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CACI Torturers in Scots Census Rehearsal

IndependenceFromAmerica | 11.11.2008 16:05 | 2011 Census Resistance | Anti-militarism | Iraq

The Scottish census of 2011 has been awarded to CACI. CACI interrogators, Mr. Steven Stephanowicz and Mr. John Israel, were key to the torture and abuse in Abu Ghraib, and were condemned by each report into Abu Ghraib, including the Fay report and the US militarys own investigation, the Taguba Report.
The first hurdle for the census is imminent and is ripe for dissent.

There will be a 'dress rehearsal' in Spring of 2009 "to see how well people understand the proposed questions and how well questionnaire delivery, collection and processing arrangements work". The rehearsal will be limited to one urban consituency, West Edinburgh, and one rural constituency. Lewis and Harris. Public participation in this rehearsal is totally voluntary.

This is the first and perhaps best chance to sink the CACI contract. Everyone in West Edinburgh, Lewis and Harris should be told that the people they are giving their private details to are the colleagues of Abu Ghraib torturers, that their tax is profiting this gestapo corporation, and that they can stop this simply by telling the canvassers to bugger off.

This means local leafletting, postering, letter-writing, spray-painting, public meetings, all the leg-work that goes into the public making an informed decision to refuse to cooperate with torturers.

Anyone who does two minutes research into either CACI or successful tactics used against the poll tax in Scotland will also see more direct ways to help scupper the census.

The current Scottish government position is that vecause CACI staff haven't been charged then there is no reason to not award the contact to them. This is a false argument since the contractors are legally immune to US prosecution under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which in 2003 held that only civilians hired through a contract directly with the Defense Department could be prosecuted for crimes overseas. They have not been prosecuted soley because they were granted immunity in advance. There is enough evidence in the Taguba Report to prosecute the two men under Scottish law - and yet the government is saying there is not enough evidence to forbid them from profitting from sensitive contacts here. This is immoral complicity.




FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

(PART ONE)

6. (S) I find that the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts:

1. (S) Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees;
jumping on their naked feet;

2. (S) Videotaping and photographing naked male and
female detainees;

3. (S) Forcibly arranging detainees in various
sexually explicit positions for photographing;

4. (S) Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and
keeping them naked for several days at a time;

5. (S) Forcing naked male detainees to wear women's
underwear;

6. (S) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate
themselves while being photographed and videotaped;

7. (S) Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and
then jumping on them;

8. (S) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box,
with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his
sfingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;

9. (S) Writing "I am a Rapest" (sic) on the leg of a
detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old
fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;

10. (S) Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked
detainee's neck and having a female Soldier pose for a
picture;

11. (S) A male MP guard having sex with a female
detainee;

12. (S) Using military working dogs (without muzzles)
to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least
one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;

13. (S) Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.

"'Specifically I suspect that Col. Thomas M. Pappas, Lt. Col. Steve L. Jordan, Mr. Steven Stephanowicz and Mr. John Israel were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and strongly recommend immediate disciplinary actions ..." - Major General Antonio Taguba

Back in 2004 -- even before the latest allegations -- military investigators left little doubt that Stefanowicz was a perpetrator of abuse at Abu Ghraib. The Fay report found that he had directed the use of dogs on prisoners, forced a prisoner to wear women's underwear, kicked a prisoner into his cell, failed to report abuse, and lied to investigators. The Taguba report found that he instructed military police to abuse prisoners in an effort to "set the conditions" for interrogation. "He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse," Taguba concluded about Stefanowicz.
 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/03/31/big_steve/index1.html

IndependenceFromAmerica

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Criminal Abuse, Corporate Immunity

11.11.2008 23:16

CACI are also approved contractors on all UK censuses so this isn't just a Scottish issue, it is a British issue. Like most bad things, it just affects Scotland first. Work on the Scottish census dress rehearsal will be the 6th of January to the 1st of May 2009.

