Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man by John Markoff

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.

As examples, the scientists pointed to a number of technologies as diverse as experimental medical systems that interact with patients to simulate empathy, and computer worms and viruses that defy extermination and could thus be said to have reached a “cockroach” stage of machine intelligence.

While the computer scientists agreed that we are a long way from Hal, the computer that took over the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” they said there was legitimate concern that technological progress would transform the work force by destroying a widening range of jobs, as well as force humans to learn to live with machines that increasingly copy human behaviors.

The researchers — leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists who met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Monterey Bay in California — generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet. But they agreed that robots that can kill autonomously are either already here or will be soon.

They focused particular attention on the specter that criminals could exploit artificial intelligence systems as soon as they were developed. What could a criminal do with a speech synthesis system that could masquerade as a human being? What happens if artificial intelligence technology is used to mine personal information from smart phones?

The researchers also discussed possible threats to human jobs, like self-driving cars, software-based personal assistants and service robots in the home. Just last month, a service robot developed by Willow Garage in Silicon Valley proved it could navigate the real world.

A report from the conference, which took place in private on Feb. 25, is to be issued later this year. Some attendees discussed the meeting for the first time with other scientists this month and in interviews.

The conference was organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and in choosing Asilomar for the discussions, the group purposefully evoked a landmark event in the history of science. In 1975, the world’s leading biologists also met at Asilomar to discuss the new ability to reshape life by swapping genetic material among organisms. Concerned about possible biohazards and ethical questions, scientists had halted certain experiments. The conference led to guidelines for recombinant DNA research, enabling experimentation to continue.

The meeting on the future of artificial intelligence was organized by Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is now president of the association.

Dr. Horvitz said he believed computer scientists must respond to the notions of superintelligent machines and artificial intelligence systems run amok.

The idea of an “intelligence explosion” in which smart machines would design even more intelligent machines was proposed by the mathematician I. J. Good in 1965. Later, in lectures and science fiction novels, the computer scientist Vernor Vinge popularized the notion of a moment when humans will create smarter-than-human machines, causing such rapid change that the “human era will be ended.” He called this shift the Singularity.

This vision, embraced in movies and literature, is seen as plausible and unnerving by some scientists like William Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Other technologists, notably Raymond Kurzweil, have extolled the coming of ultrasmart machines, saying they will offer huge advances in life extension and wealth creation.

“Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Dr. Horvitz said. “Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.”

The Kurzweil version of technological utopia has captured imaginations in Silicon Valley. This summer an organization called the Singularity University began offering courses to prepare a “cadre” to shape the advances and help society cope with the ramifications.

“My sense was that sooner or later we would have to make some sort of statement or assessment, given the rising voice of the technorati and people very concerned about the rise of intelligent machines,” Dr. Horvitz said.

The A.A.A.I. report will try to assess the possibility of “the loss of human control of computer-based intelligences.” It will also grapple, Dr. Horvitz said, with socioeconomic, legal and ethical issues, as well as probable changes in human-computer relationships. How would it be, for example, to relate to a machine that is as intelligent as your spouse?

Dr. Horvitz said the panel was looking for ways to guide research so that technology improved society rather than moved it toward a technological catastrophe. Some research might, for instance, be conducted in a high-security laboratory.

The meeting on artificial intelligence could be pivotal to the future of the field. Paul Berg, who was the organizer of the 1975 Asilomar meeting and received a Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1980, said it was important for scientific communities to engage the public before alarm and opposition becomes unshakable.

“If you wait too long and the sides become entrenched like with G.M.O.,” he said, referring to genetically modified foods, “then it is very difficult. It’s too complex, and people talk right past each other.”

Tom Mitchell, a professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, said the February meeting had changed his thinking. “I went in very optimistic about the future of A.I. and thinking that Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil were far off in their predictions,” he said. But, he added, “The meeting made me want to be more outspoken about these issues and in particular be outspoken about the vast amounts of data collected about our personal lives.”

Despite his concerns, Dr. Horvitz said he was hopeful that artificial intelligence research would benefit humans, and perhaps even compensate for human failings. He recently demonstrated a voice-based system that he designed to ask patients about their symptoms and to respond with empathy. When a mother said her child was having diarrhea, the face on the screen said, “Oh no, sorry to hear that.”

