More Rape and Cover-Up in Iraq

Another woman has been raped in Iraq, and the U.S. has been covering up the brutal crime, which took place 2 years ago in the Green Zone. This seems to be part of a pattern of women in Iraq being intimidated, abused, raped, and even murdered, followed by government efforts to cover-up what happened.

We are still trying to find answers in the case of Lavena Lynn Johnson, a 19 year old soldier killed murdered in Iraq in July 2005. All indications point to foul play in her case. The national media has helped their friends in the Bush Administration with squashing the Johnson case simply by not covering the story. At least this victim and others, like Ciara Durkin, have received national media attention. Johnson, a Black woman, was not deemed by the national media as being important enough to cover. That being said, I hope that these other cases raise awareness about similar cases across the board.

The victim in the Green zone case was an employee of KBR, a company that was at one time a part of Halliburton - where Cheney was once CEO. She was apparently gangraped by her KBR co-workers. Why have there been no arrests of KBR managers and supervisors who took part in covering this up and intimidating the victim? Why was evidence allowed to disappear? Why were suspects allowed to walk away? This is why the Justice Department needs to be a truly independent agency, rather than another extension of the White House.

From ABC:

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.

"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.

After being gangraped, Jones was held captive... in The Green Zone, which is supposed to be this great bastion of freedom, Democracy and the rule of law in Iraq.

Army doctors eventually conducted an examination of Jones, but afterwards, they handed the evidence to KBR... that's right... they gave the evidence to the suspect. I have never heard of any crime, especially rape, that called for passing sensitive evidence to the suspect. Of course the evidence disappeared shortly thereafter. Why in the Hell is a government authority (The Army Medical Corps) passing evidence- in this case a rape kit- to a private entity in the first place?

I have never seen a government this corrupt. What we are witnessing easily tops the Nixon bunch. You have to look beyond the borders of the United States to find a situation where a government was as corrupt as Bush & Co.

See Full Story from ABC

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