Encouraging non-participation may not be the best way to ruin the census. A different form of civil disobedience would be to ask everyone to fill it out, but to claim to be a muslim of Pakistani descent. It is voluntary so they can't prosecute you from lying and that would show solidarity with Scots who are muslim and of Pakistani descent, who are asked those questions in 2011. That would still make the census rehearsal meaningless. The next census in 2011 will not be voluntary, except in the sense that every law is voluntary if you are prepared to resist injustice.

Encouraging non-participation seems an easy sell though - "protest Abu Ghraib, Data Privacy, government deals with evil corporations etc.by simply doing nothing".

First thoughts for cheesy slogans:

Can't Say, Won't Say
West Edinburgh Silences Torturers
Criminal Abuse, Corporate Immunity
None of Your Business - Your Business is Torture
SNP, AberGhraib branch

The Scotsman/Evening News hasn't touched this story because Neil Mackay of the Sunday Herald broke it, but they will have to soon, it affects 40,000 Edinburgh households. The west of Edinburgh varies from affluent areas like Corsorphine and Haymarket to the Sighthill schemes. Obvious places to leaflet include the Gyle, Hearts matches, the colleges - Riccarton, Napier, Telford and Stevenson, Haymarket station.

If anyone knows independent people in Harris or Lewis, please let them know that this rehearsal is happening there too. Over the next few months posters, leaflets and stencils will be posted here for anyone to borrow or adapt..

It was announced yesterday that CACI have been awarded a another contract by the US Army for $60 million. For anyone who is following this story in-depth and preparing their own leaflets or letters, when reading those military reports we naturally miss most of the significance of the US Army terminology. The following text is an indepth explanation of the military jargon used in Major General Tagubas report from an excellent contempary blog.

"
In Paragraph 11 of the Recommendations portion of Part Three, MG Taguba recommends termination of employment and security clearance for a civilian contract interrogator for lying to investigators about his conduct of interrogations and knowledge of abuses, and encouraging MP guards to abuse prisoners in pursuit of interrogation operations. In Paragraph 12 of the Recommendations portion of Part Three, MG Taguba recommends termination of employment for a civilian contract interrogator for lying to investigators and not possessing a security clearance. In Paragraph 13, MG Taguba recommends a Procedure 15 inquiry to determine the extent of Military Intelligence personnel culpability in the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. “I suspect that COL Thomas M. Pappas, LTC Steve L. Jordan, Mr. Steven Stephanowitz, and Mr. John Israel were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib (BCCF) and strongly recommend immediate disciplinary action as described in the preceding paragraphs as well as the initiation of a Procedure 15 Inquiry to determine the full extent of their culpability.”

AR 381-10 is the basic regulation governing US Army intelligence activities. It contains procedures that intelligence personnel must follow to obtain and maintain legal authority to conduct intelligence collection activities, as well as prohibited activities. AR 381-10 implements Federal law regarding intelligence collection as it applies to the US Army. Procedure 15 is an AR 381-10 inquiry, punitive in nature, to determine if any persons assigned to US Army Intelligence violated Federal law in the course of their duties. Coupled with the Hersch piece, MG Taguba’s AR 15-6 report and a few other news items I’ve posted recently, it seems to me that there was indeed a blanket policy of coercive interrogation applied to the Iraqi detainees in US custody at Abu Ghraib. The media is missing the story here. The scandal isn’t the lower-ranking MP soldiers we’ve seen in the infamous pictures or their piss-poor leadership – and I’m not defending either of them. The issue is a blanket policy of coercive interrogation. Somebody made the decision to apply that policy through Military Intelligence channels. Presumably, the decision-maker made a conscious cost-benefit analysis, weighing the potential intelligence value of detainees against the damage that would result if word of the abuse that results from such a policy were made public, especially in light of the administration’s War on Terror. It also appears that the administration, as well as the media, is going to try to pin the blame for this shameful decision on a few low-ranking soldiers and ignore the larger issues of incompetence – not to mention illegality – of policies originating at the highest level in the Defense Department. The media and Congress should pursue the recommendations MG Taguba made in his report, specifically the Procedure 15 against members of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, and see where those policies originated in the chain of command. There is also a report in the Army Times that MG Taguba has been unexpectedly reassigned from his duties at CFLCC to the Pentagon. Big surprise.

