Tuesday, August 9, 2011

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."

18 comments:

AndrewPrice said...

Wait a minute, they are concerned about fake reports of sexual assaults and yet they ignored the same claims against. . . well, every Democrat ever? Hmmm. More bias from the NYT. I'm shocked. ;-)

Unknown said...

Andrew: I know. I was equally shocked. LOL

Joel Farnham said...

Oh my! Those eyes LawHawk. Did you have to do the eyes?

rlaWTX said...

I really hate the MSM. Nearly as much as LawHawk hates Obama.

BevfromNYC said...

I am sorry, but isn't rape already a crime. What is an "anti-rape" amendment? Oh, so now you can't rape women if you have a government contract.

Stuff like this makes me crazy. It just makes it that much harder for women who really ARE raped. But it's good to know that Obama wasn't wasting his time as Senator on anything meaningful. It would have been so out of character.

BTW, that photo of Cheney is freakin' me out.

Tennessee Jed said...

Hypocricy, New York Times be thy name. I haven't seen such lack of coverage since Bill Clinton, uh well, . . . . you know.

I should point out, in all fairness that my 2G grandmother on my dad's side was a Cheney; even pronounced it correctly (e.g. with a long "e" .)The only problem is that some party pooper will undoubtedly try and make me related to "Obama."

rlaWTX said...

I agree with everything Bev just said...

Unknown said...

Joel: The were originally animated too. But I couldn't figure out how to make that work on Blogger. LOL

Unknown said...

rlaWTX: The MSM are a total disgrace. No integrity, no honesty, no ethics. Other than that, they're great.

I guess I must have mentioned that I hate Obama.

Unknown said...

Bev: But if you have a specific anti-rape amendment, that distinguishes it from ordinary rape-rape according to Whoopi Goldberg. Unfortunately for Ms. Jones, since she claims to have been drugged on a date, that's not really rape-rape. It would have been so much easier to explain to you if she had been an underage minor and it was in a hot tub with Roman Polanski, but you get the idea.

I've mentioned before that I did a stint as lawyer for a county rape crisis center. I take this crime very seriously, and stories like this trivialize what is a horrendous and life-altering experience for the victims.

Unknown said...

Tennessee:

The Times is merely the leader and oldest member of the deaf, dumb and blind liberal media establishment. At one time, I would have included "influential," but I'm not sure that word applies anymore.

And since there are only six degrees of separation between me and Kevin Bacon, I must also be a relative of Obama's.

Unknown said...

rlaWTX: Me too.

Unknown said...

Bev: Just be thankful that I couldn't make the animation work on Blogger. That picture of Cheney was really creepy.

StanH said...

It’s like that hack, Nina Totenberg from NPR told us during the Clarence Thomas hearings, “It’s the seriousness of the charge.” We must as a group fight back, when these liberal twits make an erroneous charge, stand up and say, “No Nina you ignorant twit, it’s what you can prove, in the mean time sit down and STFU!” or point and laugh, you choose. We allow this crap to file the press vacuum, and next thing you know it echoes throughout the chattering class. This is one reason the press hates Rush so much, he comes right at them, and they invariably slink away. Of coarse most people don’t have 3hrs a day to refute false claims, but there’s our challenge, as I see it.

Unknown said...

Stan: First they jump on the charges "because they're serious" then they go out of their way to make them serious. In fact a triple murder that has not been committed is far less serious than a burglary that has been committed. When the emphasis is on the "seriousness of the crime" rather than the facts and the evidence which might prove there even was a crime committed in the first place, news reporting once again becomes empty, unsubstantiated opinion. Or simply propaganda.

Notawonk said...

andrew: they ignored the same claims against dems because they tend to wear cuddly furry costumes when sexually assaultin'. so cuddly! for a**wipes. (those asterisks are for law!)

Notawonk said...

law: i loved the piece. wait can i use that word for this article?! also, while i'm descending,can we please call him robert cheney? the other name gives me giggle fits (nope. the meds don't help) and i have to give myself a moment to compose myself before i send one of my eye-roll inducing comments.

Unknown said...

Patti: Feel free to pick and choose as as the spirit moves you. I've never subscribed to the common belief that a pun is the lowest form of humor. LOL

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