A physician told him afterward that it was wonderful that the system responded to human emotion. “That’s a great idea,” Dr. Horvitz said he was told. “I have no time for that.”

Augmented Reality in iPhone OS 3.1 by Aidan Malley

Apple promises that its upcoming iPhone 3.1 release will be the first to officially support augmented reality apps that support the iPhone 3GS' camera. Also, a new seed of Mac OS X Snow Leopard has been handed to developers.

iPhone 3.1 needed for augmented reality.

iPhone developers and users excited by the prospect of augmented reality apps, which overlay information and controls on top of real-world objects seen through a camera, have been told to sit tight until the next release of the iPhone OS exits beta.

Although iPhone 3.1 has so far only been known to expose some video camera controls for developers, third-party producer Acrossair was told by Apple that the future release would be needed for its Nearest Tube and future Nearest Subway apps to work properly.

The apps are already highly dependent on the built-in compass and autofocusing camera of the iPhone 3GS, both of which are needed to alternately recognize the direction the iPhone is facing as well as to get a detailed enough look at a subject to tag it with information. As a demonstration of the technology, Acrossair's software can show the subway stops visible in a particular direction and their distance relative to the user.



Unofficially, iPhone OS 3.1 is anticipated to be ready by early September, just in time for Apple's by now yearly iPod updates and the seemingly probable release of an iPod touch with a camera that could take advantage of augmented reality when using Wi-Fi.

The Pre in iPod's Clothing by Michael Jones

Palm has quite a checkered history when it comes to syncing your Pre with iTunes, going as far as to make the device report itself as an iPod, and leaving lingering speculation that Apple would block the device with future iTunes updates -- which is exactly what has happened. But many Pre owners were surprised (and relieved) to hear that Palm had already fixed the issue, only a week after the problem surfaced.

So, how did Palm manage to get sync working again? Well, the good folks over at PreCentral have discovered that they pulled it off by making the Pre report that its USB chipset is developed by Apple. This change effectively makes the device appear even more like an iPod, as well as further ensnares Palm into what could potentially be a nasty web of legal issues.

While it may not seem like such a bad thing to let iTunes recognize the Pre as an iPod, the problem lies in how Palm is going about doing it. All USB devices report a plethora of information back to the operating system when they are plugged in, including a device ID, a vendor ID that usually identifies the chipset manufacturer, a manufacturer string to identify the name of the company that built the device, as well as other information that identifies various capabilities that the device might have.

Typically, a combination of the vendor ID and device ID can be easily used to identify a specific device, which is how most applications and drivers communicate with USB devices. When you plug in your iPhone, for example, the system sees a device with a vendor ID of 0x05ac (which identifies it as an Apple device), and a product ID like 0x1294. The system then checks to see if any drivers have registered to be notified when this device combination is plugged in, and it continues from there. In the case of the Pre, however, Palm is identifying the vendor ID as 0x05ac, tricking the operating system into thinking it sees an Apple USB device.

As you can see, this process relies on the IDs provided to be correct in order for things to work properly. Because of this, the USB Implementers Forum (commonly called USB-IF) oversees the assignment and handling of these IDs to ensure that things go smoothly. Companies who wish to manufacture USB chipsets have to apply for a vendor ID number, as well as pay annual membership or licensing fees to the USB-IF to be an authorized vendor. So not only is Palm causing technical problems by misrepresenting the device to the computer, but it is doing so by using an ID that Apple has paid for and has the sole legal right to use. Palm, on the other hand, is likely in violation of their own agreement with the USB-IF, which clearly states that "Unauthorized use of assigned or unassigned USB Vendor ID Numbers and associated Product ID Numbers are strictly prohibited." And yes, they do have their own ID for use on their other hardware.

