This week, in a strange synchronicity, medical workers in Libya and the United States were set free.

In Libya, five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were sentenced to death and endured eight and a half years in prison as their case was appealed again and again. Tuesday, they were released and allowed to return home in what essentially amounted to a ransom agreement. The nurses and doctor, who had come to Libya to work in a hospital, were accused of infecting 426 children with HIV. From this distant vantage point in the U.S., it’s pretty clear what happened. The hospital had allowed an appalling breach of infection control and the foreign workers were necessary scapegoats. The Libyan authorities had no intention of confronting the outrage and betrayal of the grieving parents. How convenient instead to throw the blame on the people who were in the hospital, who had entered a situation they didn’t create and couldn’t fix. The accused nurses and doctor might uncover the abusive practices and gross disregard that exposed so many innocent children to a virus that is not really that easy to catch. Better to silence and discredit them, and distract attention away from the real problems in the hospital.

Medical experts had previously called the Libyan case against the medics bogus. The co-discoverer of the AIDS virus, French researcher Luc Montagnier, had said: “It’s like a return to the Middle Ages, with scapegoats who are served up for the public.” He had testified in the case that poor hygiene in the Libyan hospital was probably to blame for the children’s infections. That theory was supported by a study detailed in the British journal Nature which found HIV had entered the blood of the children before the medics had even arrived at the hospital.

The very same day the medical workers arrived in Bulgaria, a grand jury in New Orleans found no true bill against Dr. Anna Pou. The jury had been deliberating for four months, hearing the state’s case that the doctor and two nurses had committed euthanasia. The grand jury’s responsibility was to listen to testimony, evaluate the evidence, and decide whether there was enough to warrant a trial. This month they gave immunity to the two nurses, Lori Budo and Cherie Landry, and required them to testify. Under the immunity agreement the nurses could not plead the fifth and had to answer all questions. Whether that was a last-ditch attempt to come up with a case against the doctor I don’t know. In any case, the jury was not persuaded.

These women who endured four sweltering days in Memorial Hospital during the flooding of New Orleans had been arrested and handcuffed in front of TV cameras even though they had agreed to come in voluntarily if Attorney Genera Charles Foti decided to press charges. Foti seemed to enjoy the news coverage, calling the women ‘murderers’ who were ‘playing God’. Once out on bail, they were suspended from work and although the doctor taught at the medical school, the nurses have not been able to work for a year. All of them were facing the possibility of twenty years to life.

The jury found no evidence of wrongdoing, but the future for the accused women is uncertain. They have legal bills and civil suits to deal with. Mr. Foti wants to make public all the evidence he assembled against them — since the jury refused to find a crime he will try them in the press. Although most in New Orleans are relieved and happy that the grand jury found no true bill, there is a deep reservoir of race, class and religious hatred. From the Times Picayune, you can see messages like this…

“The hell with “Dr. Pou.” She’s an Eye, Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor–what business did she have making life or death decisions when help was on the way? None. Just the kind of person I want around in a crisis. Want to see someone running during the next hurricane? — It’ll be me if I’m within 500 feet of this woman and her syringes.â€?

There are many other messages less literate and more threatening. There is also outrage in Libya. The families of the infected children are demanding that Bulgaria put their nurses in jail. The parents take the nurse’s confessions, extracted under torture, as sure evidence of their guilt. They are in pain, and confronting their own government and their own responsibility as a nation, is beyond them.

New Orleans is cursed with inept and ineffective leaders and a corrupt state government. As they face an enormous task of restoration, they fight among themselves. Governor Blanco finds time to organize a Day of Prayer and sign a total ban on abortion ready to go as soon as the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. Attorney General Foti saw a chance to gain the national spotlight and make himself a hero to the ‘pro-life’ crowd by throwing charges of euthanasia at some of the volunteers who were trying to save lives in desperate conditions. “They didn’t stick to the care plan.� “They were playing God,� he said. Yes, somebody has to pay. It won’t be the Tenet Corporation that failed to evacuate the hospital. It won’t be the succession of politicians who lacked the political courage to tell the people that the levies wouldn’t hold against a major hurricane. It won’t be the President, who is practicing a kind of triage on the city, letting parts of it die of neglect.

It’s so much easier to find a scapegoat and put them through a show trial. Ann Pou, Cherie Landry, and Lori Budo deny that they did anything other than try their best to keep patients alive, but they will always carry these accusations. A city that needs so much to pull together will be occupied for a long time with its own anger and internal divisions.