HILL BRIEFS

Iraq Horror Stories Aired To Senate Subcommittee

Thu. Apr. 10, 2008


An Illinois woman who says she was raped while working for a contractor in Iraq recounted the experience Wednesday at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations International Operations Subcommittee. A woman who made similar allegations before Congress last year listened and fought back tears, the Associated Press reported.

Dawn Leamon of Lena, Ill. said she was working as a paramedic for Service Employees International Inc., a foreign subsidiary of KBR Inc., at Camp Harper near Basra, Iraq, when she was sodomized and forced to have oral sex by a soldier and a co-worker.

The alleged attack occurred just two months after Jamie Leigh Jones, formerly of Conroe, Texas, told a House committee in December that she was raped by KBR/Halliburton co-workers and held for a day in a shipping container after reporting the 2005 assault.

Jones wiped away tears as Leamon and a third woman, Mary Beth Keniston, spoke at Wednesday’s hearing, called by International Operations Subcommittee Chairman Bill Nelson, D-Fla. Keniston, of Ohio, said she was assaulted in 2004 while working as a truck driver with her husband for KBR in Iraq.

Nelson said at least three laws give the Justice Department authority to prosecute such cases. “We have an unprecedented number of contractors posted in war zones and if they are victimized by their colleagues or by soldiers, the concern of this committee is they end up in legal limbo,” Nelson said.

Thu. Apr. 10, 2008