So what does Palm have to say about all of this? They have turned the tables back on Apple, saying that they believe Apple is improperly using the vendor ID to limit the devices that consumers are able to use with iTunes. Wait, what? Isn't that *exactly* what the ID is there for? Most programs that communicate with any USB device check the vendor and device IDs to ensure that they are talking to the right device. If you've ever used the tools that came with your scanner, you've seen this before. HP's Scan Pro checks the USB devices to see if any of them are supported scanners. This is the sole reason these IDs exist, so that the software can identify a connected piece of hardware, and determine whether or not it is compatible. You wouldn't expect HP's Scan Pro to be able to download pictures from your Fujitsu ScanSnap, so why expect iTunes to show the Pre some love?

Don't take this the wrong way, I do think that iTunes and the Pre should get along, but Palm needs to go about it the proper way. Disguising the Pre as an iPod is just like a wolf dressing in sheep's clothing, but things won't go well for the wolf when the shepherd catches up with it.

San Francisco Examiner Outrage (Common Exceptable Military Medical Practice:) Airman Loses Legs After Surgeon Cuts Artery, Delays Trip to Specialists

WHO: U.S. Airman Colton Read

WHAT: Read, 20, went for laparoscopic surgery to remove his gall bladder last week at David Grant Medical Center in Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento. An Air Force surgeon mistakenly cut Read’s aortic artery, but waited hours to transport him to nearby UC Davis, which has a hospital offering higher quality vascular surgery. Because Read lost so much blood during the wait, doctors had to amputate both legs.

WHAT’S EVEN WORSE: Read, his wife and family are barred from suing the military due to the botched surgery because of a federal law called the Feres Doctrine. Lawsuits were supposed to be unnecessary because the military would “make whole” all injured service personnel. Read will receive about half his $1,600 monthly pay if he’s placed on medical retirement.

WHAT’S BEING DONE: A bill is pending in Congress that would finally end the onerous Feres Doctrine.

PolicyWatch # 1553: 'How This Ends': Iraq's Uncertain Path toward National Reconciliation

During Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's visit to Washington, the Obama administration will likely seek to reinvigorate that country's flagging reconciliation process as part of ongoing efforts to establish a stable political order in Iraq. Progress, however, continues to be hindered by ongoing violence, deep-seated suspicions, and partisan politics, raising questions about the ultimate prospects for national reconciliation.

Reconciliation and Postconflict Stability

The process by which war-torn societies heal is imperfectly understood. Experience, however, suggests that societies undertaking a formal reconciliation process to consolidate domestic peace agreements have a better chance of avoiding further civil conflict than those that do not.

Before 2003, U.S. and Iraqi thinking about reconciliation focused largely on the legacy of Saddam Hussein. Today, after six years of insurgency and civil war, reconciliation must also deal with the legacy of violence among ethnosectarian groups, and between former insurgents and the Iraqi government.

Successful reconciliation efforts, such as those in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Honduras, Mozambique, South Africa, and Uruguay, require courageous and visionary leadership, and often involve the following elements:

* Truth telling, which permits victims to share traumas and perpetrators to acknowledge guilt
* Redefining social identities by portraying both victims and perpetrators as fellow citizens
* Partial justice, where victims are compensated and at least some of the perpetrators are punished
* Public events that promote forgiveness and new beginnings

Most of these aspects, however, are missing from Iraq's flawed reconciliation process, which encompasses a diverse array of activities involving a broad array of actors -- the Iraqi and U.S. governments, nongovernmental and international organizations (NGOs and IOs), and neighboring states. These activities are often based on divergent assumptions about the nature of reconciliation and the means to achieving it.

U.S. Efforts

Since 2003, the United States has promoted reconciliation through the following activities:

* Working to incorporate Sunni Arabs into the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and the political process
* Making amends for the inadvertent killing of Iraqi civilians by offering apologies and compensation
* Engaging "reconcilable" elements in the Sunni Arab insurgency that are willing to join the political process
* Mending ties between estranged communities (Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Kurds) by organizing meetings to address common problems
* Pressing the Iraqi government to legislate the integration of former insurgents and disenfranchised communities into the political process
* Documenting property claims and disputes

A tendency to view Iraq almost exclusively through an ethnosectarian prism undermined early U.S. reconciliation efforts and unwittingly contributed to the polarization of Iraqi society. Inadequate resourcing, a lack of interagency coordination, and a refusal to talk with insurgents also hindered these efforts.

