{"id":13877,"date":"2007-12-10T16:45:02","date_gmt":"2007-12-10T21:45:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/13877.html"},"modified":"2007-12-10T16:45:02","modified_gmt":"2007-12-10T21:45:02","slug":"rescuing-an-american-citizen-from-her-american-employer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/rescuing-an-american-citizen-from-her-american-employer\/","title":{"rendered":"Rescuing an American citizen — from her American employer"},"content":{"rendered":"

I realize there are some ambiguities regarding private contractors’ legal status in Iraq, but this truly nauseating scandal<\/a>, if accurate, should put a whole lot of people behind bars.<\/p>\n

A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton\/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.<\/p>\n

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.
\n“Don’t plan on working back in Iraq. There won’t be a position here, and there won’t be a position in Houston,” Jones says she was told.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jones filed a federal lawsuit against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, arguing that she had been held against her will in a shipping container, without food or water, for 24 hours. She eventually convinced a Halliburton guard to let her make a phone call, and she contacted her father in Texas, pleading for help.<\/p>\n

He got in touch with their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), who told the State Department that they needed, as ABC News’ report put it, to “rescue an American citizen — from her American employer.”<\/p>\n

The encouraging news came when the State Department reacted to Poe’s call. The ridiculous news came when U.S. officials failed to follow through.
\n<\/p>\n

Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones’ camp, where they rescued her from the container.<\/p>\n

According to her lawsuit, Jones was raped by “several attackers who first drugged her, then repeatedly raped and injured her, both physically and emotionally.”<\/p>\n

Jones told ABCNews.com that an examination by Army doctors showed she had been raped “both vaginally and anally,” but that the rape kit disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers<\/b>. (emphasis added)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was two years ago — and no charges have been brought against anyone. From the piece: “In fact, ABC News could not confirm any federal agency was investigating the case.”<\/p>\n

Legal experts say Jones’ alleged assailants will likely never face a judge and jury, due to an enormous loophole that has effectively left contractors in Iraq beyond the reach of United States law.<\/p>\n

“It’s very troubling,” said Dean John Hutson of the Franklin Pierce Law Center. “The way the law presently stands, I would say that they don’t have, at least in the criminal system, the opportunity for justice.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Blackwater scandals clearly upped the ante when it came to contractor immunity, but Jones’ story is a grotesque example of the need to change the law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I realize there are some ambiguities regarding private contractors’ legal status in Iraq, but this truly nauseating scandal, if accurate, should put a whole lot of people behind bars. A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton\/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident. Jamie […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13877\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}