Dumb and Dumber!

Plague Doctor's mask--No, not this!

Senator Barack Obama and his pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. The clergyman preaches in church that the U.S. government made AIDS in order to commit genocide against black people.

"[Former KGB official Yevgeni Primakov] mentioned the well known articles printed a few years ago in our central newspapers about AIDS supposedly originating from secret Pentagon laboratories. According to Yevgeni Primakov, the articles exposing US scientists' 'crafty' plots were fabricated in KGB offices."--Former KGB offical and Russia's SVR chief (1991-1996) Yevgeni Primakov as cited in Izvestia 3-19-92

In January 2005, the State Department published an article explaining that Yevgeni Primakov, a former intelligence official in the KGB and chief of the SVR, admitted that the Russian intelligence had fabricated the story that the American government invented AIDS. The Soviet Union abandoned this disinformation campaign in 1987 after protests by the American government.

This conspiracy theory was reportedly advanced by the Russian-born East German scientist Jakob Segal. He was accused of being an agent of the East German Stasi and the Russian KGB (See details here).

The State Department report explains:

AIDS as a Biological Weapon

Allegations suggest that AIDS virus fabricated by United States

When the AIDS disease was first recognized in the early 1980s, its origins were a mystery. A deadly new disease had suddenly appeared, with no obvious explanation of what had caused it. In such a situation, false rumors and misinformation naturally arose, and Soviet disinformation specialists exploited this situation as well as the musings of conspiracy theorists to help shape their brief but highly effective disinformation campaign on this issue.

The Beginning of Misinformation and Disinformation

In March 1992, then-Russian intelligence chief and later Russian Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov admitted that the disinformation service of the Soviet KGB had concocted the false story that the AIDS virus had been created in a US military laboratory as a biological weapon. The Russian newspaper Izvestiya reported on March 19, 1992:

"[Primakov] mentioned the well known articles printed a few years ago in our central newspapers about AIDS supposedly originating from secret Pentagon laboratories. According to Yevgeni Primakov, the articles exposing US scientists' 'crafty' plots were fabricated in KGB offices."

The Soviets eventually abandoned the AIDS disinformation campaign under pressure from the U.S. government in August 1987 [Full text].

Primakov's 3-19-92 admission that the KGB was behind AIDS disinformation was followed by a new lie:

In revenge for [the KGB lies], the U.S. special services cooked up their own version of the attack on the Pope in the early 1980s, accusing the Soviet Union of organizing this terrorist act.

A 1992 US Information Agency report titled "Soviet Active Measures in the"Post-Cold War" Era 1988-1991" observes:

Primakov's claim was clearly impossible because charges of Soviet involvement in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II began to appear in 1981 and 1982, well before the USSR's AIDS disinformation campaign began. (The original AIDS charge, planted in the KGB-founded Indian newspaper Patriot in July 1983, went unnoticed by the world until October 1985, when the Soviets began to replay it in a concerted media campaign.) Even if the U.S. government had wished to respond to the AIDS disinformation campaign in kind - which it did not - it could not have retaliated for something that had not yet occurred. Furthermore, charges of Soviet involvement in the attempted papal assassination were the result of investigations by independent journalists, not the U.S. government, which never blamed the USSR for this event [Full text].

Primakov appears to be plagued by the the same problems with chronology as the discredited ex-professor Ward Churchill. Must be catching!