Saturday, May 08, 2004

CACI CIA?

Link:

The Philadelphia-area native at the center of the Iraq torture scandal has reportedly told friends he wants to get out of there right away and return to Australia, where he claimed three years ago he was joining the CIA.

"It's safe to say I've seen enough for a lifetime here in Iraq, and it's definitely time to come home," Steve Stefanowicz reportedly said in an e-mail to a friend in the southern Australian city of Adelaide. He apparently meant Adelaide and not Telford, the Montgomery County, Pa., suburb where he was reared.

Meanwhile, another Australian friend told the Daily News in an e-mail that in fall 2001 "Steve announced to all of his friends that he was leaving Adelaide to return to America to work for the Central Intelligence Agency."

"The events of 9/11 had nothing to do with his motivation to return to the U.S.," South Philadelphia native Sam Krupsky, now an executive with the Australian Rail Track Corp., wrote. "He was out of work and out of luck, and left because he had no prospects here."

Stefanowicz, a 1988 graduate of Souderton Area High School, was called by his Naval Reserve unit and reportedly sent to the Middle East in 2002. But it is the 34-year-old's activities as a civilian interrogator in Iraq for defense contractor CACI International that have put him at the heart of the scandal that has rocked America's reputation in the world.