The Rapists at Halliburton
#1
Halliburton raped the country when their stock rose astronomically with no-bid government contracts.
#2
A US woman who said she was raped by US contractors in Iraq testified in Congress on Wednesday, telling legislators that she was kept under armed guard in her trailer after reporting the incident.
Jamie Leigh Jones, now 23, said that she was gang raped inside the Baghdad Green Zone in July 2005 while she was working for the Halliburton subsidiary KBR Inc, which has support contracts with the US military.
The US Department of Justice failed to send an attorney to the House of Representatives sub-committee hearing, which Democrat John Conyers blasted as "outrageous" and "unacceptable."
Jones told committee members that on her fourth day in Baghdad some co-workers, who she described as Halliburton-KBR firefighters, invited her for a drink. "I took two sips from the drink and don't remember anything after that," she said.
The next morning Jones woke up groggy and confused, and with a sore chest and blood between her legs. She reported the incident to KBR and was examined by an army doctor, who confirmed she had been repeatedly raped vaginally and anally.
The doctor took photographs, made notes, and handed all the evidence over to KBR personnel.
"The KBR security then took me to a trailer and then locked me in a room with two armed guards outside my door," Jones testified. "I was imprisoned in the trailer for approximately a day. One of the guards finally had mercy and let me use a phone."
Jones called her father in Texas, who called his representative in Congress, Republican Ted Poe. Poe contacted the State Department, who quickly sent personnel to rescue Jones and flew her back to Texas.
The rape was so brutal she is still undergoing reconstructive surgery, Jones said.
-Woman testifies she was raped by US contractors in Iraq -
#1
Halliburton raped the country when their stock rose astronomically with no-bid government contracts.
#2
A US woman who said she was raped by US contractors in Iraq testified in Congress on Wednesday, telling legislators that she was kept under armed guard in her trailer after reporting the incident.
Jamie Leigh Jones, now 23, said that she was gang raped inside the Baghdad Green Zone in July 2005 while she was working for the Halliburton subsidiary KBR Inc, which has support contracts with the US military.
The US Department of Justice failed to send an attorney to the House of Representatives sub-committee hearing, which Democrat John Conyers blasted as "outrageous" and "unacceptable."
Jones told committee members that on her fourth day in Baghdad some co-workers, who she described as Halliburton-KBR firefighters, invited her for a drink. "I took two sips from the drink and don't remember anything after that," she said.
The next morning Jones woke up groggy and confused, and with a sore chest and blood between her legs. She reported the incident to KBR and was examined by an army doctor, who confirmed she had been repeatedly raped vaginally and anally.
The doctor took photographs, made notes, and handed all the evidence over to KBR personnel.
"The KBR security then took me to a trailer and then locked me in a room with two armed guards outside my door," Jones testified. "I was imprisoned in the trailer for approximately a day. One of the guards finally had mercy and let me use a phone."
Jones called her father in Texas, who called his representative in Congress, Republican Ted Poe. Poe contacted the State Department, who quickly sent personnel to rescue Jones and flew her back to Texas.
The rape was so brutal she is still undergoing reconstructive surgery, Jones said.
-Woman testifies she was raped by US contractors in Iraq -
On the National Affront
An inescapable year reaches its inevitable conclusion
By Barry Crimmins
An inescapable year reaches its inevitable conclusion
By Barry Crimmins
Could 2007 somehow have been avoided? Where does one begin to recap 12 months of such willful self-parody? Isn't it insulting to explain why, say, waterboarding is wrong, especially when one of the few people who needs this clarified is the new attorney general of the United States?
Corporate and political hoodlums spent the year doing three things: planning crimes, committing crimes, and covering up crimes. If this is news to you, no summary will bring you up to speed. So here are just some highlights of 2007, because it would be cruel and indecent to make you remember it all.
Unreal estate
This past year excised at least one bromide from motivational speakers rusty-saw collection that is, unless they shift gears on the fly and start telling us that whatever doesn't kill us only serves to make us weaker. Clearly, if you're reading this, you like a few million other schmos just trying to keep body and soul in proximity survived, despite being sandwiched between poverty and the evermore obscenely wealthy cadre of oligarchs who create it.
Americans still dream in dollar signs, but the super rich lack the conscience to dream at all. So the rest of us ended up scrambling after a monetary unit that is no longer the envy of even Canadians. A land of people who once had good jobs with good benefits has now become a place where corporate behemoths slowly squeeze us for everything that was ours including our very homes.
Mortgages too good to be true, peddled by swindlers too bad to be truthful, led to domiciles being repossessed like there was no tomorrow for the people living in them, anyway. How were you to know that, when you mortgaged your soul to a predatory lender, it would end up being owned by Bob Jones University?
If the credit hustlers didn't dispossess us, we still had to worry about having a health-care racketeer tell us that our home, when liquidated, should be enough to cover the co-pay for our first course of meds. The most important American film of 2007 was Michael Moore's Sicko, a work so entertainingly stark that it left us blankly grinning at the boundless inhumanity of corporate avarice.
Read the rest here.
404 moment - New Medical Slang
DOCTORS have always used a tribal vocabulary to communicate between themselves, but now their secret lingo is been enriched by the electronic media and urban slang.
Paul Keeley, a consultant in the department of palliative medicine at Glasgow Royal Infirmary in Scotland wrote to the weekly British Medical Journal a sample of new words that British doctors use among themselves.
They include:
- Disco biscuits: The clubbers' drug ecstasy. As in: "The man in cubicle three looks like he's taken one too many disco biscuits.''
- Hasselhoff: Term for any patient who shows up in the emergency room with an injury for which there is a bizarre explanation. Source: Baywatch actor David Hasselhoff, who hit his head on a chandelier while shaving. The broken glass severed four tendons and and an artery in his right arm.
- Agnostication: A substitute for prognostication. Term used to the describe the usually vain attempt to answer the question: "How long have I got, doc?''
- Blamestorming: Apportioning of blame after the wrong leg or kidney is removed or some other particularly egregious foul-up happens.
- 404 moment: The point in a doctor's ward round when medical records cannot be located. Comes from internet error message, "404 - document not found.''
- Testiculation: Description of a gesture
typically used by hospital consultant "when holding forth on subject on
which he or she has little knowledge". Gesture is of an upturned hand
with outstretched fingers pointed upwards, clutching an invisible pair
of testicles.
CTD means "Circling The Drain'', GPO signifies "Good for Parts Only'' and "Rule of Five'' means that if more than five of the patient's orifices are obscured by tubing, he has no chance.
A patient who is "giving the O-sign'' is very sick, lying with his mouth open. This is followed by the "Q-sign'' - when the tongue hangs out of the mouth - when the patient becomes terminal.
As for genetic quirks or inbreeding, FLK means "Funny Looking Kid'' and NFN signifies "Normal For Norfolk,'' a rural English county.
General practitioners may use LOBNH ("Lights On But Nobody Home'') or the impressively bogus Oligoneuronal to mean someone who is thick.
But they also have a somewhat poetic option: "Pumpkin positive'' refers to the idea that a person's brain is so tiny that a penlight shone into their mouth will make their empty head gleam like a Halloween pumpkin.
- Agence France-Presse -
