Cheney Justice?
Why can't Jamie Leigh Jones, who says she was raped in Iraq by her coworkers at Haliburton's KBR, sue her former employer for damages? Ask Dick Cheney.
On Wednesday, Jamie Leigh Jones told a House Judiciary Committee her now-famous story about having been allegedly drugged and gang-raped two years ago by several coworkers shortly after arriving in Iraq as a contractor for KBR, an engineering and construction firm contracted with the military to provide logistical support to the troops. Jones' story has prompted widespread outrage, partly because the Justice Department and the military failed to prosecute her attackers, but also because it appears that Jones can't sue KBR for placing her in harm's way.
When Jones went to work for KBR in Texas, and later for its subsidiary, Overseas Administrative Services, she signed contracts containing mandatory binding arbitration clauses, which required her to give up her right to sue the companies and any right to a jury trial. Instead, the contracts forced Jones to press her case through private arbitration, which she did in 2006. In that forum, the company that allegedly wronged her pays the arbitrator who is hearing the case. For that she can thank Dick Cheney.
At the time of the alleged attack on Jones, KBR was a subsidiary of Halliburton, the behemoth military-contracting and oil-technology firm. (KBR was sold off earlier this year.) So Jones is covered by the Halliburton dispute-resolution program, which was implemented when Cheney was Halliburton's CEO. The system bears the markings of Cheney's obsession with secrecy and executive power. On his watch, Halliburton, in late 1997, made it more difficult for its employees to sue the company for discrimination, sexual harassment, and other workplace-related issues.
One day, Halliburton sent all its employees a brochure explaining that the company was implementing a new dispute resolution system. The company sold the new program as an employee perk that would create an "open door" policy for bringing grievances to management and as a forum for resolving disputes without expensive and lengthy litigation. In practice, it meant that anyone who had a legitimate civil-rights or personal-injury claim signed away his or her constitutional right to a jury trial. Anyone who showed up for work after getting the brochure was considered to have agreed to give up his or her rights, regardless of whether the employees had actually read it. In 2001, the conservative and pro-business Texas Supreme Court overturned two lower courts to declare that this move was legal.
Dallas lawyer John Wall has something of a franchise suing Halliburton on behalf of employees in civil-rights and other workplace cases. He says there hasn't been a year since 1986 that he hasn't had at least one case against Halliburton. He's represented dozens of the company's employees and won numerous settlements and jury trials in civil lawsuits against the company. The reason, he says, is that Halliburton targets "the old, the injured, and the ill" when it makes layoff decisions, and it has a history of firing people for making workers compensation claims. Under the arbitration process, he says, Halliburton has fared much better, winning many more cases. When it loses, he says, the company pays significantly lower damages, which he says rarely exceed $50,000.
The dispute-resolution program had been in place at one Halliburton subsidiary for a few years before Cheney arrived. But Wall contends that Halliburton adopted it for the rest of the company to head off lawsuits that would invariably have resulted from Cheney's ill-fated decision to merge Halliburton with Dresser Industries, a troubled company that had once employed both George H.W. Bush and his father, Prescott Bush. Indeed, court documents show that Halliburton sent out its arbitration brochure just months before the merger. Afterward, Halliburton closed several Dresser plants in Texas, firing 10,000 people.
Federal law requires companies to give 60 days notice before closing a manufacturing plant. Failing to follow the law can leave a company liable for back pay and benefits to laid-off employees. Rather than announce the plant closings, Wall says, Halliburton moved the Dresser employees from the targeted plants onto the Halliburton payroll, even though in many cases there were no jobs for them. Then, once they were on Halliburton's books and bound by the binding arbitration clause, they were let go.
Among those laid off in 1999 was a longtime Halliburton employee named Lonnie Pennington. Pennington had sued Halliburton once before, back in the 1980s, for retaliating against him for filing a workers compensation claim concerning a back injury. That case resulted in a jury verdict of almost $200,000 in 1989. Halliburton continued to fight the verdict for another three years, and refused to reinstate Pennington until1992.
