KBR, Sensenbrenner, and what time will tell

by bert

12/19/07 UPDATE: Ms. Jones testified today at the hearing of the subcommittee of which Congressman Sensenbrenner is a member. Sensenbrenner failed to attend that hearing, and has made no statement on this issue. I applaud the courage of Jamie Leigh Jones.

Speaking as a resident of the district of the Honorable Jim Sensenbrenner, I want to see over the next week or so if he is willing to to carry out the job he is paid to do. Will he play a visible role in responding to the rape case involving a military contractor in Iraq? Or will he stick to his playbook, keep his head down when it comes to the Bush administration’s outrages in the name of fighting terror, and work at nothing except obstructing Democrats in Congress?

Because this story involves sex and a pretty face, I believe that most people have or will soon hear from our news media about this particular outrage, even if most outrages spawned by the Iraq War remain underreported.

Jamie Leigh Jones alleges that fellow employees of the defense contractor KBR (formerly the Halliburton subsidiary) gang-raped her vaginally and anally in Baghdad in July, 2005. Two years later and nothing has been done. Her story, now part of a federal lawsuit, goes on to recount that when she reported the rape, KBR bosses ordered her confined under guard and warned her against reporting the attack.

She claims she was finally rescued from her employers' captivity after a sympathetic guard lent a phone to her that she used to call her father in Texas. A republican congressman, the Honorable Ted Poe, contacted the State Department, which is the agency that hired KBR. Another woman employee of KBR says that such abuse and harassment is a widespread problem.

KBR’s executives sent a message late this week claiming that Jones lied. The State Department says it lost the “rape kit” of physical evidence that medical authorities who examined Jones gave to KBR.

We know from the impeachment of Bill Clinton that Congressman Sensenbrenner is capable of moral outrage when members of our government cross sexual borders. Will he support a search for truth here and acknowledge wrongdoing if it is substantiated?

I am not hopeful. The Honorable Mr. Sensenbrenner tends these days to duck his head when his legislative-branch duty calls to act as a balance to the unhinged power of the executive branch. That’s because the executive is run by a Republican, so Sensenbrenner’s duty cuts into his ability to indulge his real love (no, not foreign junkets): party politics.

Sensenbrenner seemingly hid during a similar crisis earlier this fall. In early October Congress tardily took up the looming question of the role of military contractors, pushed into action by the Blackwater Inc. security workers who massacred 17 civilians in Baghdad in September and then drove away. The evidence condemning Blackwater’s behavior is solid, and even the war-loving politicians and pundits have chosen silence on this one rather than defend Blackwater.

So as Congress reacted by again proposing a bill to make such contractors subject to criminal prosecution, I called Sensenbrenner’s D.C. office, as a constituent. I wanted information on Sensenbrenner’s position on the question of whether these government workers should be immune from any punishment. I specifically asked the aide named Josh to have someone tell me what Sensenbrenner’s position was. Nothing came to me by phone or mail.

Through my own research, I found that Sensenbrenner ultimately voted Oct. 4 with many other republicans for the bill, H.R. 2740, that would subject contractors to criminal laws. He had voted two days earlier against “consideration” of that bill. I am not sure what that means about his real position. I guess I never will, no thanks to his office in my district that I help to pay for.

Sensenbrenner’s own Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing Wednesday on the rape allegations by Jamie Leigh Jones. Sensenbrenner’s colleagues in Congress had early last week issued press releases calling for an investigation. Notwithstanding, the case of Jamie Leigh Jones never came up when Charlie Sykes “interviewed” Sensenbrenner on his WTMJ radio show last Thursday. In fact – get this – the Iraq war as a whole never came up. Instead we got silence on the issue.

At those upcoming hearings Sensenbrenner has the chance to show that his political motives stop somewhere short of utter moral vacuity. I expect him to work actively and visibly to get to the bottom of this case.

Iraqi PM Maliki is an anti-American marxist droolbucket

by folkbum

(Note the UPDATE below--apparently repeated references in the interview cited below to Obama, timetables, and withdrawal were all "mistranslated." Or something.)

Or so it would seem from Nouri al-Maliki's statements:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki supports US presidential candidate Barack Obama's plan to withdraw US troops from Iraq within 16 months. When asked in and interview with SPIEGEL when he thinks US troops should leave Iraq, Maliki responded "as soon as possible, as far as we are concerned." He then continued: "US presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."

Maliki was careful to back away from outright support for Obama. "Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans' business," he said. But then, apparently referring to Republican candidate John McCain's more open-ended Iraq policy, Maliki said: "Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems."

Anytime anyone on the American left (or, increasingly, in the American center--for that matter, even on the American center-right) suggests a time-table or a definite date by which US troops should be home safe in their beds instead of being electrocuted by KBR, we get called all kinds of vile names, such as those you see in the title of this post. (I am afraid to look at the conservative blogs for fear of learning that I have inadvertently copied one of them.) We'll see if Our Man in Baghdad suffers the same fate.

What I quoted here is not the worst of it, for McCain:

Maliki has long shown impatience with the open-ended presence of US troops in Iraq. In his conversation with SPIEGEL, he was once again candid about his frustration over the Bush administration's hesitancy about agreeing to a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops. But he did say he was optimistic that such a schedule would be drawn up before Bush leaves the White House next January -- a confidence that appeared justified following Friday's joint announcement in Baghdad and Washington that Bush has now, for the first time, spoken of "a general time horizon" for moving US troops out of Iraq.

"So far the Americans have had trouble agreeing to a concrete timetable for withdrawal, because they feel it would appear tantamount to an admission of defeat," Maliki told SPIEGEL. "But that isn't the case at all. If we come to an agreement, it is not evidence of a defeat, but of a victory, of a severe blow we have inflicted on al-Qaida and the militias."

Perhaps you haven't noticed, but only one (increasingly small) side in this argument has been saying all along that leaving, or even setting a time to leave, is admitting defeat. I'll probably be told that in comments. I look forward to it, almost.

I predict one or both of the following to happen in the next week: 1) Nouri al-Maliki will suddenly not be the Iraqi Prime Minister any more; and 2) Barack Obama, if he meets with (Obama-supporter-lite) Maliki in Iraq on the trip Obama's currently taking to Europe and the Middle East, will be accused of treason by the right. They will demand, as they did to Nancy Pelosi, that he be arrested for conducting foreign policy without permission from the president.

UPDATE: After a panicky White House accidentally emailed its entire distribution list the text of the Reuters story about Maliki's statements, they must have settled on a strategy: The United States Central Command (CentCom) issued a statement from a Dr. Ali al-Dabbagh saying, "Prime Minister Maliki's statement was 'misunderstood and mistranslated' and 'not conveyed accurately regarding the vision of Senator Barack Obama, U.S. presidential candidate, on the timeframe for U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq.'"

This is at least the second time in recent weeks that Maliki has explicitly called for a timetable for withdrawal of US troops and the US then walked back his statement:

BAGHDAD July 7, 2008, 11:17 pm ET · Iraq's prime minister said Monday his country wants some type of timetable for a withdrawal of American troops included in the deal the two countries are negotiating. [. . .] The White House said it did not believe al-Maliki was proposing a rigid timeline for U.S. troop withdrawals.

Anyway, I guess we have to believe the new version of the story that Maliki's multiple references to Obama, to "those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq" and so forth in Der Spiegel were "mistranslated."

As Josh Marshall wryly notes (from the second link of the update): "I'm learning that it's very difficult to translate the nuances of the Arabic of Iraqi leaders when they're speaking at variance with the talking points of the Bush White House. Language is a funny thing."