Dick Must Be So Proud

Just how need-a-ladder-to-reach-a-snake's-belly low is Dick Cheney's douchebag corporation KBR?

So low it is attacking the employee it imprisoned after allowing her to be gang-raped with the old she-asked-for-it defense.

Karen Houppert in The Nation:

Five years after alerting authorities that she was gang-raped in Iraq, KBR/Halliburton employee Jamie Leigh Jones will finally get her day in court.

On Wednesday, after fighting tooth-and-nail in the lower courts to keep the case from going to trial, KBR announced that it was dropping its Supreme Court appeal in the case. (The company actually withdrew its petition to the court on March 11, according to KBR spokesperson Heather Browne. This was less than two weeks after it was awarded a new $2.3 billion logistics contract by the Army.) Jones, who says she was raped by coworkers and then imprisoned in a shipping container for three days by KBR staffers who wanted to keep her complaint quiet, had been barred from pursuing her sexual harassment case in the courts by a provision in her employee contract: The fine print said all such issues must be resolved via the company's own binding arbitration process.

SNIP

Does this mean KBR is graciously giving up on the Jones case?

No way.

The company seems to be laying the groundwork for a battle that must now take place publicly, in the courts, by invoking that old she-wanted-it canard. In a document posted on the company's website, KBR, after first stating "it would be inappropriate to comment on the specifics of the case," goes on to do just that: A firefighter accused of raping Jones says it was "consensual sex," KBR states. And get this: "several witnesses present at the social gathering outside the barracks observed her having several drinks and flirting" with the firefighter.

Read the whole thing.

Any trial judge who permits even a hint of that antediluvian bullshit should be impeached. Let's hope Dick's little company baby is stupid enough to try it, and as punishment the judge slaps them with a punitive judgment of, oh, say five, six, maybe a nice even $10 billion.

And shame on Barack Obama's Department of Defense for giving these fuckers a thin dime in tax dollars.