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What's remarkable is that the conspiracytheorist paranoia about the origns of HIV continue to persist.

HIV disease is complex enough that it has taken the best efforts of a multitude of scientists twenty years since the existence of the disease was recognized to arrive at a basic understanding of the virus and how it does its damage.

To believe that HIV is a manufactured creation of the CIA (or some other convenient Establishment scapegoat) is therefore to believe that this organization possessed a knowledge of virology far superior to the best knowledge of the present day- some thirty or so years ago!

(I say thirty because the virus would have had to be released at least ten years prior to the first identification of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, due to the length of time required to produce imune system collapse after infection.)

This scenario is made even more absurd by the fact that HIV has been identified in preserved tissue samples taken from people who died of mysterious immune system impairment well before AIDS was recognized as a specific disease. One such sample dates to 1969 and was obtained in the USA; another was taken from a Danish sailor who died in the 1950s.

This history is consistent with the hypothesis that HIV existed in the wild well before the outbreaks of "gay plague" which led to it's being isolated and identified as a pathogen.

In order to believe that HIV was deliberately created by means of genetic engineering means believing that the chosen scapegoat was capable of designing a retrovirus to produce a specific effect at a time when the very existence of viruses in general was newly proven and the DNA manipulation we call "genetic engineering" didn't even exist. In fact, the virus found in the Danish sailor's tissue would have been the product of an infection which took place before the structure of DNA had been discovered.

It's very difficult to impute such super-advanced knowledge to an agency which spent several years in the 60s trying and failing to make Fidel Castro's beard fall out.

Of course, these arguments will have no effect on the conspiracy buffs. I suspect that they will find it much more congenial to claim that the requisite scientific knowledge was obtained from crashed alien spacecraft.

"Arguments have no effect on petrified training. They wear it as little as waves wear a cliff"

-Mark Twain