The Jamie Leigh Jones gang rape case

ABC News reported a story yesterday about a woman who alleges she was gang-raped two years ago in the Green Zone in Iraq by some of her Halliburton/KBR co-workers:

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, who told her story to ABC News as part of an upcoming “20/20” investigation. “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.

“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.

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 told ABCNews.com 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.

Ted Frank at Overlawyered has examined the allegations and the briefs filed, and provides a good analysis here. My friend and fellow North Carolinian Bob Owens has done some research into the story ABC reported and found some discrepancies, which he discusses here, but even with those discrepancies, he wrote on his website that he believes Jones’ was indeed gang-raped.

I’m inclined to agree, based on what I’ve read, and perhaps you will, too, after reading the journal Jamie Leigh kept in which she wrote about what she alleges happened to her. The story, I think, is just too intricate to be made up – I don’t think we’re looking at another Crystal Gail Mangum. There might be an inconsistency here or there on a minor detail but, as lawyer DRJ writes at Patterico’s blog, it looks like in the pleadings presented by Halliburton/KBR that even they have conceded that it’s entirely possible that a rape did occur in Iraq and at this point are defending themselves against Jones’ assertion’ that they were responsible for her safety but, according to her, were derelict in their duties.

Of course, my mind isn’t closed to any new additional information which may surface, and I certainly think scrutiny of the case is in order, especially considering what happened in the Duke case – I’m just giving you my opinion based the information currently available.

When I first read this story yesterday, my first thought was, oh my gosh … this has a definite ring of truth to it – and I felt sick over it. I didn’t get that with the Duke case. But unlike the far left, who have latched on to this story like they typically do any bad news story coming out of Iraq in an attempt to undermine the mission by broadbrushing everyone for the (alleged) despicable actions of a few, and unlike the radical feminists who have pointed to to this story as “more proof” of their assertions that all men are “evil,” I hope my initial reaction to this story is later proven to be unjustified. What Jones is alleging is just horrific, and something no woman should ever, ever have to go through.

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