Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

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 . . . "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.

-- BRIAN ROSS, MADDY SAUER & JUSTIN ROOD

Somebody screwed up, terribly, and someone should pay.

-- DON SURBER

Indeed, if the terrorists wanted to undermine the war effort and destroy Western Civilization as we know it, this would be the perfect way to do it. Find an intelligent, attractive young woman to claim she was gang raped by contractors who work at the Vice President's company, and then get a Republican congressman and the State Department to back up part of her story. It's brilliantly evil and almost foolproof!

. . . Because Congress wrote a law exempting the alleged perpetrators from prosecution Jones is suing the company for damages. Halliburton/KBR has offered a fair compromise. The company wants to settle the case in arbitration, where records would be sealed, and spare Jones all the bad publicity that would ensue when they attack her reputation in a public trial.

-- JON SWIFT

And, of course, while people who favor an open-ended American military commitment in Iraq probably don't specifically believe that instances of rape and kidnapping ought to be papered over in silence, I think we can all predict that this is a story that will be widely covered on anti-war websites, and basically ignored on pro-war ones.

-- MATTHEW YGLESIAS

I find it hard to believe the US or even the evil Halliburton would cover up a gang rape. Doesn't the US have an interest in ferreting out such malefactors and duly punishing them?

Apparently not. The Narrative says that gang rape is actual government/corporate policy.

I can't say this is nonsense, but it does all seem a bit hard to believe. And very convenient in terms of a multimillion dollar lawsuit against a very deep-pocketed corporation against whom a significant portion of the public is willing to believe literally anything at all.

-- ACE