NY Times Still Hates Dick Cheney

Back in 2008, the New York Times ran a scurrilous story linking Dick Cheney and Haliburton (KBR Division) to a brutal rape. The story was part of a series purporting to show that rapes of female employees of contractors in Iraq were routine, done with the quiet assent of the contractors. The poster girl for the accusations is one Jamie Leigh Jones, who claimed to have been gang-raped in the Green Zone in 2005.

And doesn't everyone love a victimized whistleblower? The horror of it all was repeated as gospel truth on CNN, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, NPR and every major urban newspaper. As she gained public exposure, the story continued to get increasingly lurid. By the time she had finished her revelations, she had been drugged, gang-raped by fellow KBR employees, held at machine-gunpoint by the KBR managers in a shipping container with no food or water because she insisted on reporting the crimes. About the only person she did not specifically accuse of participating in the rape was Dick Cheney himself, but according to Jones and the mainstream media, he was guilty by association, and probably in charge of KBR's rape program.

Our fine patriotic President, who was a temporary Illinois Senator at the time quickly demanded a full State Department investigation of Haliburton, KBR, and Dick Cheney. He wanted to know who participated, who knew what, and when, and assumed that the story was true before any of those investigations began. His fellow Senatorial moron, Al Franken (D-Minnesota) went a step farther. He demanded a Congressional investigation and proposed an "anti-rape" amendment to a pending appropriations bill for private military contractors. Just as anyone who opposes the Democrats' drunken sailor spending is an economic terrorist, Franken called the Republicans who opposed the amendment "pro-rape conservatives."

Jamie Leigh Jones became almost as much of a news item as Michael Jackson's death and Valerie Plame's outing as a low-level CIA clerk. She mugged for the cameras, and put on a bravura performance before congressional committees, culminating with her getting an advance for her book, The Jamie Leigh Story--How My Rape in Iraq and Cover-up made Me a Crusader for Justice. The media ate it up. Dick Cheney is a combination of Dr. Strangelove and Jack the Ripper. What could be better?

Fast forward to July, 2011. The Times had run out of headline space, or any space on the pages of the front sections to announce "grand jury decides Jamie Leigh Jones's story was a complete fabrication. Aside from all the Jones-damning circumstantial evidence, a rape kit done at the time showed she had had consensual sexual relations one time with one employee. There was absolutely no evidence of a rape, let alone a gang-rape. No criminal charges were filed, or ever will be filed.

Jones had claimed that the rape was so brutal that her breast implants were ruptured. Nope. The doctor on-scene and later her own plastic surgeon testified that no such injury had occurred. Both doctors were sympathetic females, and neither had any connection to Haliburton or Cheney. She claimed that she had been slipped Rohypnol by the gang. Rohypnol is a commonly-used date rape drug, often called "roofies." It remains very detectable in the bloodstream for a minimum of 72 hours. The tests by a female doctor/rape specialist done twice within 24 hours of the alleged rape showed no drugs of any kind present in her blood.

So the "troubling trend of unreported sexual assaults" turned out to be absolutely false. The whole Times series of front-page articles was built on a foundation of non-facts and no fact-checkers. And they had plenty of help from the entire spectrum of mainstream media. Undaunted, Jones's lawyers quickly shifted gears and filed a civil suit naming KBR, Haliburton and Cheney on a theory of agency law (called respondeat superior, or in ambulance-chasing lingo, "the deep pockets").

The civil complaint no longer alleges a gang-rape, or even a gang. It has devolved into a another pathetic case of a sad woman who wanted her fifteen minutes of fame, only to find out that investigators and prosecutors are not the mainstream media. They don't and can't accept lurid stories at face value (lacrosse-players being the exception to the rule). She is suing based on her own version of a sexual encounter that is just as easily refuted by the sex-partner's denials. She is perfectly happy to have her most intimate moments exposed to the public on the small chance that the jury will buy her story and connect it to big-bucks Haliburton and Cheney.

If she's smart (which I strongly suspect she is not), she'll go to Al Sharpton's attorneys so that when the consensual sexual partner sues her for defamation, she can claim "well maybe it wasn't true, but it could have been."