GANG RAPE LEGISLATION NIXED BY 30 GOP'ers

DEFENSE CONTRACTORS BUY SENATE VOTES      

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

Is it this plain?  Are the facts this clear?  Did 30 Republicans vote to allow defense contractors protection if their employees are raped, drugged and imprisoned?  Haliburton/KBR, the "Dick" Cheney company did exactly this, locked a rape victim in a box, drugged her and kept her prisoner.

68 Senators, every single Democrat and some Republicans, voted to allow defense contractors whose employees are sexually assaulted be taken to court.  Robert Kennedy Jr. and Mike Papantonio describe their take on opposition to the Rape Protection bill. 

"I checked to make sure that the 30 Republican Senators who voted against Jamie Leigh Jones' anti-rape bill two weeks ago had wives and daughters. Most of them did. But their love for defense contractor PAC money is obviously greater than their love even for their own daughters. The Senate bill was simple to follow: if a contractor like KBR has an employee who is sexually assaulted on the job, that employee has a right to have a jury hear and decide the facts of the case. If the contractor denies the victim that right, then the U.S. government won't do business with that contractor. In 2005, Jones, a KBR employee, was gang-raped in Iraq by KBR workers. After she was gang-raped, KBR security held her prisoner inside a 5' x 6' shipping container to make sure she kept her mouth shut.

The vote to enact the bill was 68 to 30. Go to the website Republicans For Rape, and you can see the list of those 30 GOP leaders who voted against offering justice to victims like Jamie. They argued that it is too harsh to force a valued defense contractor like KBR or Haliburton to appear in front of a civil jury to face outraged and repulsed fathers, mothers, and sisters when stories like Jamie's are told. What those 30 all-male, all-Republican Senators would prefer is that Jamie and victims like her would be raped again by KBR by appearing in a closed door, secretive, arbitration hearing where no one would hear the details of the assault.

It's worth mentioning that Jamie was also drugged while she was held captive by KBR management employees in that shipping crate so no one would hear her cries to be allowed to simply go home to her family. The drugs were supposed to keep her quiet in the same way that the KBR good ol' boy corporate arbitration panel would keep the details of this disgusting story quiet.

The GOP Senate leaders were not in the dark about the details of Jamie's rape. They knew she had been repeatedly sodomized and that her body was so torn up that she needed reconstructive plastic surgery. They knew that KBR's own security force held Jamie as a prisoner after the rape,  denying her food and medical treatment.

And we are aware of how at least a couple of those 30 GOP leaders regard women. Louisiana Senator David Vitter had a “stable” of female prostitutes at his beck and call when he wanted female companionship. John Ensign had his wife and at least one girlfriend around when he wanted the company of a woman. Women were at the top of mind for those two GOP leaders mostly out of convenience. But stories like the Jamie Leigh story are never convenient. We have to hear them, and the people responsible for that evil need to be held accountable in courtrooms instead of getting closed-door, corporate arbitration hearings where a victim's chances to obtain justice are over at hello.

We want to believe that some corporate money is sometimes too expensive even for politicians, but the Jamie Leigh Jones story has again proved us wrong."

The incident described is not a "one time" thing.  Hundreds of contractors working for Blackwater, KRB and other US companies have been sexually assaulted, many of them men.  With established company policies that promote this kind of behavior, it had to be expected.

Jamie survived.  There are stories floating around that others who complained of being raped simply disappeared mysteriously, supposedly kidnapped or died by friendly fire.

When the companies involved are controlled by the highest echeons of the ruling political party, operate unsupervised, unanswerable to any power for any reason, corruption, waste, poisoned water sold to troops, or causing the deaths of dozens of Marines due to getting into total screwups like Blackwater in Fallujah, someone needs to pay with more than money, jail time is due.

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