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A massive 2,800-word article in Monday's Washington Post (web site) paying homage to Bono quotes the rock star as saying he puts "flesh and blood on statistics" about AIDS. The problem is that, only six days earlier, the paper noted that the U.N.'s estimate of AIDS cases has been vastly overblown by millions. Which raises the question: The U.S. Government has spent $200 billion on AIDS, based on the figures supplied by the U.N. and other agencies. Where has all the money gone? Does anybody in the media care? Does Bono?

While failing to raise these questions, the article by Sridhar Pappu does disclose some important and interesting information. It notes that left-wing billionaire George Soros is funding Bono's DATA organization (Debt AIDS Trade Africa) and that Bono hangs around with Morton Halperin, one of Soros's top people in Washington, D.C. Halperin also serves on DATA's board.

Soros is a big backer of the U.N. and other global institutions. So is Bono. Admitting that the U.N.'s AIDS figures are all messed up might raise the question of whether the AIDS controversy is yet another major scandal for the world body and whether the U.N. can accomplish anything. This is a scandal, in short, that strikes at the heart of the world organization. If it can mismanage the AIDS problem, can it do anything right?

In fact, the story about phony AIDS figures is an old one. The Washington Post reported more than a year ago that the U.N. vastly inflated the number of AIDS cases worldwide, especially in Africa. The Post followed with an editorial critical of the U.N. for exaggerating the AIDS problem, but it did not urge a reduction in global funding for the disease. That would have been politically incorrect.

Before that, on June 20, 2004, the Boston Globe had the story, having questioned the U.N's estimate of AIDS cases.

So the major media have been presenting evidence for over three-and-a-half years that the U.N. has been inflating the number of AIDS cases. Now, it has suddenly become "official" because the U.N. admits it. Yet this is not being labeled as a "scandal" by the major media. Why? It's because all of the major players, including Presidents Bush and Clinton, the Congress, and the major media, are implicated in it. They have all been taking the word of the U.N. about the magnitude of the crisis.

AIM Founder Reed Irvine and I smelled a rat as far back as May 2000, when we published a column headlined "Flawed Reports on AIDS." The Clinton Administration has a lot to answer for because it erroneously declared AIDS a threat to our national security. This designation was a big factor behind the spending.

As we noted repeatedly over the last years, the numbers were questionable because they were not based on blood testing to see if people actually had the AIDS virus. Another factor was that the definition of AIDS in Africa was different than it is here. This was apparent to anyone who analyzed the figures and where they supposedly came from.

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