AR 381-10 This Army Regulation implements Federal law concerning intelligence collection activities. It applies only to Army personnel engaged in intelligence collection activities. The procedures contained in this regulation provide guidelines for legal intelligence collection during peacetime. Requests for exceptions to these procedures must be approved by the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Policy) on a case-by-case basis. Procedure 15. This is a procedure to report an investigate intelligence personnel who engage in “questionable activities.” Intelligence personnel who are aware of questionable activities are required to submit reports within five days through command channels to the office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, or through Inspector General channels. Reporting is mandatory. An initial investigation is required to be completed by the reporting command within 30 days, and a report must be forwarded to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence. The report is then passed to both the Department of the Army Inspector General and the Army General Counsel for review. In this case, a Procedure 15 inquiry would most likely be initiated by the G2 at CENTCOM, who would conduct the initial investigation and then forward the report as described above. Since MG Taguba made his AR 15-6 recommendations in January, the process – and Procedure 15 investigation – should be well underway by now. An enterprising journalist might want to ask about its status." - Sunday, May 16, 2004, yankee doodle

 http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/2004/05/war-news-for-may-16-2004.html

yankeeDoodleDinnae


"selective revocation of birth certificate"

13.11.2008 22:19

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/spiesforhire.htm

Humphrey was employed by CACI International Inc., a $1.8-billion information technology (IT) company that does more than 70 percent of its business with the Department of Defense. For many years, CACI had been one of the Pentagon's favorite contractors. It was particularly respected for its professional evaluations of software and IT products supplied to the military by outside vendors. During the late 1990s, CACI moved heavily into military intelligence when the Pentagon, its budget reduced by nearly 30 percent from the days of the Cold War and unhappy with the quality of intelligence it was getting from the CIA, began bringing in private sector analysts for the first time.

This proved to be a prescient move for CACI when nineteen Muslim fanatics linked to Al Qaeda, the global terrorist organization then based in Afghanistan, steered three hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack in American history, the Intelligence Community began scouring Washington for analysts, covert operatives, translators, and interrogators it could deploy in the hunt for the perpetrators, and to fill the ranks of hastily organized counterintelligence centers at the Central Intelligence Agency and other government agencies. CACI, which already had a small army of trained and cleared intelligence specialists holding security clearances, was perfectly positioned to pick up the slack.

Between 2002 and 2006, CACI signed dozens of new contracts, acquired twelve companies, and more than tripled its revenue, from $564 million a year to nearly $2 billion. Its astonishing growth catapulted the company from a bit role in IT to one of the key players in what has become a $50-billion-a-year Intelligence-Industrial Complex. "CACI is a cash-flow story," Dave Dragics, CACI's chief operating officer, boasted to investors in 2006. "Whenever you hear bad news, it's usually good news for us."

But along the road to this gravy train, CACI stumbled. The trouble began in the summer of 2003, when Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, shocked by the resistance to its occupation of Iraq, began filling Iraqi prisons with thousands of people suspected of participating in the insurgency The U.S. Army, however, was desperately short of interrogators, particularly anyone with military experience. Through the Department of the Interior, which had subcontracted management of the Pentagon's IT contracts in 2001, the Army renewed several contracts it had signed during the Bosnian war with Premier Technology Group, a small intelligence shop that CACI acquired in 2003. Within weeks of CACI's acquisition, its PTG unit dispatched two dozen former military interrogators and prison guards to Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. Many of them were unaware of the nature of the work they would face.

