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KBR, the defense contractor doing a lot of heavy lifting in the upholding of our occupation of Iraq, has banned the use of personal cell phones by its employees. KBR and its previous parent company Halliburton are notorious for many things. One of those things is the rape and cover up of rape committed by its male employees against its female employees.

How are the two related? Well, the first and most widely-known woman to come forward with an allegation of rape and cover up is Jamie Leigh Jones. Jones was gang raped by her coworkers, then locked inside of a shipping container for days in order to prevent her from reporting the attack. The Justice Department never brought charges against her assailants, and extremely important evidence in the case was “lost” by KBR. But the relevant part is how Jones escaped: through the use of a cell phone. A “sympathetic guard” loaned the phone to her, which she used to call her father in the United States. Her father subsequently called his congressperson, who ended up securing Jones’ release. If that “sympathetic guard” (you know, the one who didn’t set her free) hadn’t handed her that cell phone, god only knows where Jamie Leigh Jones would be today. But it just might not be alive, let alone acting as a major anti-rape and anti-KBR activist.

So. KBR employee is raped by her coworkers and then kidnapped and held prisoner. Employee secures her release through use of a personal cell phone. KBR doesn’t really give a shit about any of it. Employee makes a lot of noise about the incident, making KBR look really bad, even if not actually impacting the company financially. KBR bans personal cell phone use.

Now, whether or not Jones’ case and the number of similar allegations of rape and cover up that have come to light directly led to the ban of cell phones, we do not know. KBR isn’t talking, and only says that the ban is related to “a safety and security concern.”

But clearly, the safety and security of its female employees is not a concern. Maybe there was a valid safety and security concern that led to the ban. Or maybe “safety and security concern” means “the safety and security of our government contracts and image.” Looking at KBR’s long, repulsive history in this area, I tend to lean towards the latter, and I’m far from being the only one.

But let’s assume for a moment that KBR’s decision to ban cell phones has absolutely nothing to do with Jones’ case and others like it. Let’s be extraordinarily generous and pretend that their goal is not to prevent more rape victims from reporting the attacks perpetrated against them or speaking to loved ones about their rapes and rapists. Doesn’t matter. Even if KBR was not intentionally trying to stifle rape victims and put them in even more danger, I don’t give a shit, because that’s the end result we’re looking at. It will give the large number of victims one less recourse to ensure their safety. It will further isolate them from everyone outside of the company, leaving them with little to no support in a hostile climate. And it will embolden rapists within KBR, as if they needed that extra help. At this point, Jamie Leigh Jones’ story is well-known, and one has to assume that this is particularly the case within KBR. What exactly is stopping rapists from trying the whole thing all over again — now that they know there will be no real consequences for their actions, and even if their were, they’re now less likely to get caught in the first place?

If nothing else, best case scenario, this move shows KBR’s incredibly callousness towards rape survivors, its indifference if not promotion of its corporate rape culture, and its total obliviousness to the consequences of its own actions.

But KBR long ago gave up its right to be given the benefit of the doubt. So I still think it shows that when it comes to rape cover up, KBR knows what the hell it’s doing, and knows that no one will even bother trying to stop them.

Thanks to SunlessNick for the links.

cross-posted at the Curvature

Though not surprising, this is incredibly disturbing — and indicative of yet another failure of a lazy corporate media and a twisted, absolutist government that seems to be taking its cues from fascist regimes:

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

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Is basically summed up in this comment to a story on another KBR rape case:

If we can look the other way while female “employees” are raped, why can’t we open gov’t funed bordellos, get the whole thing out in the open, and then look the other way. That, in and of itself, would be the greatest protection for those females hoping to take advantage of the lucrative oportunities available to them in the war zone, while at the same time creating another lucrative oportunity for the women who want to make money in the sex trade. Simple solution. Police the approved houses of ilrepute, give the whores medical attention, and away we go.

There’s a great solution: Instead of actually doing anything about rapists, let’s give them Iraqi women to rape and call it “sex work.”

(And before anyone says that I’m equating prostitution with rape, my point is that the Americans in Iraq who are raping their fellow employees are looking to rape — that is, to hurt women sexually. Offering up a house full of Iraqi women isn’t going to turn them into kind and thoughtful johns. I suspect the commenter know this, and just doesn’t care).

