The Charge Of The Lightheaded Brigade

I don't have much more to add to Jon Swift's brilliant post about how wingers are attacking the credibility of a woman who was raped and imprisoned by KBR/Halliburton employees (and treating it like it's a fucking detective novel, instead of, you know, a women being raped), except to say that they never seem to turn their rhetorical fire on anyone but victims. Victims deserve scorn because they get in the way of the big victory, the logic goes. That's such a depressing way to live your life.

Raped, Threatened, Humiliated

Where the military-industrial conplex intersects with the authoritarian state.

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.

When profit enters the picture, the most savage humiliations can be justified. KBR's bottom line would be hurt by the revelation of this horrible tragedy. Therefore, there's a lot of unspoken pressure to keep things like this under wraps. Add in the usual realities of power relationships and the fog of war and you have a combustible mix.

Turns out that in this case, the Army confirmed that Miss Jones was raped, and KBR forcibly acquired the rape kit and commandeered it. And the Justice Department has done absolutely nothing about it.

"There are several, I think, they're excuses, why the perpetrators haven't been prosecuted," Poe told ABC News. "But I think it is the responsibility of our government, the Justice Department and the State Department, when crimes occur against American citizens overseas in Iraq, contractors that are paid by the American public, that we pursue the criminal cases as best as we possibly can and that people are prosecuted." [...]

In her lawsuit, Jones' lawyer, Todd Kelly, says KBR and Halliburton created a "boys will be boys" atmosphere at the company barracks which put her and other female employees at great risk.

"I think that men who are there believe that they live without laws," said Kelly. "The last thing she should have expected was for her own people to turn on her."

It's hard to find the words to really explain the outrage here.