Tasked with the job of rooting out the leaders of the insurgency, some CACI employees directed military interrogators to use techniques on Iraqi prisoners that were, to put it mildly, far outside the norm of civilized conduct. Reports of the mistreatment soon made their way to U.S. commanders in Iraq, who appointed an Army general to investigate conditions at the prison. In the spring of 2004, CACI was thrust into the public limelight when the Army's report, along with hundreds of graphic photographs of Iraqis being tortured and humiliated, were leaked to the press. The Bush administration was thrust into one of its most serious foreign policy crises. After leaving the Pentagon in 2006, Rumsfeld would call Abu Ghraib the worst thing that happened during his five and a half years as secretary of defense (despite being the architect of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, however, he never took responsibility for the actions of his soldiers and contractors).

The details of what CACI's people did at Abu Ghraib were the subject of an insightful book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, by Seymour Hersh, the reporter who broke the Abu Ghraib story, and the events recalled in excruciating detail by former Iraqi prisoners in a 2007 film made by Hollywood producer Robert Greenwald called Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers. Two internal Army reports concluded that CACI's contract interrogators introduced some of the most brutal practices employed at the prison, including the use of attack dogs. The images of one naked prisoner, cringing in terror as a German shepherd snapped his teeth just inches from the man's genitals, horrified the world. Combined with the testimony of several guards who followed the orders of the CACI and Army interrogators, the pictures convinced U.S. military tribunals to convict two of the dog handlers for assault. But no case was ever made against CACI's men: even though one of CACI's employees, a former prison guard named Steven Stefanowicz, was identified at trial as suggesting the use of the dogs, he has never been charged with a crime. Nor has CACI itself.

Instead, J. P. "Jack" London, CACI's chairman and CEO, made it his life's mission to exonerate his company from any wrongdoing. From the moment the Abu Ghraib story broke in 2004, London fought back with a vengeance, attacking journalists who printed stories about the scandal, and generally castigating anyone who dared to suggest that CACI bore any responsibility for the abuse. At the other extreme, London called Steven Stefanowicz, the man who helped introduce the use of attack dogs at Abu Ghraib, a model employee and praised him for doing "a damned fine job" in Iraq.

The Pentagon, far from chastising its wayward client, continues to reward CACI: despite the unresolved issues involving CACI's role at Abu Ghraib, the Department of Defense has awarded CACI millions of dollars in new contracts, including a three-year, $156 million contract signed in 2006 to provide IT support and training to instructors at the Army's Intelligence School in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The Office of the Secretary of Defense has hired CACI for two contracts, worth more than $20 million in total, to support the Pentagon's transformation initiatives and manage its classified and unclassified computer networks supporting homeland security and the global "war on terror." 3 In a lucrative arrangement announced in December 2006, the Army placed CACI in an elite group of companies allowed to bid on $35 billion worth of IT and logistics contracts over the next twenty years.

In his remarks to the intelligence conference,* Humphrey, who had worked as a CIA agent in Europe for more than ten years before joining CACI, was careful not to accept, or even apportion, any blame for what happened at the prison. The individuals involved in the "Abu Ghraib incidents," as he called them, "had the best intentions." A contractor at an internment camp is in "a very stressful situation. You're being told you have to do this, that you're the only one who can do this." Contractors, he concluded, "need to settle back down to being in a supportive role." Inside the government, "there's a little too much right now of 'let's get a contractor and life is good.' There needs to be more of a setting of a line." To date, his speech is the most detailed and honest analysis of Abu Ghraib to come from CACI.

I asked CACI if I could interview London or another executive about Humphrey's allegations and the company's work in Iraq. Jody Brown, CACI's vice president for corporate communications, replied by e-mail. CACI, she said, could not confirm information regarding "employees, vendors, or anyone associated with the company," and has posted a "comprehensive" report on its Web site called Facts About CACI in Iraq. "The subject you have selected for your book is interesting and quite timely," Brown added. "As you seem to be aware, considering your interest and coverage of the company over the past two years, we provide high-value critical information technology services to the U.S. government. Our services are aligned with the nation's highest priorities to prevail in the war on terrorism, secure our homeland and improve government services to our citizens. Most of the services we provide in this area are classified and therefore by contract we cannot discuss them."

