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GLOBAL NEWS everything from recruiting spies and interrogating detainees to processing civil forfeitures in the war on drugs. About 110 contractors do about 90 per cent of the top-secret work. The biggest of the big are household names: Booz Allen Hamilton, L-3 Communications, CSC, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and SAIC. Contractors make up nearly 30 per cent of the workforce of America's intelligence agencies. At the Department of Homeland Security, the ratio of contractors to staffers is 50:50. TSA estimates that of the 854,000 people with top- secret clearances, 265,000 are contracting with 50 companies for op-secret conventional military operations. Top-secret projects aren't the exclusive preserve of familiar players ike the CIA, the Pentagon, the NSA and the FBI. You might be surprised o learn that the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Labor and the US Postal Inspection Service also do some top-secret work. The Washington Post reports that at east 263 intelligence organisations ave been created or reorganised in response to 9/11. The Bush administration created the Office of he Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in 2004 to keep track of the massive undertaking. Unfortunately, ODNI hasn't been very successful, in part because the agency has no legal or budgetary control over the agencies it is supposedly supervising. The CIA has been known to thwart ODNI by simply classifying reports as too secret for ODNI to see. (Source: by Lindsay Beyerstein, AlterNet, 28 August 2010, http://www.alternet.org/ story/148007/) ik July, the Washington Post published its "Top Secret America” investigation—a sweeping portrait of America's heavily privatised military-corporate-intelligence establishment. "Top Secret America” (TSA) is based on hundreds of interviews with government officials, contractors and independent experts as well as on satellite imagery, government contracts, property records, promotional materials from contractors, photo reconnaissance of suspected intelligence facilities and more. Here is a summary of the findings: At last count, the official US intelligence budget stood at $75 billion—more than 2.5 times what it was on 10 September 2001. The US has become utterly dependent on contractors for basic national security and intelligence functions. The National Reconnaissance Office literally couldn't launch satellites without to contractors. The TSA report found 1,931 intelligence contracting firms doing work classified as "top secret" for 1,271 government organisations at over 10,000 sites around the country, with 533 of the contracting firms founded after the 9/11 attacks. The TSA investigation also found 18 government organisations contracting with 37 private companies to conduct psychological operations, 16 using 50 companies for "special military operations" (e.g., SWAT teams and unconventional warfare), and 14 18 contractors. Contractors have permeated every sphere of intelligence from aircraft and satellite operations to human intelligence and _ information technology. Contractors do MELTING RATE OF ICECAPS LOWER THAN EXPECTED Ti Greenland and West Antarctic icecaps are melting at half the speed previously predicted, according to analysis of recent data from the GRACE satellites, GPS measurements on land, and sea floor pressure measurements. The research results, from a joint American—Dutch team from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Delft University of Technology and the Netherlands Institute for Space Research, are published in the September issue of Nature Geoscience. Previous estimates for the Greenland icecap had the ice melting at a rate of 230 gigatonnes (230,000 billion kilograms) a year. That would result in an average rise in global sea levels of around 0.75 Contractors Somer ifle "| was forced into early retirement after the Bill Gates Foundation stepped up its anti-malaria campaign." 8 * NEXUS INSIDE "TOP SECRET AMERICA" OCTOBER - NOVEMBER 2010 www.nexusmagazine.com