This is just another in a line of allegations that American mercenaries and military men are sexually assaulting their own. What’s astounding isn’t just that it’s happening, but the arrogance that it’s happening with — the American rapists in Iraq are confident that they can get away with it. And if prosecutions of soldiers and defense contractors are any indication, they can.

And if defense contractors and soldiers think that they can get away with doing this to American women, imagine what’s happening to Iraqi women.

A heart-wrenching, must-read piece.

Our media covers the deaths of American soldiers fairly regularly — but we don’t often hear about the tens of thousands of Iraqis who we’ve murdered. Nine-year-old Ali was only one of them. And because we’re tired of hearing about Iraq — I’m tired of hearing about Iraq — I can’t help but feel a little bit complicit in this.

Ezra says it perfectly, so I’m just going to quote him in full:

This really seems to be the difference between liberals and neoconservatives on foreign policy, doesn’t it? Neocons envision a near-static population of terrorists, and prescribe an aggressive policy of killing them in order to rid the world of terrorism. Liberals see a dynamic population of terrorists and prescribe broad policies meant to blunt their popular appeal and deprive them of public support. Neocons looks at the liberal prescription and say, essentially, “you’re not killing enough of them.” And liberals look at the Neocons and, aghast, say, “stop making so many more.”

-87: The percentage of Afghan women who report suffering physical abuse, half of which is sexual.
-60: The percentage of marriages in Afghanistan that are forced.
-57: The percentage of Afghan brides who are under the age of 16.
-88: The illiteracy rate amongst Afghan women.
-5: The percentage of Afghan girls attending secondary school.
-1 in 9: The number of women in Afghanistan who die in childbirth — that’s the highest in the world, alongside Sierra Leone.
-1 Million: The number of Afghan widows who have no rights, including no right to work — leaving them to beg on the street.
-£800 to £2,000: The price of a child bride if Afghanistan.

And Afghanistan is the only country where the suicide rate is higher for women than for men.

Just a few things to think about today, and every time you hear politicians talk about how we “liberated” Afghanistan and Afghan women.

When the Bush administration was gearing up to invade Iraq, the plight of Muslim women was used as one of a handful of human rights justifications for war. They conveniently conflated “Muslim women” with “women in Afghanistan living under the Taliban,” and most Americans seemed to be under the impression that Iraqi women were roundly oppressed. In fact, women in Iraq had more rights under Saddam Hussein than they do under the current Iraqi constitution. I’m no Saddam apologist, and I don’t think that women’s rights are particularly grand achievements when human rights are virtually non-existent. However, we can’t ignore the fact that women in Iraq are inarguably worse off now than they were before we showed up.

The images in the Basra police file are nauseating: Page after page of women killed in brutal fashion — some strangled to death, their faces disfigured; others beheaded. All bear signs of torture.

The women are killed, police say, because they failed to wear a headscarf or because they ignored other “rules” that secretive fundamentalist groups want to enforce.

“Fear, fear is always there,” says 30-year-old Safana, an artist and university professor. “We don’t know who to be afraid of. Maybe it’s a friend or a student you teach. There is no break, no security. I don’t know who to be afraid of.”

Her fear is justified. Iraq’s second-largest city, Basra, is a stronghold of conservative Shia groups. As many as 133 women were killed in Basra last year — 79 for violation of “Islamic teachings” and 47 for so-called honor killings, according to IRIN, the news branch of the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

One glance through the police file is enough to understand the consequences. Basra’s police chief, Gen. Abdul Jalil Khalaf, flips through the file, pointing to one unsolved case after another.

“I think so far, we have been unable to tackle this problem properly,” he says. “There are many motives for these crimes and parties involved in killing women, by strangling, beheading, chopping off their hands, legs, heads.”

“When I came to Basra a year ago,” he says, “two women were killed in front of their kids. Their blood was flowing in front of their kids, they were crying. Another woman was killed in front of her 6-year-old son, another in front of her 11-year-old child, and yet another who was pregnant.”

The killers enforcing their own version of Islamic justice are rarely caught, while women live in fear.

Boldly splattered in red paint just outside the main downtown market, a chilling sign reads: “We warn against not wearing a headscarf and wearing makeup. Those who do not abide by this will be punished. God is our witness, we have notified you.”

