By David Isenberg at Huff Post
To paraphrase comedian Henny Youngman’s famous one-liner, take my KBR, please.
After all the bad press U.S. engineering and construction company KBR has received over the years for its operations in Iraq , both during its time as a Halliburton subsidiary and since, one might think it had learned a thing or two about how to avoid sticking its foot in its mouth.
But you would be wrong, As case in point consider the following legal brief KBR filed, which was posted online by the estimable Ms. Sparky — who is to chronicling KBR misdeeds, including those against it own employees, as white is to rice — in regard to the case of Jamie Leigh Jones,
For those who missed this news Ms. Jones is the then 20-year old former KBR/Halliburton worker, who says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad in late July 2005.
The main points are by now well known. She says that just four days after arriving in Iraq 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.
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.
According to her lawsuit, Jones was raped by “several attackers who first drugged her, then repeatedly raped and injured her, both physically and emotionally.” Jones said that an examination by Army doctors showed she had been raped “both vaginally and anally,” but that the rape kit disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers. See KBR’s AWOL Medical Records here and here
Ms. Jones had to be rescued from her American employer by U.S. State Department agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, after she was able to contact her father by cell phone, who then contacted his congressman, Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), who contacted the State Department.
In late 2007, over two years after the reported rape occurred, the Justice Department had brought no criminal charges in the matter. In fact, an investigation by ABC News could not confirm any federal agency was investigating the case.
Early on, in a statement, KBR said it was “instructed to cease” its own investigation by U.S. government authorities “because they were assuming sole responsibility for the criminal investigations.”
Read the full story here
A Huge THANK YOU to our own Terry Marshall for his continued efforts to expose fraud and abuse by AIG. Terry worked with T Miller on this latest story which you can read below.