When he was fired again in 1999, Pennington made a formal complaint to the Texas Commission on Human Rights, alleging that the layoff was not only a form of retaliation for his complaints about discrimination on the job but also violated the Americans With Disabilities Act and the 1967 federal law barring age discrimination in the workplace. As part of its investigation, the commission sent repeated requests to Halliburton for the layoff documentation, but the company refused to respond. Finally, the commission sent a letter to Cheney's office with a gentle reminder that the law required Halliburton to respond. Wall says that Cheney reportedly called the commission and basically told them to fuck off.
So the commission contacted the sheriff and had him serve Cheney with a subpoena for the documents. Rather than turn over the documents, however, Halliburton shredded them. (Wall eventually deposed the woman who did the shredding,.) In a traditional civil lawsuit, judges have wide latitude to impose sanctions against a defendant for destroying evidence. They can tell a jury to assume that the information was extremely damaging to the defense. They can impose fines. They can find for the plaintiff and toss out the rest of the case to punish the other side, regardless of how strong the case was.
But when Pennington later went before the Halliburton arbitrator, the arbitrator dismissed his case, saying he had failed to produce sufficient evidence to support his claims, which, of course, was difficult to do after Halliburton had shredded part of his personnel file. The arbitrator made no mention of the evidence destruction. Wall protested the evidence destruction to the Texas Attorney General, Republican John Cornyn, who is now a U.S. senator, but Wall says Cornyn's office never investigated and no one was ever held accountable for it.
By May of this year, when her lawyer sued in federal court to try to get her case before a jury, Jaime Leigh Jones had been in arbitration with KBR for 15 months. L. Todd Kelly, her lawyer, recently called arbitration a "star chamber," and argued that it was a way of keeping her case out of the public eye. In court, both Halliburton and KBR have responded to the suit by arguing that Jones knew what she was doing when she signed her employment contract and that she should have to abide by the arbitration agreement. In response to the media flurry triggered by Jones' public allegations, KBR and Halliburton have also claimed that private arbitration is not secretive. Halliburton's history suggests otherwise.
In 2002, the Securities and Exchange Commission launched a probe into accounting irregularities at Halliburton that came in the aftermath of its merger with Dresser Industries. The merger had resulted in a huge drop in Halliburton’s stock value due to enormous unsettled asbestos liabilities that Cheney had failed to disclose to shareholders when he won their approval for the merger. As the inquiry heated up, reporters started looking at Cheney's tenure as CEO. One of them called Wall, who told the journalist about the shredding incident. A few days later, Wall received a "cease and desist" order from the arbitrator who had handled the Pennington case, telling him that he could not disclose anything about the document shredding.
It was a sign that secrecy is one of the reasons that Halliburton prefers arbitration. If its employees could sue the company in a regular court, reporters would have access to all the complaints and most of the documents in the cases. They could locate the plaintiffs and interview them. In effect, there would be some sunshine on Halliburton and KBR's corporate behavior. Instead, complaints made through private arbitration are virtually impossible to find and examine in any systematic way.
This week, I asked the American Arbitration Association (AAA), which handles many of Halliburton's arbitrations, if I could review all the complaints filed against the company by its employees in arbitration over the past three years—complaints that would be public if they had been filed in a courthouse. I received the following response:
"The AAA adheres to strict Standards of Ethics and Business Conduct, guided by our core values of Integrity, Conflict Management, and Service. As part of these ethical standards, we avoid any conflicts of interest that may jeopardize our impartiality. The AAA's rules protect the confidentiality of the arbitration process by restricting the disclosure of information related to cases filed with the AAA by AAA employees and arbitrators."
When I protested, noting that simply releasing the complaints would not affect anyone's impartiality, an AAA spokesperson sent me to Richard Naimark, a senior vice president at the company. He explained that while arbitrations aren't necessarily confidential—though many are—they are technically owned by the two parties, who can release the information if they want to, but AAA cannot. Naimark insisted that employees like the confidential nature of arbitration. "Americans value their privacy," he said.
