Gone.

D.R. Scott said it with one word in comments yesterday within Hubris' post below on the young woman who was apparently gang-raped by workers at a KBR work camp (Kellogg Brown & Root until April was a Halliburton subsidiary. How lucky for Halliburton to have spun the company off before this story broke), and then held prisoner in a shipping container until a sympathetic guard loaned her his cell phone, which she used to call her father 7,000 miles away stateside.

Her father called her local Congressman, and he called the State Department—to rescue an American citizen from a rogue American contractor in the middle of a war zone. They just roll so wrong off the tongue—the words. Agents were dispatched to the American mercenaries site and the abused woman worker was freed.

I'll say it again.

Gone.

As D.R. Scott elaborated, “Whatever moral authority the United States claimed to have is now gone.”

Totally. Painfully. Sadly.

Gone.

The next time you hear some half-cerebrumed fool asking with a puerile whine, “Why does the world dislike us?”, after you laugh in his face and backhand him in his drooping jaw, stand over his unconscious body and run this case down for him.

This is how we're treating our own people who've gone over there ostensibly to help “the cause”.

Imagine what in Satan's fucking name these roided-up loose cannons are doing to Iraqis who don't have a congressman to call.

Gone. Gone. Gone.

Here are some of the ugly particulars of the case—the sorts of things that evaporate all moral authority and then seeds the clouds for a rain of karmic blowback so drenching that Hell itself would steam from the deluge's leaching in.

...the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

“Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston,“ Jones says she was told.

Yes. they effectively threatened her with blackballing in the industry were she to talk. Speak out and we'll destroy your livelihood. Got it? Good. Now, the fellas need a little...how do you say, entertaining...

Gone.

A spokesperson for the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security told ABCNews.com he could not comment on the matter.

Over two years later, the Justice Department has brought no criminal charges in the matter. In fact, ABC News could not confirm any federal agency was investigating the case.

Legal experts say Jones' alleged assailants will likely never face a judge and jury, due to an enormous loophole that has effectively left contractors in Iraq beyond the reach of United States law.

“It's very troubling,” said Dean John Hutson of the Franklin Pierce Law Center. “The way the law presently stands, I would say that they don't have, at least in the criminal system, the opportunity for justice.”

------------------------------------

Since no criminal charges have been filed, the only other option, according to Hutson, is the civil system, which is the approach that Jones is trying now. But Jones' former employer doesn't want this case to see the inside of a civil courtroom.

KBR has moved for Jones' claim to be heard in private arbitration, instead of a public courtroom. It says her employment contract requires it.

The Bush administration's “enforcer” arm, the Justice Department under Alberto Gonzales, and it's torture-enabling State Department actively sought to cover this whole thing up up, and to this day still is—then constructed a Rube Goldberg-ian policy contraption that works only to protect criminals who operate in the name of this government.

“Gone, baby gone.”

Hubris' post ended with this question:

“Anybody want to guess how long before we start hearing the attacks on this 22 year old girl?”

The answer? Maybe an hour. From Melanie in comments:

“One quick google reveals that there are already websites that are calling her "rape bait" because she is pretty.

And from Serving Patriot in the same thread:

...Just read the comments at the ABC news website for all their disgusting, "whe deserved it" of "invited it" glory.”

I won't link to the ugliness. You know where to go to find it. Bet you get there in under four clicks.

I'll count down. Five, four three, two, one...

Gone.

This government has taken whatever standing...whatever tenuous higher ground we may have had...and rammed it through a wood-chipper.

Then burned it to cinders with a flamethrower.

And followed that with a nice, long hydrochloric acid bath—agitating the last molecules with a vigorous cocktail-shaker move...into so much nothingness.

Gone.

You get that when the President pimps out his female Secretary of State, chuckling up his sleeve with his bought-and-paid-for pundits and weirdly-nicknamed aides de camp over disrespect of her at the hands of an arrogant, sexist head of state.

It's a by-product of humor being made at the expense of a woman running for President, where a male opponent doesn't challenge a supporter giddily calling her, a Senate colleague of his—a “bitch”.

What do you expect when the President won't subtly pressure, or even ask a question of a supposedly close fellow world leader whose government's judiciary sentences a female rape victim to 200 lashes for being in the company of men she is not related to, and then for speaking out against said court's injustice?

And all, all fades away when this government will give its mercenary army carte blanche...

...to run wild in a war theatre, and roughshod over an overtaxed and underpaid military who they are free to abuse...

...to murder meandering civilians, and punish them not...

...to rape, and imprison a fellow American—a woman, and threaten her with sanction should she seek justice for the ultimate denial of dignity.

Fades? No. Thrown away is more like it. Prestige cast aside is no longer prestige, but is like all that is gutter-tossed. Refuse.

“One can judge a civilization by the way it treats its women.”, Helen Foster Snow once said. And much to our collective chagrin, we are found wanting. Sadly, sadly wanting.

But there America stands, or rather...wobbles....with reptilian tears streaming down and a querulous “Ted Baxter” bawl erupting from its gut.

“Why, oh why, oh why, oh whyyyyyyyyyy do 'they' hate us so much? It's our freedoms! They hate us for our freedoms!”

But the truth is revealed. Ugly and gnarled, un-pretty, but real—they don't hate our freedoms. “They” scorn, mock, and laugh at our loud pretentions to them.

A well of good will, dusty now and webbed with dry, burning hypocrisy.

Every drop...

...gone.