By Steve Hynd
We've covered Jamie's case from the very first here at Newshoggers. She alleges that she was drugged, raped and abused, then held under armed guard to prevent her going to the authorities, while working for KBR/Halliburton in Iraq in 2005. Her rape kit, which was lost then recovered, certainly bears out the rape part of her story. The story first surfaced in 2007:
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.
...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.
Rescued her from under armed guard by security personnel that KBR illegally contracted from Blackwater and others, that is.
Rightwing bloggers, to their eternal (lack of) shame, immediately rallied around Dick Cheney's old firm. "Too perfect" wrote the Jawa Report and Flopping Aces, "very convenient" wrote Ace of Spades. PJM's Bob Owens wrote an entire post suggesting by innuendo that Jamie was making the whole thing up then tried to defend himself in Newshogger comments.
A news report today says that after five years Jamie Leigh Jones has finally been acknowledged as having the right to pursue her abusers and their employer in court.
Jones employment contract with Halliburton (now known as KBR) contained an arbitration clause that required "any and all personal injury claims' to be heard by an arbitrator. Jones eventually refused to arbitrate, wanting her lawsuit to be heard in court.
The Fifth Circuit eventually held that some of Jones' claims did indeed belong in court because the assault was not related to her employment. KBR had appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, but after initial briefing, KBR withdrew its appeal on March 11.
Why? Sen. Al Franken! Franken successfully advocated a prohibition that keeps contractors receiving federal defense funds from forcing employees to arbitration to resolve certain claims, including civil rights and harassment disputes.
Thank you, Senator Franken.
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