What Happens in Iraq Stays in Iraq

More reports are surfacing describing the sort of lawlessness that U.S. contractors enjoy in Iraq. This time it is a female employee of KBR who suffered numerous cases of sexual hazing, including a sexual assault at the hands of a State Department official. Despite the State Department's recommendation that the official be charged, the U.S. government has declined to pursue the matter further.

From Hell back to Purgatory

A mother living in Federally subsidized housing in the U.S. sends her son back to war ravaged Liberia for fear of what is happening to him in the U.S.

Augustus had been well schooled in the lessons of Park Hill, which has taken in so many waves of refugees over the last 30 years that it is known in some quarters as Little Liberia. By his teenage years, he had adopted a street name (Ghostface) and a gang affiliation (Bloodline) and learned how drugs coursed through the neighborhood into the hands of customers.

Ms. Sirleaf made her choice and did not look back, even when her son found himself in the midst of war, even when he begged to come home.

“If God give him to me, he will survive,” she told her friends when they asked how she could be so cold. “If he is not mine, he will die.”

Her decision made a strange kind of sense in Park Hill, a row of federally subsidized apartment buildings northwest of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge that is home to 3,000 to 4,000 Liberians.

This is an extreme example, no doubt, but it does bring home the horrid circumstances under which poor minorities must live in this country, and just how little the government does to help improve their lives. When people complain about the money that we waste on foreign wars, that would be put to better use at home, this is the sort of thing they're thinking of.

Please, Waterboard my Pilots! (Ha, ha!)

With apologies to Henny Youngman, I note that the Bush Administration's use of and non-denial defense of waterboarding as an interrogation technique has brought this nation to the point that the U.S. Military finds itself in the unenviable position of tacitly green-lighting the waterboarding of downed U.S. airmen by the secret security services of foreign powers.

Witness the stunning exchange between Senator Lindsey Graham and Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, when Graham asked Hartman if the U.S. military would protest the waterboarding of a U.S. Airman downed over Iranian airspace. Hartman refused to answer the question.

The Last to Know

Just so you know (click the image for a larger view):


Faux News vainly hopes you never hear Jones' story.

Swiftboat Veterans For Destroying the GOP

How appropriate that the party that invented "swiftboating" is starting to turn its weapons inward and ripping itself to shreds in a virulent, internecine bout. I've said in the past that Mike Huckabee is the only GOP candidate who truly worries me (what with ol' Fred Thompson languishing in dumpsville and John McCain universally despised by party faithful for fathering a black baby... or something like that). But today the conservative Club For Growth has produced an attack ad that's bound to put one Hell of a chink in Huckabee's armor. The spot is delectable in its underhanded savagery:




I especially love that last line "Nursing Home Bed Taxes." They might as well have followed GOP precedent and called it the pre-death tax.

Jesus Deserved to Die

"Jesus deserved to die." That's the only way one can interpret Mike Huckabee's answer, in 1997, to a question about how he, as a Christian, could justify being a supporter of the death penalty.

"...if there was ever an occasion for someone to have argued against the death penalty, I think Jesus could have done so on the cross and said, 'This is an unjust punishment and I deserve clemency."

But Jesus did not argue that he deserved clemency, so clearly, his punishment was just.

And Now, An American Victim

In the heady heyday of the great tech-fueled stock market bubble of the 1990's, over-exhuberant con-men and charlatans led the credulous in a chant of "the old rules do not apply." Then, when gagillion dollar market caps for companies with no profits, sales, or even tangible products couldn't be sustained, the "old rules" kicked in, the market collapsed and the rest is history. Iraq today is something like the stock market was back in the 90's... at least the anarchic "old rules don't apply" part of it. For if you're a mercenary sub-contractor you could very well say that in Iraq the "old laws don't apply." And by "old laws" I'm talking stuff like "thou shalt do no murder" and rape being a bad thing and all.

We've heard the stories of Blackwater and other mercenary firms dealing death to the Iraqi civilian population in a rather arbitrary and haphazard manner while suffering no consequence for it. This is in part because the Bush administration, in all it's Orwellian wisdom decided that the best way to bring Democracy to Iraq would be by turning it into a place where Mercenaries could visit and just, let themselves go, secure in the knowledge that they enjoyed immunity from the laws that govern civilized nations.

Now ABC news brings us the story of an American victim of foreign contractors. And by foreign I mean foreign to Iraq, since Halliburton, the contractor in question, is decidedly not foreign to our shores. Jamie Leigh Jones, who was just 21 years old when she worked for Halliburton in Iraq, was gang raped by employees of that company, and then locked in a storage container by company officials who feared the negative consequences for the company if she told her story. It was only after a congressman's intervention (prompted by a phone call from her father) that she was rescued by "agents of the U.S. embassy" and returned to safety. Furthermore, evidence of her rape was destroyed after the Army rape kit was handed over to Halliburton security officials.

To make matters worse, Jones has no recourse under U.S. law. At best she can sue the company in civil court, however, Halliburton is claiming that the employment contract she signed requires her to settle all claims through secret, binding arbitration proceedings. Yes, you read that right, Halliburton is claiming the right to impose a contract that forces a rape victim to sign away her right to settle claims in a public courtroom. Under U.S. law it is illegal to insist that employees sign contracts stipulating that they will never vote to join a trade union, it is legal to have employees sign away their right to sue a company in a public court when they are raped by their employers.

There is so much that is sickeningly wrong about this case it's hard to know weven where to start.