U.S. Considers Barring Abu Ghraib Contractor
The U.S. government has launched a review of one of the private contractors involved in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal to determine whether to bar the company from future federal business, company and government officials said Thursday.
The General Services Administration asked Virginia-based CACI International Inc. for information on the contract under which it provided civilian interrogators to the prison, company officials said. At least one CACI employee has been named in a military report as contributing to the abuse at the prison outside Baghdad.
Company officials pledged to cooperate. Neither the company nor any employee has been criminally charged in connection with the abuse.
“We continue to actively support every investigation and inquiry that has come our way,” J.P. “Jack” London, the company’s chief executive, said during a conference call Thursday with stock analysts.
The GSA inquiry is one of five underway involving the company and is the latest to raise questions about the history of its contract.
At issue is whether the agreement was being used appropriately or manipulated beyond its original intent.
The use of civilians to interrogate prisoners in Iraq has come under scrutiny in part because it is unclear how they can be held accountable for their conduct.
The contract was initially issued by the Army to a company called Premier Technology Group in 1998 to sell computer technology. As a result of a government decision and a business acquisition, it wound up five years later as a contract with CACI, under the control of the Interior Department, to provide civilian interrogators to the U.S. military in Iraq.
In addition to the GSA, the company is facing investigations by the Interior Department, the Army inspector general and the Defense Contract Auditing Agency, as well as an overall intelligence inquiry by the Army.
CACI’s stock fell nearly 12% after the announcement of the GSA review. The company said that as much as 35% of its revenue stemmed from work with the GSA, the federal government’s supply and services arm.
Contract experts said CACI’s situation illustrated the kind of problems created under the push by recent U.S. administrations to outsource more government jobs while shrinking federal oversight.
“The manner in which this contract was awarded and overseen is emblematic of a system that’s broken,” said Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written a book on the farming out of government work to private firms. “It’s pretty self-evident that the Department of the Interior, the government agency of Smokey the Bear, is not equipped to do oversight of Abu Ghraib prison.”
The Interior Department has suspended further work orders under the contract until it completes its inquiry. However, investigators have determined that the department had only limited contact with the Army personnel overseeing the civilian interrogators, an Interior spokesman said. Contact “has been sporadic because of the distance and the infrastructure available,” spokesman Frank Quimby said.
The contract was originally issued to Premier Technology by the Army’s intelligence and information technology contracting center at Ft. Huachuca, Ariz., to supply an array of products and services that included computer equipment, software, hardware and training.
As part of the Clinton administration’s push to consolidate government functions, the Army transferred responsibility for its contracting to the Interior Department’s National Business Center in 2001. The department reissued the contract with a $500-million ceiling, and has issued 81 work orders under it, most of them unrelated to Iraq.
In May 2003, CACI inherited the contract when it acquired Premier. The work orders under the contract mostly involved providing computer equipment, some of it related to intelligence technology, Quimby said.
Last summer, the Army asked an Interior Department contracting official whether CACI could provide interrogators under the contract. Quimby was unable to identify the officer in question.
The contracting official determined that the contract allowed for hiring interrogators because they would be using computers to collect and analyze information, Quimby said.
That decision is now being reviewed by the department’s inspector general.
CACI has been issued two work orders to provide civilian interrogators in Iraq, for a total value of as much as $41.3 million, Quimby said.
