As some of you may know, the Bulgarian nurses returned safely home on July 24th after 9 long years of imprisonment and torture in Libya. The Center for Nursing Advocacy has been covering this story from the beginning and they are to be commended for that. However, I read something on their site the other day that dumbfounded me. As they reported the release of the nurses, they requested that we send letters, THANKING LIBYA FOR THEIR RELEASE.

I don’t know about you but thanking someone for imprisonment and torture doesn’t quite make sense.

In case you have not been following this story, here is some background from Wikipedia:

In 1999, 5 Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor were working in a hospital in Libya when the largest documented nosocomial breakout of HIV occurred. An emergency WHO team was called to investigate the matter and meanwhile the 5 nurses and doctor were arrested and imprisoned in Libya.

The WHO issued a report in which, “No evidence has been found for a deliberated injection of HIV contaminated material.” And the report suggests that the outbreak was largly due to a lack of sterile supplies including sharps containers, sterilizers, and protective gloves and also, “the practice of using in dwelling intravenous catheters for injections in hospitalized children and sharing the same syringes, without appropriate sterilization, would appear to be possible causes of the outbreak.”

Nonetheless, the 5 nurses and 1 doctor have been imprisoned and allegedly tortured to produce confessions. In May of 2005 the prisoners were interviewed by Human Rights Watch and reported the following:

• Dr. Ashraf Ahmad Djum’a al-Hadjudj reportedly lost an eye and one of his hands has been paralyzed.
• Snezhana Dimitrova declared that her hands were tied behind her back and she was hung from a door dislocating her shoulders, and that she was told to “confess or you will die here”.
• Nasya Nenova testified that “We were alone there with those men who did everything they wanted to do”.
• Valentina Siropulo, told Human Rights Watch “I confessed during torture with electricity. They put small wires on my toes and on my thumbs. Sometimes they put one on my thumb and another on either my tongue, neck or ear,” “They had two kinds of machines, one with a crank and one with buttons.”
• Kristiana Valceva, said interrogators used a small machine with cables and a handle that produced electricity. “During the shocks and torture they asked me where the AIDS came from and what is your role,” She said that Libyan interrogators subjected her to electric shocks on her breasts and genitals. “My confession was all in Arabic without translation,” … “We were ready to sign anything just to stop the torture.”

The thing that really bothers me is that these nurses were being tortured in Libya and meanwhile the media was covering false stories like the one about the interrogator who allegedly flushed a Koran down the toilet at Guantanamo Bay.