The distinction between military men and mercenary men…

That assumes there is one. Three female American soldiers died of dehydration in Iraq because they refused to drink water for fear of being raped by fellow soldiers as they went to the toilet at night.

And ‘command rape’ - coercion into a sexual relationship by a military superior sounds exactly like what happened to Jones before she left for Iraq. So it’s not that there’s a distinction between the military and the contractors - with the slight exception that military offenses might be punished in a court martial.

If her allegations are correct (innocent until proven guilty…) it think it’s clear that nearly everyone Mrs Jones interacted with did not ‘feel’ for her on a personal or corporate level. You can’t tell me that getting locked in a trailer after a gang rape has to do with cold corporate interest. They know they’re protected from criminal litigation. That’s a group of people who don’t give a shit about the 20-year-old, blonde admin assistant with breast implants.

Imagine how she must have looked. And they locked her in a trailer and wouldn’t let her call her family. That’s not calculated; that’s ‘the bitch was asking for it.’

This woman didn’t even count after she’d been brutalised. And that stems from larger cultural problems regarding women and what is deemed acceptable to do to them.

This is not about private contractors in military roles or capitalism. Pretending it is detracts from the guilt of those who perpetuated this crime and all those who covered it up. It also detracts from the real issue here which is the world’s attitude towards women, the culture we live in that breeds men capable of such abuses and the various systems which continue to fail women when they fail to suitably condemn and punish this violence.

You say that ‘the fact this goes unpunished is indicative of the ‘not my problem’ culture so acceptable in terms of anything Iraq.’ I think the fact that this goes unpunished is indicative of the ‘not my problem’ attitude towards the continuing gender inequality and abuse of women, which we see in many and varied forms across the world.

Trying to make it about anything else makes us complicit in the ongoing failure to recognize the reality of gender inequality and violence against women.

I agree with you that the fact this goes unpunished is indicitive of the ‘not my problem’ culture so acceptable in terms of anything Iraq, but I would go so far as to say that the reprehensible fact here is that anything is done under the banner of war as a business opportunity instead of offically through the US military is going to be subject to that attitude. On a person to person level I’d imagine Halliburton employees feel for this woman etc, but Halliburton the entity (using the same excuse blackwater used) says it is a corporation and as such not concerned with anything but profit maximization. It’s not in the interest of mercinaries to litigate against their own employees. Which should be a case for the elimination of private contractors in military roles.

The real hope crushing kicker here is not that this lady got raped in the name of capitolism, but that the system is setup to profit from ‘not my problem’ so there’s no motivation to fix it.