Letters to the editor

Attacking HIV in Africa

Thank you for running a very important Commentary column by Michael Fumento (“African AIDS myths,” Sunday) on irresponsible assumptions regarding heterosexual HIV transmission in Africa and the overlooking of poor injection hygiene as a factor.

Three forms of political correctness — left (HIV is everyone’s disease), right (HIV is the price of sexual sin) and center (large well-intentioned public assistance is good for Africa) — have joined in an unwitting collaboration that has resulted in HIV, a blood-borne virus, rashly and mysteriously being regarded as simply just another (albeit deadlier) venereal disease. Such a conclusion has been made without serious scientific scrutiny of how heterosexual HIV transmission occurred and without any explanation or even serious examination of why this rashly assumed change in the nature of HIV’s spread seems to work on only one continent.

And all that was done without a serious set of systematic studies first to specifically discount well-known major transmission routes (unsafe injections and specific types of sexual intercourse).

It is time to no longer take international health organization statements and exculpatory self-designed studies on this subject at face value. If serious study is to be done, both the dissenting scientists and the international institutions should collaborate on a study design to trace the authentic roots, prevalence and transmission of this terrible scourge.

MATTHEW HOGAN

Silver Spring

A book, the CIA and the presidential election

I am always pleased when a newspaper prints an article — good or bad — about my book “Imperial Hubris.” Clifford May’s April 17 Commentary column, “Better with spies in the cold?” is decidedly the latter, but that’s his right, and I would welcome a debate with him on the substance of his points.

One issue I need to raise is Mr. May’s statement that my book was intended to undermine President Bush’s re-election campaign. This has been stated by the commentator Robert Novak and more recklessly by Sen. John McCain and others.

I believe these statements are inaccurate and damaging to the CIA — at a time when it is in the vanguard of the nation’s defense. Unfortunately, neither Mr. Novak nor Mr. McCain was privy to what I believe is the real reason the CIA allowed me to publish “Imperial Hubris.”

I have tried to provide information I believe is pertinent to this issue in a new chapter in the paperback edition of the book; the new chapter was reviewed and cleared by CIA.

To put this material succinctly, in June 1999, I wrote a memorandum to the 12 most senior officials of the CIA — including Director George Tenet — outlining about a dozen serious intra-intelligence-community problems that my officers had encountered in attacking Osama bin Laden.

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