What happened at Abu Ghraib, and CACI's refusal to discuss it, stands as a kind of high-water mark for intelligence contracting. In 2006, the year Humphrey delivered his comments, the cost of America's spying and surveillance activities outsourced to contractors reached $42 billion, or about 70 percent of the estimated $60 billion the government spends every year on foreign and domestic intelligence. Unfortunately, we cannot know the true extent of outsourcing, for two reasons. First, in 2007, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) refused to release an internal report on contracting out of fear that its disclosure would harm U.S. national security interests. Second, most intelligence contracts are classified, allowing companies like CACI to hide their activities behind a veil of secrecy.





 http://www.dissidentvoice.org/May05/Stanton0509.htm

And the buyer? CACI International, the group that received unwelcome attention for its role in the torture scandals in Iraq that plague the company and the US government to this day. For its purchase of a piece of the classified domestic contractor CACI was awarded the Hottest M&A Deal by the Northern Virginia Technology Council in May 2004. According to investorideas.com, The huge CACI-CG-AMS transaction involved thousands of employees and over $1 billion in cash. For CACI, it was the largest acquisition in the company's 42-year history. The transaction increased CACI's workforce by almost one quarter -- from some 7,600 employees to more than 9,400 -- brought in more than 300 new contracts, and raised revenue to $1 billion for the first time in the company's history.
Having reviewed just 50 or so entries for this contract (Dxxxxx04xxxxx), and ending up at a $100M USD value, one can only speculate on how many more of the classified awards are contained within the remaining 27,000 USSOCOM, DISA-NCA entries. Perhaps it runs into the hundreds of millions. And for what? Domestic operations? Interrogation and rendering? Homeland security? Intelligence gathering and assassination? It s all speculation since only Rumsfeld, Guarino and CACI s Jack London know for sure.




 http://cryptome.org/rummy-op2.htm

The legal mouthpiece at CACI made a strong point about denying that CACI does not have an entity at the addresses mentioned in the Stanton article, yet fails to point out that they have actually used the 2011 Crystal City address for recruiting, and that they have hundreds, and perhaps thousands of employees working mere feet from here as part of their torture for profit business model. Further, the attorney gets all twisted up about Stanton mentioning that the company is/was involved in assassination, and yet he fails to refute and sidesteps the statements made in the article about illegal torture and abuse allegations at various U.S. Military Prisons that were linked back to Jack London, CACI and Titan.
Recall that it was Jack London or CACI who hired Steptoe & Johnson to "investigate CACI" during the torture debacle at Abu Ghraib, and that the law firm seemed more interested in a public relations campaign than the actual pursuit of wrongdoers. As firm of Steptoe and Johnson failed to refute or mention the torture allegations in their threat letter to Stanton dated 5/23/2005 it is safe to assume that the torture allegations against CACI are completely true, and that Steptoe and Johnson know that they are true, but that they take exception to CACI being accused of actual assaination when a more correct description should read something like "selective revocation of birth certificate". The employees of the law firm of Steptoe and Johnson has a long history of harassment and filing of frivolous lawsuits, pleadings, and motions and they are likely just trying to terrorize John Stanton into silence, which given CACI's history of torture and human right abuses should be taken seriously. Senior partners at Steptoe and Johnson also has extremely close ties to the Bush administration, to Carlyle Group, CACI, Titan, and the defense industry. Steptoe has also represented members of the Saudi Royal Family on a long list of matters, and has quietly handled a host of matters for the bin Laden family since 9/11. The specific attorney at Steptoe who wrote the threat letter to the journalist has a history of representing clients and specializing in Racketeering and Corrupt Influence cases. Perhaps the President of CACI is touchy about possibly being brought up on RICO violations?

IFA