

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
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<title>David Isenberg (Author at The Cato Institute)</title>
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<link>http://www.cato.org/people/david-isenberg</link>
<managingEditor>amast@cato.org (Andrew Mast)</managingEditor>
<description>
The Cato Institute seeks to broaden the parameters of public policy debate to allow consideration of the traditional American principles of limited government, individual liberty, free markets and peace. Toward that goal, the Institute strives to achieve greater involvement of the intelligent, concerned lay public in questions of policy and the proper role of government.
</description>
<language>en-us</language>

<item>
				<title>Private Contractors Still Lack Adequate Oversight (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10319</link>
				<description><![CDATA[The grim, continuing story of just how bad oversight and accountability are in the world of private military contracting received its latest confirmation June 10, when the congressionally mandated U.S. Commission on Wartime Contracting released its interim report, "At What Cost? Contingency Contract...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10319</guid>
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				<title>Book Review: Wired for War (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10288</link>
				<description><![CDATA[Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
by P W Singer
The Penguin Press, 2009, ISBN-10: 1594201986, 512 pages





If you want to understand why Peter Singer's latest book, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, is a tour de f...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10288</guid>
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				<title>The Good, and Bad, News on Contractors (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10154</link>
				<description><![CDATA[A United States government report released last week is a classic good news, bad news story on private security contractors (PSCs) operating in Iraq.

The audit report, by the Special Inspector General for Iraq (SIGIR), looked at five Theater-Wide Internal Services (TWIIS) contracts awarded to fiv...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10154</guid>
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				<title>Lions and Contractors and Robots. Oh my! (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10114</link>
				<description><![CDATA[This is my final "Dogs of War" column. Since starting in January 2008, I have covered many different aspects of private military and security contracting, but they have been only a small portion of the total number of issues worth examining.



Like any other issue, there is good and bad news wh...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10114</guid>
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				<title>Let Loose the Legal Beagles of War (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10097</link>
				<description><![CDATA[Don't look now but it is raining lawyers; or to be more precise, lawsuits. Just consider what has happened in the past two weeks.

There was a ruling on March 18 by the U.S. District Court in Virginia denying CACI's motion to dismiss a case by four Iraqi plaintiffs alleging abuse at Abu Ghraib pri...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10097</guid>
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				<title>US Cries Chinese Wolf (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10076</link>
				<description><![CDATA[On March 25, the United States Department of Defense released the 2009 unclassified edition of its annual report "Military Power of the People's Republic of China" to Congress. 

 

As a description of the ongoing development of China's military forces it is a reasonably informative document. Bu...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10076</guid>
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				<title>Have Ph.D., Will  Travel (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10075</link>
				<description><![CDATA[For more than six years, Iraq has served as a test case of the strengths and weaknesses of private military and security contractors. They most often operate well. At times, they are primarily bad. But most of the time, they have elements of both &#8212; meaning that even if a contractor does exactl...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10075</guid>
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				<title>Theory Is Fine, Action Is Better (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10059</link>
				<description><![CDATA[The International Criminal Court issued a warrant on March 4 for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Among other things, he is suspected of "intentionally directing attacks against an important part of the civilian population of Darfur, ...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10059</guid>
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				<title>Can't We All Just Get Along? (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10046</link>
				<description><![CDATA[If, as most people expect, private military and security contractors are increasingly part of America's military establishment and future battlefields, they will need to improve the coordination of their operations with regular military forces. 

In the past, there has been undeniable friction bet...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10046</guid>
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				<title>Contractors Doomed to Repeat the Mistakes of the Past (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10028</link>
				<description><![CDATA[An army may travel on its stomach, but it lives to fight another day by studying its history. For the U.S. military, the study of history is not an academic pursuit but a deadly serious business. That is why there are offices like the Air Force Historical Research Agency, the Army Center for Militar...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10028</guid>
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				<title>Outsourcing Peacekeeping (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10017</link>
				<description><![CDATA[Is the world ready to let private military and security contractors participate in U.N. peace operations? When I ask this, I'm not talking about Hollywood celebrities calling for the firm formerly known as Blackwater to work in Darfur. 

In one respect, this is a trick question as contractors have...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10017</guid>
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				<title>Mercenaries Are in the Eye of the Beholder (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9993</link>
				<description><![CDATA[Last Sunday The New York Times reported the American military will begin recruiting skilled immigrants who are living in the United States with temporary visas, offering them the chance to become U.S. citizens in as little as six months. 

While immigrants who are permanent residents with green ca...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9993</guid>
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				<title>Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq (Speeches)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9979</link>
				<description><![CDATA[Let's start with why I wrote this book. My rationale was simple. I wrote it to fill a void. It is a sad fact that much of the debate over private military and security contractors is, to borrow from Shakespeare, a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing. The tale is made wors...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9979</guid>
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				<title>Covering Contractors (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9978</link>
				<description><![CDATA[Last week I wrote that obtaining information about private military and security contractors has never been easier than it is now. But if that is so, then why do so many private military and security contractors think news coverage of their activities ranges from poor to abysmal?

Some, echoing th...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9978</guid>
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				<title>Private Military Contractors -- Mysterious? No. (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9957</link>
				<description><![CDATA[A common refrain from many who observe the private military contracting industry is that it is opaque, shadowy, veiled, secretive, hidden, non-transparent, etc. Is this true? Yes and no, but mostly no.

When I first started following this industry in the early 1990s, it really was difficult to get...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9957</guid>
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				<title>Security Peddlers Eye Afghan Windfall (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9938</link>
				<description><![CDATA[As the President Barack Obama administration in the United States grapples with what to do about Afghanistan, one thing is certain; it is good news for the private military and security industry. As the United States sends more troops there they will be accompanied by an increase in private contract...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9938</guid>
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				<title>Contractors Fulfilling a Contract: Imagine That (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9935</link>
				<description><![CDATA[Is it possible that a private security contractor can actually do a good job -- do what it contracted to do without waste, fraud or abuse? Of course, the answer is yes. And the vast majority of security contractors do just that. Yet to read and watch much of the media coverage of their work, it woul...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9935</guid>
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				<title>Slippery Slope: Contractors' Impact on Military Culture (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9907</link>
				<description><![CDATA[If anything about the private military contracting industry is certain, it is that it will continue to grow in the future. And that raises an interesting question: What impact will the continuing and growing dependence on private contractors have on the U.S. military establishment? 



In 1992 U...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9907</guid>
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				<title>Codes of Conduct: Trust but Verify (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9894</link>
				<description><![CDATA[Regulation of an industry takes many different forms. There are outright laws and regulations, official standards, governmental monitoring agencies and internal rules, to name a few. Sometimes it works well. And sometimes it fails spectacularly; think of America's current financial services industry...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9894</guid>
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				<title>The Future of Contractor Accountability: Immunity or Impunity? (Commentary)</title>
				<link>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9887</link>
				<description><![CDATA[One of the commonly voiced complaints about private security contractors is that they operate with complete impunity. This always has been somewhat overstated. For example, the June 2003 Coalition Provisional Authority Order 17, which states that contractors "shall be immune from any form of arrest ...]]></description>
				<pubDate>Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
				<guid>http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9887</guid>
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