Halliburton/KBR Cover Up Gang Rape

Posted by Steven Reynolds, The All Spin Zone at 12:00 PM on December 10, 2007.

This post, written by Steven Reynolds, originally appeared on The All Spin Zone

Yes, a gang-rape in Baghdad, by Halliburton and KBR employees with a Halliburton employee as a victim. The cover-up has been swallowed, if not actively abetted, by US personnel there. This should result in massive investigations and firings. In Bush World it will probably result in renewed Halliburton contracts and medals for their workers.

There's not much one can say to increase the disgust that this story is going to serve up to the American public on ABC's 20/20 in a couple nights. A young American woman working for Halliburton was gang raped by her fellow employees, then Halliburton covered up the crime and threatened the woman if she chose to report it. Evidently the US government, such good friends of Halliburton, is supposedly taking part in the cover-up, evidently favoring Halliburton over a gang-raped citizen. Here's the report, but the video is on TV in a couple days:

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.

"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.

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.

"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.

You know, that sounds like kidnapping to me. The rest of the article shows how evidence was taken by Halliburton employees, and subsequently disappeared. It shows the United States government refusing to comment, and also refusing to bring charges, thus forcing the victim here to go to civil court to redress her extreme grievances.

I can't say more than that my governemtn is supposed to be better than this, but time after time Bush and Company has shown itself without morals of any kind. We should all be outraged.

Tagged as: kbr, halliburton, rape

Steven Reynolds is a regular blogger for the All Spin Zone