An American woman who said she was raped by US contractors in Iraq testified in Congress on Wednesday, saying that she was kept under armed guard in her trailer after reporting the incident.
Jamie Leigh Jones, now 23, said that she was gang-raped inside the Baghdad Green Zone in July 2005 while she was working for the Halliburton subsidiary KBR Inc, which has support contracts with the US military.
The US Department of Justice failed to send an attorney to the House of Representatives sub-committee hearing, which Democratic Representative John Conyers blasted as "outrageous" and "unacceptable."
Jones told committee members that on her fourth day in Baghdad some co-workers, who she described as Halliburton-KBR firefighters, invited her for a drink.
"I took two sips from the drink and don't remember anything after that," she said.
The next morning Jones woke up groggy and confused, and with a sore chest and blood between her legs. She reported the incident to KBR and was examined by an army doctor, who confirmed she had been repeatedly raped vaginally and anally.
The doctor took photographs, made notes and handed all the evidence over to KBR personnel.
"The KBR security then took me to a trailer and then locked me in a room with two armed guards outside my door," Jones said.
"I was imprisoned in the trailer for approximately a day. One of the guards finally had mercy and let me use a phone," she said.
Jones called her father in Texas, who called his representative in Congress, Republican Ted Poe.
Poe contacted the US State Department, who quickly sent personnel to rescue Jones and flew her back to Texas.
The rape was so brutal she is still undergoing reconstructive surgery, Jones said.
Jones tried to get her case resolved first through KBR channels, then through the Justice Department. When neither course seemed to work, she gave an interview with ABC television news.
KBR has been silent on the matter, though according to ABC News the company circulated a memo among employees signed by company president and CEO Bill Utt saying that it "disputes portions of Ms. [Jamie Leigh] Jones' version and facts."
Jones said that she knows of at least 11 other women who were raped by US contractors in Iraq.
Jones' KBR contract, however, included a clause which prevents her from suing her employer, Poe said, which will likely force her into arbitration, which he described as "a privatized justice system with no public record, no discovery and no meaningful appeal."
There are many laws that the department "can enforce with respect to contractors who commit crimes abroad, but it chooses not to," Democratic Representative Robert Scott said.
The Justice Department "seems to be taking action with respect to enforcement of criminal laws in Iraq only when it is forced to do something by embarrassing media coverage," he said.
"This is outrageous that we even have to be here today," said Conyers, adding that it showed "how far out of control the law enforcement system in Iraq is today."
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
RSS