Rather than privacy, employment lawyers routinely say that most employees they represent crave a jury trial. Texas lawyer Barbara Gardner challenged the way Halliburton forced arbitration on its employees, but, after losing the case in 2001 before the Texas Supreme Court, she has taken a dim view of mandatory arbitration in employment contracts. "Employees don't fare very well in arbitration," she says "It's not a level playing field. It's all set up to make sure the employer wins." Her firm will no longer handle employment cases forced into private arbitration because they are considered so hopeless.
While it's impossible to get all the complaints filed by Halliburton's employees, it is, thanks to a California state law requiring arbitration companies to disclose some bare-bones data, possible to examine Halliburton's track record in those cases. Employment lawyer Cathy Ventrell-Monsees testified before Congress in October that AAA data show that between January 2003 and March 31, 2007, of the 39 Halliburton cases that went all the way to a decision, Halliburton won 32, a win rate of 82 percent. Plaintiffs in employment litigation face a high bar in court trials as well, but even so, that figure is very high. Employers win about 64 percent of all employment cases at trial in federal court and about half in state court, according to data from the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).
The AAA data is a bit inscrutable, but a quick review of its most recent public report suggests, too, that the employee “winners” in Halliburton arbitrations aren’t winning much money. Out of 119 cases disposed of between April 2003 and March 2007, I could only find three in which the arbitrator actually awarded any money. The largest was for $82,000, and the smallest was a little over $7,000.
In state courts, according to the BJS, 43 percent of the awards in employment- discrimination trials were more than $250,000, and 16 percent were above a million dollars. The median award in state court for a discrimination case was $218,000 in 2001, the most recent year for which data is available. It's not too hard to see why Halliburton and KBR want to keep Jaime Leigh Jones in arbitration. If the allegations she has made are true, and her lawyers can prove it, her case could be worth many millions of dollars in a jury trial. It could also be both expensive and embarrassing, two things that Cheney clearly wanted to avoid a decade ago when he stacked the deck against his company's employees.
Comments
Thank you Ms. Mencimer for your outstanding book and reporting about binding mandatory arbitration.
If arbitration is fair, faster and cheaper why is it mandatory? Because it isn't fair, faster and cheaper and no informed consumer would choose arbitration if they had a choice! That is a myth perpatrated on the American people by the tort reformers. Who are the tort reformers? Big business and the Chamber of Commerce who want freedom to rip off the public with impunity.
CEO's like Dick Cheney like to claim that it is, and that those who want to ban predispute binding arbitration clauses are trial lawyers who want to make a ton of money. False and misleading for sure! The truth is that hard working citizens have to have an attorney whether they arbitrate or exercise their 7th amendment right to trial by jury. So lawyers make money either way.
I first learned about the pitfalls of binding arbitration as President of Homeowners Against Deficient Dwellings, www.hadd.com, a national not for profit advocating for the safe and sound construction of new homes. Many homeowners who contact us have had no choice other than foreclosure because of serious construction defects and binding arbitration clauses.
Homebuilders claim that buyers don't do research to learn who the good builders are, but the truth is that many bad builder complaints are hidden from the public in secrecy agreements homeowners are forced to sign at the end of arbitration, and the Better Business Bureau and Attorney General's often don't make complaints available to the pubic.
It is urgent that Congress pass the Arbitration Fairness Act of 2007 that would ban predispute binding arbitration in all consumer and employment contracts.
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The AAA needs to be exposed for what they are criminals pandering to Corporations.In the case of Halliburton, one only has to look back at Cheney there former CEO,to realize what kind of corrupt company that is.Oh!, lets also not forget the Bushes connection.
Why does none of this surprise me! We have a runaway Executive Branch hell - bent on screwing the American public in every way they can. This is a shame. Doesn't anyone out there know what's going on. I saw this coming when Bush was running for president the first term. The crimes and lies just keep piling up.
I thought there would be some change when Democrats took the majority in 2006, but Pelosi took "impeachment" off the table. So, we have runaway neo-cons doing whatever they want, and we have a spineless Democratic congress afraid to stand up to them. I will bet that we are the laughing stock of every country, and, justifiably, the most hated. Our true colors have finally been revealed. Shame on us for allowing this to happen. Shame on all of us.
Welcome to tort reform - Texas style.
