The inimitable Cursor gathers articles that report damning allegations of the widespread rapes of female employees of KBR, Halliburton, and other defense contractors in Iraq.

"A Nation report on 'Another KBR Rape Case' in Iraq which took place in January 2008, notes that one Houston law firm alone has 15 clients with "sexual assault, sexual harassment and retaliation" allegations about KBR or its affiliates, but hopes for redress look dim."

The Nation report by Karen Houppert states: "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.

"In fact, a growing number of women employees working for US defense contractors in the Middle East are coming forward with complaints of violence directed at them. As the Iraq War drags on, and as stories of US security contractors who seem to operate with impunity continue to emerge (like Blackwater and its deadly attack against Iraqi civilians on September 16, 2007), a rash of new sexual assault and sexual harassment complaints are being lodged against overseas contractors--by their own employees. Todd Kelly, a lawyer in Houston, says his firm alone has fifteen clients with sexual assault, sexual harassment and retaliation complaints (for reporting assault and/or harassment) against Halliburton and its former subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root LLC (KBR), as well as Cayman Island-based Service Employees International Inc., a KBR shell company."

As AtLargely succinctly puts it in a post titled, "Of violent sex crimes covered up by your tax dollars...:"

"Instead of addressing the problem they have created, however, the Bush-Cheney administration and their corporate no-bid contracting buddies have pressured the victims of these violent crimes into silence and government resources to cover-up these crimes. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you our American victims of our other American victims as well as criminals who are themselves being guided by a criminally corrupt group of corporations and a criminally corrupt government."

Jamie Leigh Jones, a KBR employee in Iraq, gave a shocking testimony before a congressional committee last December about being gang raped by co-workers.

And here is how reprehensible KBR, the war profiteering company, is. "KBR has moved for Jones' claim to be heard in private arbitration, instead of a public courtroom. It says her employment contract requires it. In arbitration, there is no public record nor transcript of the proceedings, meaning that Jones' claims would not be heard before a judge and jury. Rather, a private arbitrator would decide Jones' case.

However, it's the usual method of operation of KBR, former subidiary of Halliburton where Dick Cheney was the CEO.

Scott Horton at Harper's wrote about the Jamie Leigh Jones case which included this:

"There has not been a single completed prosecution of a crime involving a contractor implicated in violent crime coming out of Iraq, although the reported incidents which would have merited investigation are legion. Again, it is simply impossible to believe that in a community with a peak population of 180,000 people—with many more people than that actually cycling in and out of these jobs, tens of thousands of them Americans—over a period of approaching five years there has been no violent crime. The facts point to something else: an attitude of official indifference within the Department of Justice, or at least a decision to accord these crimes a very low priority and no or very little resources."

As I wrote in a post in January, "Bush and his administration along with his politicized Pentagon don't exactly inspire confidence.  In fact, they don't know what they're doing regarding Iraq except for handing out taxpayers' money to their greedy, stealing, fraud committing corporate cronies under no bid contracts in Iraq, without zero or effective oversight and not answerable to Iraqi law, courtesy of L. Paul Bremer and Order #17." 

"Order 17 stipulated that "Contractors shall be immune from Iraqi legal process with respect to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of a Contract or any sub-contract thereto"  

Lack of any real investigation and legal redress was so bad that, "Last October, the House passed a bill that requires the FBI to investigate allegations of wrongdoing by U.S. contractors and allows them to be tried under American jurisdiction. However, the Senate has not yet taken any action on the measure."

Why in the hell are Halliburton, KBR, and these other criminal war profiteering cronies of Bush and Cheney still contractors for the US government?  These bastards have given our troops dirty water and spoiled food, have cheated American taxpayers, and now have been responsible for suppressing the evidence of violent crimes committed against and judicial recourse for female employees in Iraq.

All this aided and abetted by the worst administration the US has ever had.

And impeachment is still off the table.