Posted by
Chris Jones on Monday, December 10, 2007 4:58:55 PM
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 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.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its
then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container
for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed
security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.
Now this lawsuit actually sounds like it has some legs, because the
State Department actually intervened and rescued her from the shipping
container!
"It felt like prison," says Jones, who told her story
to ABC News as part of an upcoming "20/20" investigation. "I was upset;
I was curled up in a ball on the bed; I just could not believe what had
happened."
Finally, Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.
"I said, 'Dad, I've been raped. I don't know what to do. I'm in this
container, and I'm not able to leave,'" she said. Her father called
their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas.
"We contacted the State Department first," Poe told ABCNews.com,
"and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen" -- from
her American employer.
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.
According to her lawsuit, Jones was raped by "several attackers who
first drugged her, then repeatedly raped and injured her, both
physically and emotionally."
Army doctors performed a rape kit on Ms. Jones which clearly showed
that she had been raped both vaginally and anally. However, the rape
kit mysteriously disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security
officers.
Over two years later, the Justice Department has brought no criminal
charges in the matter. 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.
I have been a strident defender of allowing contractors to be immune
from prosecution in Iraq. I don't really lose any sleep over Blackwater
having to shoot one or more people for whatever reason.
Immunity for "contractor on Iraqi" crime is one thing, but I never
considered that immunity would extend to "contractor on contractor"
crimes. Or more specifically "American on American" crimes. Shooting an
Iraqi in a war zone is one thing, but American contractors gang-raping
a 20-year old American woman is f*cking outrageous.
Jones went on to say that KBR and Halliburton created a "boys will
be boys" atmosphere in the barracks, which created an unsafe
environment for females. The fact that KBR/Halliburton would even
consider making the women share the same barracks with a bunch of
"alpha male" contractors is almost too much to believe. If they chose
to bunk with the guys so be it, but their should have been separate
quarters available.
The honest to god truth is that regardless of sleeping quarters,
American contractors should act like professionals rather than a bunch
of rabid animals. It's this kind of crap that brings dishonor and shame
to everyone who's over there trying to do good work.
There is absolutely no legitimate reason for extending immunity for
crimes against co-workers. I guess that means that a contractor could
shoot a U.S. Soldier and be immune, or kill a Congressman and be
immune. This is getting to be a sick situation and if a little bit of
immunity is gonna become this kind of immunity, then clearly there
should be NO immunity.
This entire story will be featured on an upcoming episode of "20/20."
-Chris Jones
The Hot Joints