This is what was done, by a lot of large corporations in oil and gas, to prevent, what were sold to the public, as "frivilous" lawsuits.
You know, the kind that result when plants blow up, and people get killed. In addition, Texas now has imposed a ceiling on monetary awards, if you are lucky enough to go to trial, and win. Damages are severely limited.
All we need is one judge, who does not consider an *assault* to be an "employee dispute".
A mixture of personal lawsuit against the rapists, and naming Halliburton as an enabler of and accessory to the assaults (treating the situation as if it were not a corporation, but a "person"... they DO want to be seen legally as "persons", don't they?.. who held her down while the rapes took place), could conceivably take this out of the realm of an "employment" issue.
Jones' attorneys need to take a page out of Cheney's handbook. It doesn't matter if the legal concept isn't sound, or even if it was just pulled out of David Addington's butt. It just needs to BE THERE... then, get it in front of a "friendly" judge, who will use any excuse you give him/her, to rule in your favor.
Certainly, there must be a judge in Texas, who is against rape? These attorneys for Jones can't give up now. Throw it against the wall.
I was a Dresser Employee when Halliburton (under Cheney) took over. In addition to the Mandatory Arbitration clause which immediately killed our American system of justice for the employees. Cheney got a big fat raise by stealing our pension fund and leaving the regular employees with a 3% decrease in pay and a hostile work environment on the cusp of the Y2K problem. He was the primary reason I left the company. Ironically, I submitted a very valuable patent while in Dresser's employment and if the patent (on RFID technology) is implemented or sold my engineering contract gives me 10% of it's impact to the corp. bottom line. Undre arbitration that amounts to squat - and we wonder why engineers are disappearing (we are starved and beaten down for greedy @$$holes at the top).
We are talking the same government that allowed and from the growing evidences would show is responsible for the New York city attacks on September 11th, 2001. And yet, there they sit. More and more of America is starting to take notice.
Contrary to what Bush’s supporters in the judicial system contend, no agreement, including one of mandatory arbitration can ever be established between any employer and their employees where clear violations of existing law are present and applicable penalties for such crimes have been properly legislated.
The contractual terms between the victim and KBR are unenforceable under federal law. An employee for instance cannot sign away legal remedy thus allowing any employer to knowingly violate law or somehow victimize the employee in ways which blatantly violate either state or federal law.
Rape, murder and armed robbery are but a few crimes that would literally nullify any such contractual agreement mandating arbitration. Regardless of how bad Vice Dictator Cheney wants to protect his comrades at KBR they are still bound by and must adhere to the law. The fact is NO arbitration agreement supercedes constitutional or criminal law.
Agreements of any kind between private parties that selectively provide immunity from prosecution any particular person, corporation or government entity for their willful commission of a crime is unenforceable. This physically and emotionally tortured young lady has every right in the world to have her day in court.
Is there a suit in the fact that they forced arbitration agreements because they knew they were breaking the law? Can they be held as accessories before the fact?
Like the Executive Orders Bush signed that gave pre-emptive legal immunity to any American or American corporation in Iraq, knowing that they would be commiting crimes.
I think an expert in contract law could argue that this contractual agreement to arbitration is illegal, much as a contract for slavery, even if signed by both parties - owner and slave, is illegal because slavery is illegal.
Unless I am mistaken, a contract agreeing to deny legal prosecution of a crime is not a legal contract for the same reason; because the law would supercede the contract in all cases.
Besides all the rational legal reasoning here, I gotta say: Christ on a cracker, why haven't we frogged marched these criminals out of our White House yet? I can't believe we're even discussing the fine points of yet another crime by these asshats.
Just sayin'
Please take special note: Bush has altered, changed or outright defied legitimately passed legislation via signing statements over eleven hundred times so far. Believe it or not, this qualifies him as a dictator. Things will only get worse for common Americans from here on in if this Constitutional violation is not soon addressed and curtailed. The United States Constitution assigns lawmaking almost exclusively to the Legislative Branch of our republic, it does not grant almighty authority to King George of Carlyle and his crooked Dick, Mr. Cheney.
