Protestors Crash Tech Conference, Indict Local Corporation for Role in Abu Ghraib

A small band of fiery activists disrupted a major technology conference yesterday to call attention to a corporation’s role in the torture of Abu Ghraib prisoners. CACI International, a Virginia-based technology company with an office here in San Francisco, had 27 employees working as interrogators at Abu Ghraib. Protestors delivered a simple message to the corporation, the top brass of which participated in yesterday’s conference: CACI should close down their local office, because our city does not accept torturers in their midst.

At the outset of the Iraq war, CACI received a no-bid contract to provide interrogators and other forms of counter-intelligence to the U.S. Army. This contract included services at Abu Ghraib, where evidence exists than many CACI employees were involved in cruel, torturous behavior against civilian prisoners. Yet because these employees were not members of the U.S. Army, nor were they Iraqi citizens, they escaped any sort of legal retribution for their actions.

The protest, which marked the kick-off of an ongoing campaign to get CACI offices out of San Francisco, began in front of the Westin Saint Francis hotel on Union Sqaure. The hotel provided the location an annual conference sponsored by J.P Morgan, held to allow top representatives of the nation’s biggest technology corporations to rub elbows. Activists stood just outside the door, calling for CACI to leave the City with chants, signs, and fliers passed out to those entering and leaving the hotel.

While the protest outside continued, four CACI opponents snuck in side, masquerading as conference attendees. Then, as a special presentation by CACI to their shareholders began, activists unfurled a banner telling the corporation to leave San Francisco. A small group of security officers quickly surrounded them and ushered them outside, but not without the group of activists making a lot of noise on their way out, chanting and yelling the details of CACI’s Abu Ghraib involvement.

“I think it was a success,” said Sasha Wright, one of those who snuck into the conference. “We were able to educate people about CACI’s role in the torture at Abu Ghraib and demand that they leave S.F., and that’s what we set out to do.”

Many of the activists out front agreed, issuing loud cheers as Wright and others were escorted out from the hotel by security staff. Dean Tuckerman, an anti-CACI activist and San Francisco resident, believed the protest lifted the veil on the seemingly innocuous tech company.

“People need to know that CACI is a torturing company that hides torturers in their business,” said Tuckerman. “And we’re against them in S.F., just like we’re against them anywhere else in the world.