global surveillance system with the capacity to identify new diseases had been in place in the 1970s." In a letter issued on WHO's World Health Day 1997, President Clinton asserted that "no place on earth is invulnerable to infectious disease, as the HIV/AIDS pandemic has so tragically proved." As previously illustrated, AIDS hardly qualifies as a "pandemic" by any rational definition; nevertheless, the notion of an AIDS "pandemic" is helping to bring about the empowerment of WHO and the creation of a "global surveillance" system, just as Gardner predicted.

Empowerment of WHO is an ominous development. The UN agency is guided by a constitution that facilitates virtually unlimited meddling in the health affairs of supposedly sovereign nations. The document defines health as "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." It is difficult to envision any area of human thought or activity, public or private, individual or collective, which that definition cannot be stretched to fit. And lest there be any doubt that government is to be the moving force behind WHO-type global health policies, the ninth plank of the agency's constitution states: "Governments have a responsibility for the health of their people which can be fulfilled only by the provision of adequate health and social measures."

April 7th (the anniversary of the formal adoption of the WHO constitution in 1948) is designated each year as World Health Day. This year's theme was "Emerging Infectious Diseases -- Global Alert, Global Response." WHO Director General Hiroshi Nakajima of Japan urged governments to pour more money into the fight against infectious disease, stating that since such maladies "respect no frontiers" we "must work together globally to control them." A sample World Health Day Proclamation which was urged upon state and local officials was larded with such globalist rhetoric as "the health of Americans is linked to the health of people throughout the world," and "global collaboration is essential to counteracting the constant threat of emerging infectious diseases...."

David Heymann, a medical doctor at WHO's emergency disease unit, claimed that "man has now become a vector [carrier] of disease from one continent to another, just like insects." The implications of that ominous observation are indeed spooky, since disease-carrying insects are usually dealt with by a process of eradication (the supposed "explosion" of human population has often been cited by new world orderlies as a factor contributing to the outbreak of infectious diseases). Dr. Heymann further claimed that Western medical advances had helped to create a world fit for microbes rather than humans, since such developments as cancer treatments and organ transplants had increased the number of elderly and sick people with poor immune systems who serve as ideal breeding grounds for disease. That observation undoubtedly lifted the spirits of "Doctor" Jack Kevorkian. After all, if global health gurus now view man as a disease vector, and the sick and elderly as breeders of disease microbes, can WHO-sanctioned euthanasia under the "humanitarian" guise of suppressing pestilence be far behind?

President Clinton has eagerly enlisted in the UN/WHO global anti-microbe campaign. The President has asserted that "no place on earth is invulnerable to infectious disease," and because a "global threat requires a global response," his Administration "has made a profound commitment to detect, combat, and prevent infectious diseases around the world." He did not cite a constitutional provision that authorizes such a transnational anti-bug war, since there is none. Given Mr. Clinton's appetite for authoritarian measures in such matters as civilian disarmament and counter-terrorism, he must be enchanted with WHO's guidelines for combating contagion. A 1986 WHO document entitled Public Health Action in Emergencies Caused by Epidemics: A Practical Guide listed "Quarantine," "Emergency mass immunizations," "Restrictions on mass gatherings," and "Restrictions on travel" as potential weapons in its global anti-disease arsenal.

The threat posed by contagious disease can be a potent weapon in the hands of elites who seek to terrify the masses into submitting to authoritarian controls. Among the cautionary lessons to be drawn from the tragedy of Germany's National Socialist regime is the danger posed by the political manipulation of medical and public health policies bolstered by bogus "scientific" studies and statistics.

Infectious diseases exist today, as they have throughout history, and need to be confronted intelligently and effectively. We must, however, avoid traps set by those who, under the guise of combating pestilence, may be pursuing a sinister political agenda potentially more deadly than a plague.

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