Thanks for the expose'. This is just the same type of secrecy that Bush and Cheney use in running the government. Why are Reid and Pelosi always caving in to the Repubs? Why is there no filibustering to prevent monies for war funding?
Arbitration clauses should NOT be allowed. Employers should NOT be allowed to force arbitration rules as a matter of fact in hiring. It is either don't take the job, or take our rules, which means no job, or take the risk. We NEED more governmental regulations on hiring practices. The Arbitration Act of 2007, sounds like it would help, if we could get it through Congress. Plus we have to demand more transparency in government.
William G, I agree with your ideas, but they need to get into media the average person reads, which won't happen, while Bush is on his throne. Plus the FCC just OK'd consolidation by Media - TV plus newspaper - same owner. Need to sign the Petition of protest.
Mandatory arbitration and waiver of one's right to justice in court is something that's been invading our lives thanks to the Republican Revolution. Many of us have signed such clauses in order to get our employer-supplied health care. And if you get a contractor to, say, remodel or repair your house, it's likely that he will make such a clause part of your contract.
These things are so unAmerican--how can we waive our right to our own court system? But it's very hard to get out of signing them when you're in the situation. I tried unsuccessfully not to sign such a clause for my medical coverage...but in the end, I caved because the insurance company wouldn't take me without it.
If it was my daughter, I would already be in the boardroom of that company punching the living [deleted] out of the BoD myself. Me and my entire extended family. This outrage is the REASON you fight Corporate Fascism.
Roll over and play dead america, ely on others instead of your own two hands and this is what your country becomes.
Rapeing of Cheney
Interesting idea but where, even for pay, would you find anyone willing to do it?
I CAN TELL YOU THAT AFTER BEING UNDER THE BUSH CLINTON BUSH ADMINISTRATION. I HAVE BEEN EMBARASSED FOR MY COUNTRY. I HAVE DECIDED TO LEAVE AND NEVER TO COME BACK. THESE PEOPLE HAVE MADE ME ASHAMED TO BE AN AMERICAN BECAUSE THE WORLD HATES US. I HAVE TRIED EVERYTHING FROM JOINING ALL KINDS OF ORGANIZATIONS AND VOTING FOR THE IMPEACHMENT OF BUSH AND CHENEY AND THE ENTIRE ADMINISTRATION BUT IF YOU IMPEACH THEM THEN YOU HAVE THE STUPID BITCH PELOSI TAKING OVER THE OFFICE WHO NEEDS HER BULL[deleted]. I LIKE A LOT OF AMERICANS CAN TAKE NO MORE OF HER BULL[deleted] OR THE ADMINISTRATIONS [deleted]. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. WE NEED TO IMPEACH CHENEY AND PELOSI. BUT I WILL VOTE BEFORE I LEAVE THIS COUNTRY WHERE I WAS BORN AND RAISED AND LOVE. MY VOTE IS FOR KUCINICH AND THATS THAT. THEN I AM GONE.
Ms. Jones is living first hand American justice in the corporate/government world. No matter what dirty deeds were done, illegal or immoral, our government will defend corporate and themselves over the rights of a US citizen. Just like with Blackwater and past KBR Haliburton crimes in that the capitalist corporations and the power that be, are one in the same. If not the same, they are closely involved and related through blood money. When our laws are created and often written totally by lobbyist on behalf of corporations, what else would you expect. And now even politicians [ Bush and Cheney]are even trying to obtain the same loopholes that they allowed Corporations to have, and having laws introduced giving them immunity as well. That is if they havent had it slipped into a passed bills without anyone noticing already.
This really makes me glad I moved out of Texas... a right to work state: that means they can fire you for whatever reason they wanted. Since Jamie Jones's incident happened in a war zone why can't she file the incident as a War Crime? Oh... that's right .... Bush doesn't believe we should fall under that jurisdiction. I guess there goes all Bush's arguments for bombing "rogue countries" for not following the "world community".
