Pay Any Price by James Risen Page A

officers who oversaw the prison emerged from the scandal largely unscathed. And so did the outside contractors who worked alongside the military and intelligence personnel inside the prison.
    But there was still plenty of bad publicity. And prolonged legal action.
    CACI was mired in the Abu Ghraib scandal after an army investigation concluded that Steven Stefanowicz, a CACI contractor working as an interrogator at the prison, had played a role in the detainee abuse. In the army report, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba determined that Stefanowicz had “allowed and/or instructed MPs, who were not trained in interrogation techniques, to facilitate interrogations by ‘setting conditions’ which were neither authorized [nor] in accordance with applicable regulations/policy. He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse.” Taguba also found that Stefanowicz had made a false statement to investigators about his interrogations and knowledge of abuses.
    The involvement of CACI and another contractor, Titan, in the Abu Ghraib scandal raised new questions about outsourcing in the war on terror, and exposed for the first time the degree to which U.S. intelligence was using outside contractors to perform some of its most sensitive tasks. Indeed, the contractors had greater legal exposure to the fallout from Abu Ghraib than did the federal government, which could claim sovereign immunity to avoid lawsuits brought by the victims at Abu Ghraib. Lawyers for those victims skirted the sovereign immunity obstacle by targeting CACI and Titan, turning them into proxies for the government.
    J. Phillip London decided to respond to the allegations about Abu Ghraib by going on the offense. Rather than apologize or explain its real role with the U.S. intelligence community, CACI aggressively took on news organizations that wrote about it and Abu Ghraib, and issued statements claiming that the media portrayal of CACI’s role was highly inaccurate and biased. In 2008, London even wrote a book, published by a conservative publishing house, that he claimed was designed to correct the record about CACI. It was entitled
Our Good Name.
    The CACI counteroffensive didn’t stop the press from writing about CACI, and certainly didn’t stop legal actions from being brought against the company. After a drawn-out legal process in the U.S. courts, Titan’s corporate successor, Engility, agreed in 2012 to pay more than $5 million to former detainees at Abu Ghraib to settle their lawsuit. But CACI showed no willingness to settle and fought on. Its refusal to settle was finally rewarded in 2013, when a federal judge dismissed the Abu Ghraib lawsuit against it, nine years after the prisoner abuse scandal erupted.
    CACI’s aggressive attempts to change the public’s narrative about the firm apparently did help with the government, because CACI’s work for the defense and intelligence communities continued with little interruption after Abu Ghraib. It has actually grown remarkably ever since. In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, the
Los Angeles Times
reported that the government might ban CACI from further contracts. But by August 2004, just months after the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted, CACI reported sharply higher profits. A company executive told the
Washington Post
at the time that Abu Ghraib had generated “a lot of noise,” but that it had not had a significant impact on CACI’s bottom line.
    The negative headlines have faded since Abu Ghraib, and CACI has boomed since. By 2012, revenue had surged to $3.7 billion, up from $2.4 billion in 2008. London is almost certainly not as rich as the Blue brothers, but he does own more than 192,000 shares in CACI stock as of 2012, according to the firm’s SEC filings. He has thus benefited handsomely from the firm’s post–Abu Ghraib resurgence.
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    Robert McKeon was a man of Wall Street, not the Pentagon or the CIA. He was a New Yorker, a graduate of