GOP Lawmaker Presses Rice Over Iraq Rape Case

[sabra]

Source: ABC News Blotter

A Republican lawmaker wants Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to answer questions in person about the high-profile rape case of Jamie Leigh Jones, after lower State Department officials failed to provide information that satisfied him.

Declaring that the State Department's previous written responses about Jamie Leigh Jones' allegations of gang-rape and confinement were "unacceptable" and raised "serious concerns," Rep. Ted Poe of Texas wrote the State Department Monday to request a meeting with Rice. A copy of the letter was shared with ABC News.

In interviews and her lawsuit against her former employer Kellogg Brown and Root, Jones has said she was drugged and gang-raped by her co-workers on her third night in Iraq. After reporting the incident to KBR, she has said the company confined her to a modified shipping container. According to Jones, Rep. Poe played an instrumental role in winning her release by contacting the State Department, which dispatched agents to her location.

Asked if Rice would meet with Poe, State spokeswoman Nicole Thompson said "the secretary's office will respond to the congressman." She declined to comment further.

Read more: http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2008/01/gop-lawmaker-pr.html

[OnyxCollie]

1. A repug with a modicum of integrity. Who would have guessed? nt

[sabra]

2. and also cares about his constituent...

[Orsino]

7. Since the victim was a civilian contractor...

...this Republican was able to avoid supporting actual troops. That's important.

[TheMadMonk]

10. Could be cynical and suggest that he's more concerned about...

...reelection than toeing the party line.

But then again, he coulda toed by simply leaving her in the container to rot in the first place.

Perhaps it's time to remind ourselves that the traditional republican IS NOT represented by the face presented by the party.

I might not be enamoured by all of their values, but IIRC integrity did once stand high amongst them.

[OnyxCollie]

11. I often give in to cynicism

by observing the repugs' SOP of "blame the victim".

To have directed that attitude towards Rep. Poe was disrespectful. For that, I apologize. Such actions should be met with commendation, not cynicism.

[mwb970]

12. Neocons are not true Republicans.

Once upon a time there was a respectable entity called the Republican party. They had ideas (yes) and principles. I disagreed with most of them, but they were defensible and stemmed from a coherent (if off-base) worldview.

These current "Republicans" are something else altogether. The party is now a den of thieves, having been converted to a criminal enterprise by Rove, cheney, and their fellow neocon thugs. Their goal is more money and more power for themselves and their rich, powerful friends, nothing more. This evil end is used to justify every evil means. America, and Americans, literally do not matter at all to them.

Maybe this guy is some kind of holdover from the real Republicans of yesteryear? There must be a few around somewhere.

[Winterblues]

3. I thought all Contractors had complete immunity in Iraq

I seem to recall it was one of the first things Bremer put into place. How could this gal bring a law suit?

[dysfunctional press]

4. i think that perhaps the immunity only applied to raping iraqi's...?

:shrug:

and taxpayers, naturally.

[sattahipdeep]

5. Claude Kicklighter ....

He has refused his Assent to Laws.

Pentagon Won't Probe KBR Rape Charges


"No further investigation by this agency into the allegations made by Jones is warranted."

http://www.abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4099514&page=1

[ReformedChris]

6. The Repubs House of Cards Will Crumble...

With time and pressure, I think we will see more and more GOPers jump on the investigation bandwagon and demand answers. Unfortunatley, most are too stupid and narrow minded to bother doing their duty as Americans to investigate this disasterous situation.

[Barrett808]

8. rec'd n/t

[hvn_nbr_2]

9. "confined her to a modified shipping container"

Good Lord! Was that with or without the waterboard enhancement?

[flashl]

13. Open secrets about rapes in Iraq ...

The Rape Of Iraq And Other Sexual Matters

I just e-mailed the following paragraph to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Refugees International, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and two women journalists at CBS news, Katie Couric and Lara Logan (foreign correspondent in Iraq):

I would like to know more about the sexual assault on women in Iraq: rapes by American and coalition forces; rapes by the Iraqi police and military; rapes by Iraqi civilian men; rapes of women and girls detained in prisons; gang rapes; women forced into starvation prostitution—either for the occupying forces or for Iraqis; the increase of brothels in Baghdad and Basra as a result of the occupation; the trafficking of women and girls into prostitution by criminal gangs, either within Iraq or in surrounding countries; the way families are forced to sell daughters for survival; any ´survival sex´ women and girls are engaged in due to desperation; ´survival sex´ forced upon the refugee population (2 million in Iraq--2 million in surrounding countries); the trafficking, by U.S. military contractors, of Filipina and Chinese girls into brothels in the Green Zone; the role of the U.S. Military Police in the pimping of Iraqi women and girls; the physical and psychological state of the prostituted Iraqi girls trafficked into the Green Zone for paid rape; the rape of female military personnel by their own men—and anything else you may have seen going on in Iraq.

For Couric and Logan, I appended: "This aspect of Iraq has been overlooked by CBS news." For Amnesty International, I added, "I would also like to know about the trafficking of girls into Guantanamo Bay to service the U.S. military there. Your organization is involved in the rights of detainees there but has overlooked this other class of tortured beings."

This is the year I would like to see the sexual exploitation of women in the wars America indulges in finally covered rather than ignored—in reparation for not having done so from the Revolution forward—the Civil War (with its wandering bands of syphilitic camp followers, mostly women widowed by the war); the Spanish American War and the two Great Wars and Korea and Vietnam and Desert Storm and Panama and Afghanistan and now Iraq—not a whisper from the whore in the dirty alley, offering it up for a few dollars due to hunger, or the hunger of her children. It is time. Katie Couric and Lara Logan (the latter journalist has been ´embedded´ with the troops over there), it is time you report on all the women and girls, in Iraq, and all the Iraqi refugee women and girls in surrounding countries forced into survival sex. It is time you profiled the 14-year-old Iraqi refugee girl sold by her family in order to feed her younger brothers and sisters.

American Chronicle