Beyond the Pale

Friends of BushCheney:

That dawn, naked, covered in blood and feces, bleeding from her anus, she found a US soldier she did not know lying naked in the bed next to her: his gun lay on the floor beside the bed, she could not rouse him and all she could remember of the night before was screaming and screaming as the soldier anally penetrated her while a colleague who worked for defense contractor KBR held her hand--but instead of helping her, as she had hoped, he jammed his penis in her mouth.

Over the next few weeks Smith would be told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor. The camp's military liaison officer also told her not to speak about what had happened, she says. And she would follow these instructions. "Because then, all of a sudden, if you've done exactly what you've been instructed not to do--tell somebody--then you're in danger," Smith says.

But contractors are good! And we can't prosecute them because they're not operating in the U.S.!

Read the article, this isn't an isolated incident.

I feel ill.

KBR

Classy job, those contractors.

The New iRaq

Or, I could have titled this post, "If Conservatives Got Their Pony."

When Is Poop Not Poop?

When it's rape.

In a case that's getting national attention, the Nebraska Supreme Court may have to decide if a woman can use the word "rape" in her alleged attacker's trial.

A Lancaster County district court judge told her she can't use it.

"I refuse to call it sex, or any other word that I'm supposed to say, encouraged to say on the stand, because to me that's committing perjury. What happened to me was rape, it was not sex," said Tory Bowen of Nebraska.

Truthy bad, truth good.

h/t Feministing

What's in a Name?

That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.

Not this time. Via Jessica at Feministing:

It's not enough that rape survivors are re-victimized in the courtroom by having their sexual histories brought up or are accused of "wanting it." Now they can't even call their assaults, well...assaults.

From Dahlia Lithwick at Slate:

...a Nebraska district judge, Jeffre Cheuvront, suddenly finds himself in a war of words with attorneys on both sides of a sexual assault trial. More worrisome, he appears to be at war with language itself, and his paradoxical answer is to ban it: Last fall, Cheuvront granted a motion by defense attorneys barring the use of the words rape, sexual assault, victim, assailant, and sexual assault kit from the trial of Pamir Safi—accused of raping Tory Bowen in October 2004.

The first trial resulted in a hung jury last year, and in the retrial the words will once again be banned. The only word left to use by both the defense and the prosecution to describe what happened? Sex. Uh huh, that's lovely.

From here on, I will refer to anything I think is bad as poop. More descriptive words are prohibited.