Women in Afghanistan — you know, the ones we liberated from the burqa — aren’t doing much better. Women’s rights leaders have been murdered. Girls in school are prime targets for religious fundamentalists. And fundamentalist religious groups are taking hold of large parts of the country.

Three cheers for “liberation.”

Moving this up to the top because the book comes out today and it’s fabulous. Go get it. Really, go now! You can read an excerpt here. And more on the book from AJ himself here. Order it on Amazon by clicking the image below. -ed

I don’t do book reviews as often as I’d like, mostly because I don’t get around to reading non-law books as often as I’d like. But it’s something we’re going to start doing more often at Feministe. We’re also working on developing some sort of books section of the site to post reviews and thoughts; in the meantime, if you scroll down a bit, there’s a red Amazon box on the middle column of the site that has some of our book recommendations. We selected them ourselves, so it’s not an Amazon-bot or anything, and they do all come highly recommended. Please check them out.

I did get around to reading the book Still Broken: A Recruit’s Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagonby AmericaBlogger AJ Rossmiller. Quick full disclosure: AJ is a friend in real life, and he gave me a copy of the book. That said, he made it very clear that there were no strings attached, and no obligation to review it or even read it. I did read it, but had decided beforehand that if I didn’t like it, I simply wouldn’t write about it. I ended up really liking it, though, so here we are. He also tried to buy an ad on the site; because I’m reviewing the book, I rejected payment on that ad, which should be going up tomorrow (in other words, no one here made any money off of it). So, while AJ is a friend and while there will be an ad for the book on this site, this review is neither a favor nor an obligation nor something I have any financial interest in doing. Ok? Ok.

Still Broken is described as “a riveting and sobering portrait of Bush-era intelligence failures and manipulations, laid out by someone who witnessed them up close and personal.” While “riveting and sobering” certainly apply, I would suggest that it’s more along the lines of “infuriating,” “mind-boggling” and “thoroughly depressing” — and simultaneously wry, engaging and easily readable.

AJ graduated from Middlebury College having studied political science with a focus on the Middle East, always with the goal of working in intelligence. The events of September 11, 2001 were, for him, a call to action, and after graduating college he decided to go to work for the Department of Defense, despite his general opposition to the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. AJ and I aren’t exactly politically in line — at least from the book, he comes across as far more moderate than I am* (I don’t know whether that’s accurate in “real life” or not, as our written presentations of our ideas are rarely comprehensive) — but he is is exactly the kind of person that I would want in the Pentagon and on the ground in Iraq. He’s smart, well-versed in Middle East politics, patriotic, passionate, honest, brave, hard-working and endearingly idealistic. He is also more interested in doing his job well, gathering accurate intelligence and protecting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians than he is in pushing a particular agenda or ideology. While he makes it clear that those characteristics are extremely common amongst his co-workers and military personnel, the chain of command in the Defense Intelligence Agency manages to pervert and compromise good intel work on every level — often with disastrous results.
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WASHINGTON - A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks….

The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.

Big question is, what the hell took so long to do this study?

Or, “There’s nothing that can’t be blamed on Mexicans.”

DES MOINES — Mike Huckabee used the volatile situation in Pakistan Friday to make an argument for building a fence on the American border with Mexico and found himself trying to explain a series of remarks about Pakistanis and their nation.

On Thursday night he told reporters in Orlando, Fla.: “We ought to have an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there’s any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country.”

On Friday, in Pella, Iowa, he expanded on those remarks.

“When I say single them out I am making the observation that we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities except those immediately south of the border,” he told reporters in Pella. “And in light of what is happening in Pakistan it ought to give us pause as to why are so many illegals coming across these borders.”

In fact, far more illegal immigrants come from the Philippines, Korea, China and Vietnam, according to recent estimates from the Department of Homeland Security.

Asked how a border fence would help keep out Pakistani immigrants, Mr. Huckabee argued that airplane security was already strong, but that security at the southern United States border was dangerously weak.

“The fact is that the immigration issue is not so much about people coming to pick lettuce or make beds, it’s about someone coming with a shoulder-fired missile,” he said.

Yeah, all those people crawling across the Sonoran desert in the 120-degree heat are really Pakistani terrorists armed with shoulder-launched RPGs and anti-aircraft missiles. Be sure to check the maid for plastique, and make sure the gardener isn’t putting in land mines.

Dipshit.