Too Big To Prosecute?

Jamie Leigh Jones

Well, frumps, another day another little spoonful of insanity. The recent passage of Senator Franken’s amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill 2010 demonstrates, once again, how far the GOP has strayed from the most basic human values in their obsessive zeal to crush the Obama administration and any who support it.

Given the number of GOP sex scandals that have come to light over the past year or so, it is looking like the Party of Family Values may be morphing into The Party of Boys Will Be Boys.
Since the GOP seems to be rather fixated on the doings of gay people in various milieus, maybe it’s just their way of proving they’re not pansies. Who knows?

But during this past week, ultra-conservative GOPers have turned a new corner and, although they are sticking to their guns (literally) on abortion, they have recently signaled a willingness to look the other way on rape because of the potential negative impact on “free markets” if businesses are held accountable for employees who happen to rape fellow employees on their lunch breaks.

The Franken Amendment

Senator Al Franken recently submitted his first piece of legislation in the form of an amendment to Defense Appropriations bill for 2010. Franken’s amendment, in a nutshell, denies federal funding for defense contractors who use mandatory arbitration clauses to deny victims of sexual assault, battery and discrimination the right to bring their case to court.

As Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post noted:

“You’d think that this would be a no-brainer, actually, but that didn’t stop Jeff Sessions from labeling Franken’s effort a “political attack directed at Halliburton.” Franken, of course, pointed out that his amendment would apply broadly, to all contractors, because otherwise, ‘twould be a bill of attainder, right? Right?”

In the end, the Amendment passed easily in a roll-call vote by a 68-30 margin and even managed to score some rare bipartisan support.

Death of Innocence

The story behind the Franken Amendment was that of Jamie Leigh Jones, a nineteen year old, who was attracted by an opportunity to make what sounded like big money, fast, in Iraq working for [defense contractor] KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary. When Jones arrived in-country, she was billeted in a barracks with 400 men. Not so unpredictably, it wasn’t long before sexual harassment started. Jones reported the harassment through the proper channels but KBR did nothing about it and the harassment continued.

In the end, nineteen year old Jamie Leigh Jones was drugged and gang raped and then locked in a shipping container without food or water until she promised she wouldn’t report the incident and threatened her with reprisals if she did. What followed has been a three-year legal saga, here’s a snippet from an excellent article by Stephanie Mencimer which appeared in Mother Jones last month:

“Her (Jones) legal saga started after Halliburton failed to take any action against her alleged attackers, and the Justice Department and military also failed to prosecute. Jones then tried to sue the company for failing to protect her. But thanks to an employment contract created during the tenure of former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney, Jones was forced into mandatory binding arbitration, a private forum where Halliburton would hire the arbitrator, all the proceedings would be secret, and she’d have no right to appeal if she lost.”

“Data from the American Arbitration Association showed that Halliburton won more than 80 percent of its cases in arbitration, and when I looked at the data two years ago, it showed that out of 119 cases Halliburton arbitrated over a four-year period, only three resulted in the employee actually winning any money. The deck was clearly stacked against Jones from day one.”

“After 15 months in arbitration, Jones and her lawyer realized the same thing and went to court to fight the arbitration agreement in the hopes of bringing her case before a jury. Jones argued that the alleged gang rape was not related to her employment and thus, wasn’t covered by the arbitration agreement. Finally, two years later, a federal court has sensibly agreed with her.”

“Tuesday, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2 to 1 ruling, found her alleged injuries were not, in fact, in any way related to her employment and thus, not covered by the contract. One of the judges who ruled in her favor, Rhesa Hawkins Barksdale, is a West Point grad, Vietnam vet, and one of the court’s most conservative members, a sign, perhaps, of just how bad the facts are in this case. It’s a big victory, but a bitter one that shows just how insidious mandatory arbitration is. It’s taken Jones three years of litigation just to get to the point where she can finally sue the people who allegedly wronged her. It will be many more years before she has a shot at any real justice.”

Franken stated that:

“This bill would make it so that anybody in business with the Department of the Defense can’t do this,” he concluded emphatically. “They can’t have mandatory arbitration on issues like assault and battery.”

Here’s a video clip of Jamie Leigh’s testimony before Congress:

Contractors Behaving Badly

Franken’s amendment isn’t a cure-all for some of the out-of-control behavior that has occurred, like the story of Jamie Leigh Jones, but it is a good start at pushing greater accountability on the defense contractors who are happy to collect our tax dollars while, at the same time, creating an environment in which anything goes and little of it receives any attention unless others somehow expose what’s happened.

We’ve all heard some of the horror stories surrounding various defense contractors involved in the Iraq and Afghan military engagements, and I’m sure that we haven’t heard the last. These 21st century “wars” are far more mercenary than any American wars prior to this. Introducing a greater profit motive into warfare has about the same negative effect that it does on, say . . . heath care.

There are a small number of very fringe, very bad players attracted to serving in mercenary “armies” – that’s nothing new. Defense contractors supposedly weed the bad guys out before they are unleashed on our troops. Yesterday I posted a story on Combat Support Associates, a defense contractor in Kuwait, that hired a former Blackwater employee who was looking for employment because he was under investigation for murdering a security guard attached to the Iraqi vice-president. CSA claimed that they didn’t catch anything unusual on the employees background check. So much for screening . . .

So it is not beyond the realm of comprehension that there is a potential, in that population, for things to get radically out of hand ala Blackwater, Halliburton/KBR, Wackenhut, etc. This war has been host to alleged random murders, group sex abuse orgies and other documented cases of exceptionally bad behavior

So who could possibly vote against a piece of legislation that at least attempts to protect those doing hazardous duty from being victimized by their own colleagues?

Well, actually, these Senators did just that (compliments of Huffington Post):

Alexander (R-TN)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burr (R-NC)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Graham (R-SC)
Gregg (R-NH)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
Kyl (R-AZ)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Risch (R-ID)
Roberts (R-KS)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)
Wicker (R-MS)
Notice the little “R” for Republican in the parentheses after their names? That, of course, means that these are esteemed Senators of the GOP. All four female Republican senators joined the Democrats and voted for the amendment.

These Republican men evidently don’t feel that rape deserves all of this attention. Our tax dollars pay for their salaries (and their health care) and any of the projects that they choose to carry out. I would love to see every American taxpayer in the land, print out this list, pin it to their bulletin boards and remember those names. The next time you see any of those names on a ballot or a campaign sticker or a fund-raising letter keep in mind what those people stand for (or better yet, what the don’t stand for) and ask yourself if they deserve any control over how your tax dollars are spent in the future.

Technorati Tags: Halliburton, KBR, Jamie Leigh Jones, Sen. Al Franken, 2010 Defense Appropriations bill, gang rape, manditory arbitration, GOP, Republicans