I worked for KBR/Halliburton in Iraq from 2003 to present and Jamie is full of crap Barrecks 1 only holds 40 to 60 people and the same with barrecks 2 Jamie said she was in the barrecks with 400 men whichis a lie and I hope Halliburton attorneys catch onto this. Also everyone is in a CONTAINER they are called LIVING CONTAINERS!!! what the news are showing is a shipping container something they found on the internet and are showing with their iraq pictures with her story where did they get these pictures of the container andof Iraq she was only there for 4 days looks like they hunted for something to act like it was a container. Also the Gurka guards are outside of everyone container!!! They keep us safe from the insurgents that try to take over camp hope its patheticand did you see jones is on wikipedia she thinks she is a celebrity oh and whats up with the makeover photo this is not a celebration good scam on your 15 minutes of fame!!!
First off this young lady submitted affadavits by Kevin Rodgers to the press that was actually the victim of Tracy Barker's Mr Rodgers does not even know this person these attorneys took affadavits from their other client to submit to the press why??? and the other affadavit that was submitted to the House Judiciary by Human Resource Letty Surman was all accounts of victim Tracy Barker it talks about Tracy Barkers case entirely talks about even the supervisors name that assaulted Barker but yet the only name on this affadavit is Jamie in a page that is posted on the back of this affadavit also Tracy Barker's Congressman sent aletter to the attorney general asking for answers in her assault case why is this not updated either and these 2 share the same attorneys?????
www.tracykbarker.com
Tracy K Barker Halliburton/KBR Rape Victim
and abused since coming back to the United States not only by rape victim she helped but also by Congress
If your not pissted your not paying attention
Tracy Barker is one of the first victims to bring public awareness as she brought charges against Halliburton/KBR stating that she was sexually assaulted, given drugs to make her sleep, raped, sexually harassed while under their employ and confined to a shipping living container falsely imprisoned in 2004 while working at Camp Hope and in 2005, in Basra. Barker is a military wife and mother of 5 who worked for a Halliburton/KBR subsidiary, in Iraq while her husband served in the US military in the United States Army Golden Knights Parachute Team for the past 24 years. While there, Tracy states she was sexually harassed and sexually assaulted by a State Department employee and a Halliburton/KBR subsidiary. Tracy was also retaliated against when she stood up for the Iraqi women that were being abused on Camp Hope. She was even watched when she went to the bathroom being told that they wanted to make sure she didn't call the United States again for help including her husband and children. After these incidents, she said she was confined under orders by her employer to a living shipping container. Food was brought to her as if she was a prisoner and she was denied medical attention and any outside communications. She also claims that when she attempted to leave the camp at one point she was brought to a staging area in the middle of Iraq left with no PPE gear and had to ride in a food truck for 19 dangerous hours through Iraq with views of insurgents and starving children, this horrific journey took her back to Camp Basra.
Barker was forced several days later to wear the same clothing the night of the assault and paraded through a crowded dining area and was told that it was a part of the State Departments investigation to see how men reacted to her. At this point she was still refused medical attention. And taken off the convoy list several times.
Eventually, Tracy was able to use a cell phone of Kevin Rodgers, a National Guard. Tracy’s husband 1st Sergeant Galen Barker states that his wife contacted him through Rodgers. Tracy submitted National Guard Kevin Rodgers affidavit back in 2006. Tracy's husband Galen then tried to get to Kuwait to meet with a friend who works for Black Water so that he could go into Iraq and rescue his wife who was being held like a hostage. However, Tracy continued to be held against her will by Halliburton/KBR and the State Department that continued to stall her release. Tracy was given drugs to make her sleep and to be calm from the assault by KBR/Halliburton's medic. The following morning Tracy was raped by her supervisor. She was then rescued by Dr. David Pakkal of the State Department who took her immediately to Kuwait to report what had happened.
Several months after returning home in July of 2005, Tracy was never able to get any answers from the State department to have charges brought. Tracy started receiving phone calls from Jamie Leigh Jones claiming she was gang raped. Barker learned that a State Department investigator Lynn Falanga and a Halliburton EAP representative had given her home phone number out to an alleged gang rape victim because they thought Tracy could help her, even though they weren't even dealing with Tracy's case or rape.
