For women in Iraq, the terrorist could be the guy working beside you

But somehow, Jones would become a suspect in her own rape. According to her testimony, KBR security escorted her to a trailer and locked her in under the watchful eyes of two guards. As the hours passed, she requested a phone to call her dad back in the States. She says a KBR rep refused. Finally, a guard lent Jones his cell. When she reached her outraged father, he called her congressman, Republican Ted Poe of Texas, who called the State Department. Two State officials rescued Jones from the trailer. She soon left the country.

Then there was Pamela Jones (no relation to Jamie), another Texan, who went to Kuwait in 2003 to work as a logistics coordinator for KBR. Her job was to make sure the troops had what they needed when they arrived at her base, and she did it with as much Houston hospitality as she could muster.

"I wanted to be where our people, our kids are," she says. "I'm a momma, you know."

Jones was in her early 50s, a single mom who admits, "I ain't the prettiest thing walking." The soldiers called her "Miss Pam." Unfortunately, not everyone extended the same level of courtesy: Her married supervisor had a habit of hitting on her.

Her job involved driving from base to base; he would insist she ride with him. When they were alone in the car, he would dig his fingers into her breasts, bruising her shoulders and thighs. When she fought back — once even punching him in the jaw — it only got worse.

"I begged him . . . please don't do this," she says.

But it went on for nearly a month. Jones' co-workers warned her not to complain, because she would get fired, and "Don't nobody want to lose their job on account of a fool," she says. But when she went home for vacation, she called a hotline KBR had set up to handle such complaints, providing details and names. Nothing happened.

When she returned to Kuwait, another co-worker invited himself over to her room to watch a movie. She fell asleep, only to wake up with him on top of her, fondling her breast. This time she reported the attack immediately. KBR removed her from the base for her "safety."

The pattern would continue. A Florida woman sued Halliburton and KBR, claiming that when she was stationed in Iraq in 2005, a drunken co-worker stole a key from an unlocked storage box, broke into her apartment, and raped her. The man she accused remained free, according to the suit, and she was never told whether he was prosecuted.

Meanwhile, a woman in Oklahoma sued KBR, alleging that while she was in southern Iraq, she suffered the same treatment as Kineston. Two of her supervisors made "unwelcome sexual overtures, both verbal and physical," according to her lawsuit, and she claimed managers' sexual harassment of women was "pervasive and systematic" throughout her division.

When she complained to HR, nothing happened. Yet she was "branded a troublemaker and treated as an outcast," her lawyer wrote in court documents. She was eventually fired after she had an accident in a company vehicle.

"Their mentality was 'I'm 9,000 miles from the United States, and I can do whatever I want,'" Kineston says.

Letty Surman, a former KBR supervisor who worked in Kuwait and Iraq from 2004 to 2006, admits in an affidavit that sexual harassment was the "major complaint," though Halliburton "has a policy of sweeping problems under the rug." She talks about a climate of retaliation, where people are heckled or sent to remote camps if they complain. A blog where Halliburton employees could anonymously post gripes was taken down because it embarrassed the company. In fact, KBR has gained such a reputation as a good ol' boys club, she says, that workers have nicknamed it Kinfolk, Brothers & Relatives.

In that kind of company, a woman complaining that her co-workers are behaving like junior-league sex offenders doesn't stand a chance.

For the 180,000 private contractors involved in the war, the long arm of American law doesn't reach to the desert.

This became painfully clear last fall, when contractors from Blackwater Worldwide opened fire in a Baghdad neighborhood, killing 17 civilians and setting off a storm of finger-pointing about who was responsible for punishing the contractors.

Experts are still debating whether military law can be applied to contractors. And though the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act allows for the civilian prosecution of crimes committed by people "accompanying the armed forces," the Justice Department has been reluctant to file charges.

Back home in Texas, Jamie Leigh Jones learned just how dysfunctional the legal system can be. State Department officials working on her case first said the evidence had been processed in the fall of 2006, but then said they didn't know a rape kit existed. Once they found the kit, they said the pictures and doctor's note were missing. Three years after she found a rapist in her bed, no one has been prosecuted for the crime.

"It's really sick, because these men know that they can get away with anything," she says.