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Despite scandals over human rights abuses and war profiteering, private military contractors are expanding their presence overseas, and may even be involved in helping to draft the next U.S. defence budget. Currently more than 20,000 privately contracted employees are at work in Iraq, feeding U.S. troops, providing security, and rebuilding the occupied nation's shattered infrastructure. Although private military contractors, known as PMCs, were implicated in the torture scandal at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, and are the target of congressional probes into over-billing, more than 150 U.S. companies have been awarded contracts worth up to 48.7 billion dollars for work in post-war Afghanistan and Iraq, according to research by the Washington-based Centre for Public Integrity. That figure represents an increase of 82 companies and more than 40 billion dollars since the centre first issued a study of contracts awarded to PMCs last fall. In a separate report released Jul. 29, the centre also found that three private companies -- Booz Allen Hamilton, Perot Systems Government Services and Miltec Systems Co -- are headhunting for analysts to work in the development of the U.S. defence budget. [more]