Jamie Leigh Jones Wins the Suzanne McDaniel Public Awareness Award

Former KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones is the winner of the Suzanne McDaniel Public Awareness Award. Jones won the award for going public about being raped by fellow KBR employees in Iraq. The media attention helped other women come forward. The horror stories of women being sexually assaulted and harassed revealed a widespread problem.

The award is given by Congress.

Rep. Ted Poe, R-Humble, commended former KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones on Wednesday for going public about an alleged gang rape by colleagues shortly after she arrived in Baghdad to work for the Pentagon's largest military contractor. At a ceremony on Capitol Hill, Jones, 23, received the Suzanne McDaniel Public Awareness Award, named after one of the first prosecutor-based victim advocates in Texas.

Poe, the co-chairman of Congress' Victim's Rights Caucus, helped bring Jones back to the United States after the alleged attack in 2005, following a telephone alert from her father.

The sexual attacks on women have continued after Jones went public in December. Dawn Leamon was anally raped was forced to have oral sex with two men. Incidents like this continue because the Bush administration has no interest in changing the laws governing contractors in Iraq. No contractor serving in Iraq can be prosecuted for a crime. The State Department even went as far as granting immunity to Blackwater personal involved in the shooting incident that killed 17 Iraqi civilians.

Senator Bill Nelson has pressed the White House to prosecute the men involved in the attacks.

``The bottom line,’’ he says, ``is that American women working in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to be assaulted while their assailants continue to go free.”

Administration officials have responded to Nelson by ignoring his information requests. The Justice Department responded to the recent hearing by not sending an attorney to testify on the matter.

It is interesting to note that the Department of Justice has thousands of lawyers," said Poe. "But not one from the barrage of attorneys is here to tell us what, if anything, they are doing. Their absence and silence speaks volumes about the hidden crimes of Iraq."

Ann Friedman makes an astute observation.

All I can think is that if this is the horrible stuff they can get away with doing to female coworkers, imagine what U.S. military contractors have done to Iraqi women. Frankly, it's horrifying.

I rather not imagine. It's too sick.