[think it through] libya sentences nurses to death

My first thought on seeing this was ‘not guilty’ but slowly, I began to wonder – what if? What if they had done it? And for good reason too. But I get ahead of myself. Here’s the story in a nutshell, depoliticized and expunged of Bulgarian and Libyan protests and Western outrage:

Six foreign health workers jailed in Libya for years on charges of deliberately infecting children with the AIDS virus were convicted and sentenced to death in a case that has long sparked international outrage and did so again Tuesday. The nurses and doctor have been in jail since 1999 on charges that they spread the HIV virus to more than 400 children at a hospital in the Libyan city of Benghazi during a botched experiment to find a cure for the disease.

Western nations blame the infections on unsanitary conditions at Libyan hospitals and accuse Tripoli of using the six health workers as scapegoats. Detained for nearly seven years, the defendants had previously been convicted and condemned to death, but Libyan judges granted them a retrial last year after international protests over the fairness of the proceedings.

An international legal observer, Francois Cantier, of Lawyers Without Borders, promptly criticized the retrial as lacking scientific rigor. Research published this month said samples from the infected children showed their viruses were contracted before the six defendants started working at the hospital in question.

Luc Montagnier _ the French doctor who co-discovered HIV - testified in the first trial that the virus was active in the hospital before the Bulgarian nurses began their contracts there in 1998. More evidence for that argument surfaced on Dec. 6 _ too late to be submitted in court _ when Nature magazine published an analysis of HIV and hepatitis virus samples from the children.

Idriss Lagha, the president of a group representing the victims, rejected the Nature article, telling a news conference in London on Monday that the nurses had infected the children with a "genetically engineered" virus. He accused them as doing so for research on behalf of foreign intelligence agencies.

Whew! Gadhafi asked Bulgaria for compensation which it rejected and that might be behind the convictions too. On the other hand, that last accusation of a "genetically engineered" virus – why not? Stop one second before you angrily click out of my blog. The scientific community has always chafed against ethical constraints which forces them to experiment on animals.

This is why such scientific advances were made in World War II because the shackles were off. There were plenty of Jews to do with as they wished. We know that many of these scientists were at large and there’s no reason to believe that scientific enquiry has ceased since that time. Science is dispassionate. It also needs money. Where is this sort of money? The US and Europe of course. Where are human rights of a lower order in Europe and people’s threshold of what they’re prepared to do for money somewhat lower? The fSU of course.

Now – where could one experiment and get away with it? Africa? Where else? Also, if you wanted to wipe out a few million people, especially those who are being a tad tiresome, e.g. Muslims, who better to experiment on than Gadhafi’s people? And Iran’s. But you couldn’t get your foot into Iran and you’re already in Iraq. Gadhafi, though, has been trying to butter up to the world lately and you might be able to do some exchange whereby you provide medical ‘help’. In other words, you have an ‘in’ into Libya which you don’t have elsewhere.

I’m not saying this is so but I really think we should ponder a little about the victims’ advocate’s words before deciding.