Can you imagine being gang-raped and then imprisoned by your employer?
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.
Can you imagine being the father who got this phone call?
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.
But as wrenching and outrageous as the individual human story is, the grotesque immorality of the system it reveals is harder still to wrap your mind around.
An American woman employed by an American company was raped by her coworkers. In order, apparently, to keep her from reporting the rape, her employer held her captive in conditions worse than criminals in prison face. The rapists are not being prosecuted - maybe cannot be prosecuted - because the US has left contractors in Iraq unanswerable to the law. The physical evidence of rape has been disappeared. The company is not being prosecuted for imprisoning her. They furthermore are insisting that her employment contract means she cannot sue them, but has to go into a secret arbitration process massively stacked in their own favor.
We've heard a lot of it before, with Blackwater guards not being held accountable for killing Iraqis, and Blackwater not being held accountable by the US government. But as wrong as it is to try to cover up for having murdered a lot of people by claiming that they shot at you first, those people are dead. You're criminally trying to cover your own ass, but you're not causing them any further suffering. It takes a special something, it seems to me, to say "we don't want to be held accountable for the gang-rape of this woman we employ. Hey, let's lock her up under armed guard without food and water." What was the end game there? Was the intent to let her out once they'd broken her and she wasn't going to report it? Did they even have a plan? And this, mind you, wasn't a matter of the rapists themselves trying to cover up their actions. This was a decision made by someone high up enough in the company to assign guards to a damn storage container.
This is what the government of our country has bought and paid for.
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