Did the employment contract mention gang rape? Criminal acts violate the terms - that should be null and void.

How about if she were murdered - then would the victim's family have to 'arbitrate'?

It's all of a piece though - mercenaries outside of the reach of law - then the lawlessness within the mercenaries - why should it surprise us?

Karen Houppert
Editor's Note: Lisa Smith is a pseudonym used on request. Additional reporting by Te-Ping Chen. Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.

It was an early January morning in 2008 when 42-year-old Lisa Smith*, a paramedic for a defense contractor in southern Iraq, woke up to find her entire room shaking. The shipping container that served as her living quarters was reverberating from nearby rocket attacks, and she was jolted awake to discover an awful reality. "Right then my whole life was turned upside down," she says.

What follows is the story she told me on Monday in a lengthy, painful on-the-record interview, conducted in a lawyer's office in Houston, Texas, while she was back from Iraq on a brief leave this week.

That dawn, naked, covered in blood and feces, bleeding from her anus, she found a US soldier she did not know lying naked in the bed next to her: his gun lay on the floor beside the bed, she could not rouse him and all she could remember of the night before was screaming and screaming as the soldier anally penetrated her while a colleague who worked for defense contractor KBR held her hand--but instead of helping her, as she had hoped, he jammed his penis in her mouth.

Over the next few weeks Smith would be told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor. The camp's military liaison officer also told her not to speak about what had happened, she says. And she would follow these instructions. "Because then, all of a sudden, if you've done exactly what you've been instructed not to do--tell somebody--then you're in danger," Smith says.

As a brand-new arrival at Camp Harper, she had not yet forged many connections and was working in a red zone under regular rocket fire alongside the very men who had participated in the attack. (At one point, as the sole medical provider, she was even forced to treat one of her alleged assailants for a minor injury.) She waited two and a half weeks, until she returned to a much larger facility, to report the incident. "It's very easy for bad things to happen down there and not have it be even slightly suspicious."

Over the next month and a half, she says, she faced a series of hurdles. She would be discouraged from reporting the incident by several KBR employees, she says. She would be confused by the lack of any written medical protocol for sexual assault (as the only medical person on site, she treated herself with doxycycline). She would wander through a tangled maze of interviews with KBR and Army investigators about the incident without any clear explanation of her rights. She would be asked to sign several documents agreeing not to publicly discuss the incident, she says. She describes having her computer--which she saw as her lifeline, her main access to the outside world--confiscated by KBR staff as "evidence" within hours of receiving her first e-mail from a stateside lawyer she had reached out to for help.

And eventually she would find herself temporarily assigned to sleeping quarters between two Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) officials, who, she says, assured her that it was for her own safety, since her alleged assailants were at the same camp for questioning; they roamed freely. When she wanted to move about the camp to get meals etc., she was escorted.

Smith felt very alone. But she was not.

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Jamie Leigh Jones’s and Dawn Leamon's story was covered on DigitalJournal.com here by Pamela Jean and here by David Silverberg.

In a follow-up to that coverage, the abused employees have filed lawsuits against both KBR and Halliburton. Depsite raising many public complaints, and getting a great deal of media attention on her case, Jones has not received any fair judgement on her claims of rape. So now, Jones is suing the government to get justice. KBR is a subsidiary of Halliburton, and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney is a shareholder in it.

When she worked with KBR in July 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones lived in a two-story barracks with 420 men and only 20 other women. She claims the facility she lived in was under direct control and supervision of the U.S. government and its employees. Jones says she was brutally raped and she complained to her supervisors about constant sexual harassment. She wanted to transfer to a safe environment, but nothing was done by KBR.

On the same day she complained to her supervisors, she says she was drugged and brutally raped by several Halliburton/KBR firefighters. She woke up the next morning bruised and bloodied. She had to undergo reconstructive surgery after the incident and she is still recovering from the injuries.

In the lawsuit, Jones is suing the government for negligent supervision and hiring of its contractors, and for failing to provide a safe living and working environment for women.

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