The Texas Girl Muhammad Al-Ohaideb • Al-Riyadh
After so much was written in the American media regarding the Qatif girl who was sentenced by a Saudi court to 200 lashes and six months in prison, the case of a Texas woman, who was gang-raped by her American coworkers in Baghdad, was covered up by the company she worked for and also by the US government.
Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, said that several men at a camp in the Green Zone in Baghdad raped her and that her company, Halliburton, then put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she would lose her job.
In a lawsuit filed in a US federal court against the company, and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water.
During that time, she says, the company posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave. Jones described the container as furnished, with a bed, a table and a lamp.
After she convinced a sympathetic guard to lend her a cell phone, she managed to call her father in Texas. Her father informed their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, who managed to get her back to Texas. The US Department of Justice abandoned Jones and did not assign a lawyer to defend her. She failed to receive justice in her case and so tried to contact and convince Halliburton. However, the company did not pay attention to her case. American companies that work in cooperation with the US Army in Iraq ask their workers to sign undertakings never to sue their employers. So much for American democracy and justice.
When Jones felt she had reached a dead end, she approached the media and was again abandoned and marginalized except for a short interview with ABC News that forced the company to distribute a letter, signed by Halliburton’s chairman and executive director, stating that they did not agree with what Jones had alleged.
Since the attacks, Jones has established a nonprofit foundation called the Jamie Leigh Foundation, which is dedicated to helping victims who are raped or sexually assaulted overseas while working for government contractors or other corporations. I believe that our media outlets must take advantage of this case to convince Americans that their media and their justice system are abusing them daily, if not every minute.