Immediately after the bombing of the Federal Building in
                      Oklahoma City in 1995 there was a media blitz blaming
                      paranoid people and anti-government militia groups for the
                      violent deaths. Now with the 9/11 bombings the media reports
                      a “conspiracy lobby” whose basic premise is that President
                      Bush/the CIA/Big Oil either planned the attacks or let them
                      happen to secure the US oil pipeline/ take over the Middle
                      East/ launch a one-world government.

                      In a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece (24 March, 2002), Gale Holland claims the
                      so-called conspiracy lobby is a tiny but persistent subgroup spawned by the John F.
                      Kennedy assassination and nurtured through the CIA/assassination-plot scandals of
                      the following decades. To emphasise the silliness of conspiracy theory a large
                      photo of Bin Laden is placed next to Elvis Presley, and captioned “Like Elvis
                      Presley, Osama Bin Laden keeps popping up all over, especially in Utah, where he
                      is often seen devouring a Big Mac.”

                      Predictably, Holland uses the paranoia buzzword in his final paragraph:
                      “Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction, but sometimes fiction is just fiction.
                      Getting at the truth is tough, accepting it can be harder still. Paranoia is a lot easier.
                      Sept. 11 may have robbed us of our sense of normalcy, but we can’t let it upset out
                      reason.” 

                      What is obvious is that the major media quickly accept the politically-correct version
                      of an “official story” of an event, as provided by official government sources, and
                      dump all politically-incorrect versions of the story into the conspiracy theory trash
                      bin. Waging war on “evil-doers” everywhere is accepted; believing in conspiracy
                      theories is unpatriotic and borders on treason. We demand documentation as proof
                      of conspiracies, while incriminating documents are shredded by a team of well-paid
                      lawyers, accountants, and executives, as in the case of the Enron and Arthur
                      Andersen scandals. 

                      Any researcher who has dug hard to find “the truth” knows that it is rarely found in
                      the media. After all, the speciality of the major media is to provide new stories, not
                      to solve the ills of society, nor to bore people with “old news.” Reporters pride
                      themselves in unbiased reporting, by not taking sides or injecting personal opinion
                      in their stories. Few news writers have the courage or ability tend to investigate
                      potentially-explosive conspiracy theories that might embarrass the government, or
                      their advertisers or editors – or even their readers. 

                      Despite these shortcomings, the media seem to take pride in dismissing people as
                      “paranoid” who believe in conspiracy theories of any kind. 

                      According to Webster’s Dictionary, paranoia is a serious psychiatric diagnosis: a
                      psychosis characterised by systematised delusions or persecution or grandeur
                      usually without hallucinations. Paranoia can also be defined as a tendency on the
                      part of an individual or group toward excessive and irrational suspiciousness and
                      distrustfulness of others. People who exhibit such psychiatric traits are paranoid.

                      A definite diagnosis of paranoia requires the expertise of a psychiatric health
                      professional. A diagnosis is made after a careful history and physical examination
                      of the patient, and must include a detailed drug history and psychiatric observation.

                      All this is ignored by journalists who indiscriminately label people as paranoid. Their
                      purpose is to discredit a person’s mind and reasoning ability. Unfairly labelling
                      people as paranoid is malicious and evil; and the word can be as hateful as words
                      like nigger, kike, and faggot. When terms like paranoia and paranoid are tossed
                      around in the media, rational communication is no longer possible. 

                      A paranoid person is not normal because paranoia indicates a diseased mind.

                      In their quest for power, politicians often portray their perceived enemies as
                      diseased. Hitler was a master of this. After securing the cooperation of the German
                      physicians, he rid the Third Reich of thousands of mental and physical defectives by
                      murdering them. When this was accomplished, he turned on the Jews. He labelled
                      the Jews as a cancer that needed to be cut out of a diseased Germany. Thus, the
                      roots of the Holocaust were planted. 

                      Labelling people as diseased is an effective way of discrediting and silencing them.

                      The media overkill of paranoia is evident in Michael Kelly’s “The Road to Paranoia,”
                      a 13-page essay which appeared in The New Yorker, 19 June, 1995, shortly after
                      the Oklahoma City bombing. According to Kelly, “There have always been radical
                      fringes on both the left and the right which believe that the government conspires
                      against the people. But lately, the two have formed a strange alliance – fusion
                      paranoia – that is reaching millions of disaffected Americans.” He reviews the
                      major conspiracy theories, and interviews conspiracist Bob Fletcher, a member of
                      a political organisation called the Militia of Montana. Not surprisingly, Kelly makes
                      Fletcher look like a friendly loony-bird. 

                      As I read “The Road to Paranoia” I suddenly realised I was part of Kelly’s story. For
                      almost a decade I had been promoting the idea that AIDS had originated as a
                      genetically-engineered virus that was deliberately seeded into the Black African
                      population and into the American gay male community via government-sponsored
                      vaccine programs and experiments conducted in the late 1970s. (For a wealth of
                      information on the man-made origin of AIDS, go to www.google.com and type in
                      “AIDS biological warfare”. Also see, http://aidsbiowar.com.) 

