(***EDIT***) If I recall correctly, this topic has already been diaried and made the rec list, by our friend gooderservice, but I strongly feel that this topic cannot be exposed enough.
Among the worst fears of every man is to find out their daughter has been forced to do something against their will; to be held against their will; to be overpowered and raped. Well, an extremely ugly story has emerged about a forcible gang rape and illegal imprisonment of the victim in the Green Zone, and what I consider to be (at least based on the evidence so far) to be a very courageous young woman who has gone public with her horrible story and its aftermath.
I apologize if you think this topic has been discussed enough for today. Tough. Below is my take on the matter.
I will content myself with a couple of brief quotes and then weigh in with my views.
It's not enough that an innocent woman was raped in the Green Zone by people who are ostensibly charged with actually helping to rebuild a country we invaded (yeah, RIGHT) but that the woman evidently was forcibly held in a shipping container by Kellogg Brown-Root supervisors in the immediate aftermath, literally as a prisoner:
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.
Here it is, folks. The end result of Republicanism. Complete deregulation of behavior and complete abrogation of the rule of law. Effectively, the Green Zone is a lawless zone where contractors can do whatever the Hell they want without consequences and their bosses will simply cover it up. This includes destroying the rape kit that was obtained after Jamie Jones was rescued 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."
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.
Why did those State Department boneheads turn the rape kit over to these people? Or were they boneheads? Was that a conspiratorial act?
I can barely stand to read anymore.
I can barely imagine what Mr. Jones felt when he got that phone call. This young woman wasn't even allowed the same rights as a criminal thug would get after they committed a crime of the same sort that was visited upon her.
To those who say "let's wait and see if the truth comes out," I can say this: yes, I agree. However, what kind of courage does it take for a dishonoured, brutalized woman to go public with a story like this?
I'm sorry, no one's going to make a story like this up.
When - oh, WHEN are we finally going to get our GODDAMN country back? When are we finally going to start hunting down every single one of these bastards whose goal is to destroy our rights, deny our history as a nation, invade countries for corporate profit, and brutalize our most innocent and helpless citizens? We could not stuff the jails full enough with these people.
As a father of a six-year-old girl, this story sends me into a blind, frothing rage. There is nothing that can make me see red faster than a story like this. Coupled with the fact that this was done under the aegis of the Federal Government and one of the most well-known (and most utterly corrupt) contractors in the United States, which has a long hsitory of collusion with the Federal Government going back to Lyndon Johnson's days in the House of Representatives, I can only say one thing:
Our government is made of monsters.
It is time to take our country back.
These people, from Bush on down, are tyrants and must be stopped. NOW.
This is what happened when you allow deregulated markets.
This is what happens when you privatize a war effort.
The Republicans are not and have never been "the party of personal responsibility."
The Republicans are the Party of Institutionalized Forcible Rape and the would-be founders of Caliban's Kingdom. They are a lawless band of thugs, right down to every single last GODDAMN voter of their party.
Republicans are Pod People. They are mindless, ignorant, unfeeling morons who cannot even be bothered with the mere concept of critical thinking, or independent thought. It's just easier to have King Thug tell them how to think. After they finish their daily ladling of mindlessness from Rush and Joe Scarborough, they can walk around, wearing their false pride like a badge of honor.
But now their daughters are prey to these people. Their sons have been well-established as the carno-thugs' IED fodder. Fighting for a lie. Fighting for Dick Cheney's stock options. But it is not enough. It will never be enough for these people, whose greed sets a new historical standard of pathology and gibbering self-consuming madness.
People vote Republican because they just don't give a shit. Well, maybe they'll start giving a shit when their daughters start getting raped by the scumbags whom the government THEY VOTED FOR are directly funding and supporting by the billions.
If this explosive story is not enough to destroy the Republican Party and its illegitimate, anarchic, lawless war, then this country is irredeemable and I will very strongly consider leaving it after 2008.
Anyone who identifies with the Republicans has some very, very serious soul-searching to do.