Another KBR Rape Case

article posted April 3, 2008 (web only)
Another KBR Rape Case
Karen Houppert


Editor's Note: Lisa Smith is a pseudonym used on request. Additional reporting by Te-Ping Chen. Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.


Houston

It was an early January morning in 2008 when 42-year-old Lisa Smith*, a paramedic for a defense contractor in southern Iraq, woke up to find her entire room shaking. The shipping container that served as her living quarters was reverberating from nearby rocket attacks, and she was jolted awake to discover an awful reality. "Right then my whole life was turned upside down," she says.

What follows is the story she told me in a lengthy, painful on-the-record interview, conducted in a lawyer's office in Houston, Texas, while she was back from Iraq on a brief leave.


That dawn, naked, covered in blood and feces, bleeding from her anus, she found a US soldier she did not know lying naked in the bed next to her: his gun lay on the floor beside the bed, she could not rouse him and all she could remember of the night before was screaming and screaming as the soldier anally penetrated her while a colleague who worked for defense contractor KBR held her hand--but instead of helping her, as she had hoped, he jammed his penis in her mouth.

Over the next few weeks Smith would be told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor. The camp's military liaison officer also told her not to speak about what had happened, she says. And she would follow these instructions. "Because then, all of a sudden, if you've done exactly what you've been instructed not to do--tell somebody--then you're in danger," Smith says.

As a brand-new arrival at Camp Harper, she had not yet forged many connections and was working in a red zone under regular rocket fire alongside the very men who had participated in the attack. (At one point, as the sole medical provider, she was even forced to treat one of her alleged assailants for a minor injury.) She waited two and a half weeks, until she returned to a much larger facility, to report the incident. "It's very easy for bad things to happen down there and not have it be even slightly suspicious."
go here for the rest
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/houppert

KBR, as you know, has no US connection because they said they paid their employees from an offshore account. The US government may be able to allow a suit because of the tax shelter they set up for themselves in order to not play by the rules, they now want the protection of. The case came out last week that may have paved the way for others to be given some justice for what they have gone through with these rapes. Rape is a crime and not a dispute for an arbitrator to deal with. Much like the Catholic Arch Diocese decided that child abuse and rape was a bad thing to do instead of a crime, covering this up only comes back to bite them in the end. Let's pray in this case, they get the full Monty in terms of justice!