After following the horrific story of Jamie Leigh Jones, reading and hearing of the Franken Amendment, and the 30 senators who voted against it, I thought I’d heard it all, but several of the stories have disappeared from the websites that bloggers had linked to.
Last year, Jamie Leigh Jones, 22, a KBR employee who says she was drugged and brutally raped by several male KBR employees two years earlier, sued the company (and Halliburton, KBR’s parent company until last year) for, among other things, trying to cover-up the incident. One thing KBR officials did, she says, after she woke up bleeding, was sequester her in a shipping container, telling her if she left Iraq for medical treatment she’d be fired. It was only after she was able to convince a guard to let her use his cell phone to call her father at home in Texas that he intervened by calling the State Dept, and she was able to get out.
One response from KBR was to ban employees from carrying cell phones. Their claim is that it is a security concern. While searching for the stories confirming this, they have all seemed to disappear.
CNN.com turns up a page not found.
The examiner returns a 404. When trying to do a search on the site, there is only one result. It, too, is empty, stating, “There is no content to display for the current topic at this time.”
The story can be found at the Canada Free Press website. It links to a different web address on CNN’s site.
A KBR employee, who asked to remain anonymous, said he was “not aware of any security breaches involving the use of cell phones” and that employees were not given any reason for the order.
He said he has no plans to comply and believes his personal security would be at risk without his cell phone.
If there hadn’t been any security breaches, why did they institute the policy? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the reason. If there was, indeed, such an imminent danger to US citizens in Iraq, the cell phone ban would affect civilian and military personnel. It doesn’t. And it’s strange that the ban went into effect shortly after Ms. Jones was able to call her father back home in America.
Finding links to these articles shouldn’t be so difficult, especially a year after the news reports. It’s just a bit suspicous when foreign web sites readily have the articles, while American sources seem to have disappeared.