                      My publishing house, Aries Rising Press, had published two books on the subject of
                      AIDS as a man-made epidemic, which were well-received and reviewed in the
                      alternative press and totally ignored in the mainstream media. In 1989 my book,
                      AIDS & The Doctors of Death, was offered for sale by an independent bookseller
                      at the International AIDS Conference in Montreal. The presence of the book so
                      infuriated officials of the World Health Organisation that they demanded the book
                      be removed from the shelves and banned from the conference. 

                      Despite all this I had not expected to find Aries Rising Press included in Kelly’s list
                      of several dozen “rapidly growing alternative media that traffic in conspiracism.”
                      Even the word “traffic” suggested that my Press was somehow involved in illegal
                      activity, rather that bona-fide and well-documented research on the origin of HIV. 

                      Kelly did mention the conspiratorial belief that “AIDS is a government plot to kill off
                      blacks and homosexuals,” but no further details were provided. Also mentioned was
                      a 1990 poll of African-Americans concluding that “a third believe that HIV was
                      produced by scientists and disseminated through black neighbourhoods for the
                      purpose of genocide.” 

                      During the past two decades of media reports on the various theories of AIDS
                      origin, the theory that the disease might be man-made is occasionally mentioned.
                      However, the scientific evidence supporting this theory is never mentioned, and the
                      idea is usually dismissed as misguided and paranoid.

                      Initially, the media heralded the green monkey theory of AIDS, first proposed by
                      Robert Gallo, the so-called discoverer of the AIDS virus. In a just-published book
                      entitled Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up, and the
                      Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo, Chicago Tribune reporter John Crewdson totally
                      discredits Gallo’s discovery of HIV and claims the scientist actually pilfered the virus
                      from French scientists at the Pasteur Institute. Crewdson, who first exposed the
                      scientific irregularities of Gallo’s AIDS research in 1989, claims the resulting
                      lawsuits were finally settled in 1993 and only through the intervention of high-ranking
                      French and US government officials.

                      In addition, Gallo’s monkey theory has been replaced by the chimpanzee theory.
                      Currently, the new government-approved “official story” of the origin of AIDS is that
                      HIV began in the African rainforest when a chimp virus “jumped species”, most
                      probably when a hunter cut his finger while butchering a chimp. How a Black
                      heterosexual epidemic in Africa could have transformed itself into a disease
                      exclusively found in white homosexual men in New York City in the late 1970s has
                      never been convincingly explained. 

                      Ex-New York City Health Commissioner Stephen Joseph, in his AIDS book,
                      Dragon Within the Gates, also dismisses without explanation “the paranoid
                      theories about AIDS being a deliberate invention of biological warfare.” However,
                      he does note “the scars left by the Tuskegee experiment” in the Black community.

                      In this notorious government-sponsored syphilis experiment, public health doctors
                      deliberately lied to black sharecroppers in Alabama for over 40 years. The men
                      were never told they were infected with syphilis, and when a penicillin cure became
                      available in the 1940s the doctors withheld treatment so that they could study the
                      devastating effect of untreated syphilis. When the men died, the doctors rushed to
                      get an autopsy, coaxing the family into giving permission by having the government
                      pick up the tab for the funeral expenses. Under pressure from civil rights activists,
                      this racist experiment was finally terminated in 1972. 

                      Joseph writes that the memory of Tuskegee “fueled a conspiratorial theory that
                      AIDS resulted from a biological experiment, gone awry, performed on Africans by
                      the United States government.” 

                      But conspiracy theorists know that government doctors and scientists, and the
                      military, have conducted covert experiments on unsuspecting civilians for decades.
                      Recently the nation was shocked to learn that physicians had performed dangerous
                      radiation experiments on unsuspecting hospitalised patients from the 1940s up until
                      the 1980s. After a half century of government cover-up, the proof was finally
                      revealed when previously classified government documents were released by the
                      Department of Energy. (For details, type in “Human Radiation Experiments” at
                      google.com. Also see Pulitzer Prize-winning Eileen Welsome’s The Plutonium
                      Files; America’s Secret Experiments in the Cold War.)

                      Only a fool would believe that government-sponsored conspiracies do not exist.
                      History has proven that the media cannot protect us or inform us of vast government
                      programs that hurt innocent people. 

                      Charges of secret and unethical experiments against helpless citizens are not the
                      ravings of paranoid people. On the contrary, they are serious accusations of an
                      informed and enlightened citizenry.

                      It is time to speak out against falsely labelling people as paranoid.

                      Paranoid and paranoia are acceptable terms when used in a medical setting. But
                      they have no place in slandering and denigrating people who express alternative
                      views in a democratic society.

                      ______________________________________________________________________________
                      Dr. Cantwell is the author of Queer Blood, and AIDS and the Doctors of Death,
                      two books on the man-made origin of AIDS. Further information can be obtained
                      from Aries Rising Press, PO Box 29532, Los Angeles, CA 90029 USA. Email:
                      alanrcan@aol.com. Further information can be obtained by visiting
                      http://aidsbiowar.com.