Abstract

CACI and Its Friends

In his now-famous report on Abu Ghraib prison, Major General Antonio Taguba identified Steve Stefanowicz, a civilian interrogator employed by CACI International, as having "allowed and/or instructed" United States soldiers to abuse and humiliate Iraqi prisoners and as giving orders that he knew "equated to physical abuse." CACI, which has twenty-seven interrogators working under Army command in Iraq, has taken a defiant stance on Taguba's allegations. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, CACI has emerged as one of the most unabashed corporate backers of United States President George W. Bush's foreign policy and a key supporter of the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of CACI's specialties is "social networks" analysis, which involves mapping relationships among terrorist networks and their civilian supporters--exactly what the U.S. Army interrogators at Abu Ghraib were after. When he was elected a CACI director in 1999, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and president of Armitage Associates, a consulting firm with a long list of powerful clients that included Boeing, Unocal, Texaco, Goldman Sachs and the Brown & Root subsidiary of Halliburton. In 2003, CACI earned $507 million in information technology revenues from the government, making it the country's seventeenth-largest federal information technology contractor. Sixty-five percent of its revenues came from the Defense Department, where CACI's clients include the Army's Intelligence and Security Command and V Corps, which has several units in Iraq that have been deeply involved in U.S. counterinsurgency operations. Any investigation of CACI should also focus on the higher-ups who approved these contracts, as well as any Administration officials who may know about CACI's relationship with military intelligence.