After returning home, Tracy asked government officials to assist in securing justice.It has been 3 years and congress refuses to help her in her case or even recognize her as one of the first victims to bring public awareness, or recognize her as a victim at all. Congressman Poe stated that Tracy came through their office which was inaccurate. When Tracy heard about this she decided to call and ask for help but she was turned down. On the civil side, the State Department has not disciplined the State Department Official who has admitted to State Department investigators some of the events that Tracy described. Not only does this assailant remain employed with the State Department, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia has refused to seek an indictment against him for his conduct. When Tracy asked for answers in the investigation Tracy says that the State Department only contacted her 2 times in 3 years. Attorney Advisor Henry Norcom offered her a payment of $3,500 to drop charges against its employee for the admitted assault and to give up all her rights. Tracy refused the offer, and continues in her pursuit for justice not only for herself, but for others who have experienced the same or similar treatment while serving our country abroad.
October 2007 Tracy was pregnant with twins and was asked to do a 20/20 interview. When this interview ran it did not cover her case entirely by leaving out facts of rape, being given drugs, put in a shipping living container, left in the desert and important filings in Barkers case no one knows why this has happened. When Tracys case was not presented fully she made ABC 20/20 fully aware immediately after it ran. Tracy claims they ignored her. ABC 20/20 also promised if she did the interview telling complete strangers about her case that they would cover her story from the beginning to the end which they have not done.
December 19, 2007 Tracy was asked to write a statement for the Congressional Hearing of Homeland Security, Crime, and Terrorism. Tracy declined because she was invited to DC by Congressman Bob Etheridge saving her testimony for the committee. Paying her own way of $1,300.00 with a 2 hour notice Tracy arrived but when she got there she was not allowed to testify or even speak. Media was shunned away from her case. During the congressional hearing An affidavit of Letty Surman whose name Tracy submitted as one of her witness back in Dec 2005 was given to Tracy to submit to the committee. When she handed the affidavit over it was eyewitness accounts of Tracy's office, work place, coworkers in Basra Iraq. Talks about Tracy's accounts from her EEOC charges even names the supervisor who raped her but for some reason did not mention Tracy on this entire affidavit. Even though Tracy declined to write a statement for the Committee after Tracy came home a statement was submitted to the Congressional hearing that Tracy never wrote. Congress has completely ignored Tracy and skipped over her case entirely moving on to the others that came forward after her. Hillary Clinton even refused to help Tracy and told her that she couldn't help because Tracy was not a New York resident. Tracy was used for a number count and her case has been ignored completely even though she is one of the first that brought public awareness.
As for her former employer, Halliburton and its subsidiaries requested that Tracy’s case against them be resolved through a arbitration that they contend is required by her employment contract. In private, there is no judge or jury, but the case is decided by an arbitrator selected from a list of arbitrators. Recently, a federal district judge known by Judge Miller in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas agreed with Halliburton’s position and granted Halliburton’s Motion to Compel Tracy’s case against her former employer and its subsidiaries to continue proceeding in arbitration with comments in to Tracy that "sexual harassment up to assault is a reality in todays work place". This was appealed and recently on April 25, 2008 Judge Miller sent Tracy to arbitration again. Tracy’s attorney, Stewart Hoffer of Houston, Texas, had been hired to assist Tracy with the Halliburton case as well as the case pending against the State Department official.
While Tracy continues her pursuit for justice in her own individual case, Tracy wanted to ensure that her experience, and the experience of others, did not go unnoticed by our elected officials. But Congress doesn't even demand justice in her case and one of the assailants is a State Department employee, it is difficult to demand justice for others especially when no one is working together.
Tracy is working with different departments trying to save her best friends life Yousif. He has been running for his life for 2 years and is stuck in Iraq being hunted by kill units because he worked for an American Company. Tracy is working with her disability of PTSD which makes it very hard for her to write. We are looking for an author to help tell her story about her experience, challenges, and about the abuse that has taken place against Tracy since coming home to the United States, and her struggle to save Yousif while being the only military wife when these assaults happened that has come forward to this day.
Every KBR/Halliburton SEII rape and assault victim deserves justice but it shouldnt be at the price of abusing another victim.
Copyright 2007
dlh
:::
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Thanks for further information on the whole "abritration" fiasco.
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