The U.S. took a new approach in the months prior to the 2007 troop surge, when the U.S. military opted to work with former insurgents from various Awakening groups, known as Sons of Iraq (SOI), to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). These bottom-up efforts, which focused mainly on reconciliation between U.S. forces and local Iraqi communities and insurgent groups, enjoyed significant success. During the surge, however, broadened efforts to reconcile estranged Iraqi communities, and former insurgents with the Iraqi government, witnessed only mixed success.

Iraqi Efforts

Many Iraqis saw the post-Saddam government's early attempts at reconciliation by retribution and compensation as nothing more than victor's justice. Retribution was carried out by de-Baathification and the trial of former regime personalities such as Saddam Hussein and Ali Hassan al-Majid (Chemical Ali). Compensation was achieved through the establishment of government foundations to care for Iraqis who had been maimed, imprisoned, or killed by the previous regime.

In June 2006, shortly after becoming prime minister, al-Maliki announced a twenty-four-point national reconciliation plan that included provisions for amnesty, conferences, a review of de-Baathification procedures, compensation for victims, punishment for terrorists and war criminals, and the creation of the Supreme Committee for Dialogue and National Reconciliation (SCDNR). Minister of State for National Dialogue Affairs Akram al-Hakim, a close associate of al-Maliki, heads this committee, an organization that attempts to engage Iraqi tribes, civil organizations, political parties, and religious leaders. Al-Hakim oversees, at least in theory, all governmental entities involved in reconciliation, although quite tellingly, the committee lacks a professional staff and remains unfunded (parliament rescinded $65 million earmarked by the Council of Ministers).

The Iraqi government's principal operational arm for reconciliation is the Implementation and Follow-Up Committee for National Reconciliation (IFCNR), which was established in June 2007 and is currently headed by Muhammad Salman al-Saadi, another al-Maliki associate. While formally under the purview of SCDNR, it actually reports directly to the prime minister and enjoys a high degree of autonomy. It deals mainly with the vetting of former regime personnel, tribal affairs (including both Awakening and tribal support councils), internally displaced persons, access to basic services (denial of which was used in the past to punish perceived enemies), and job creation issues.

In September 2007, the Iraqi parliament established the ad hoc National Reconciliation Committee (NRC). The independent Sunni parliamentarian Wathab Shaker heads this committee, and its dozen or so members are drawn from nearly all major parties. The NRC is not, however, a major player. Its primary activities include working for the release of mainly Sunni detainees and serving occasionally as an interlocutor to the Arab League.

In January 2008, the Iraqi parliament passed the Accountability and Justice Law to supplant the de-Baathification system established in 2003 by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Although some of its provisions are improvements -- less stringent criteria for de-Baathification, more generous pensions for dismissed personnel, forfeiture of restored rights in the event of demonstrated culpability for criminal acts, and an independent appeals mechanism -- others are not, such as exceptions to the new de-Baathification criteria and the wholesale dismissal from government service of former employees of Baath-era security agencies. The commission required to implement the law, moreover, has not yet been established.

In addition to these top-down governmental efforts, a number of bottom-up initiatives have originated from civil society, in the form of community and tribal gatherings.

The Iraqi government's reconciliation activities have been hampered by the taint of politicization and the lack of follow-through. A desire for revenge rather than reconciliation was seen as driving early de-Baathification efforts and trials of former regime personalities, further polarizing Iraqi society. Al-Maliki uses IFCNR to extend patronage to his supporters, such as the tribal support councils, and to exert leverage over his former enemies, while members of parliament apparently drove the creation of the NRC to ensure that the government addressed their reconciliation agenda.

Since al-Maliki outlined his ambitious agenda in 2006, accomplishments have been modest. Although dismissed army officers have been reinstated, personnel from the former regime's security forces have been paid their pensions, and local reconciliation efforts have gone well, problems remain. The Accountability and Justice Law remains largely unimplemented, key proposed amendments to the constitution have not been passed, and it is unclear whether the government will find stable employment for the eighty percent of former SOI militiamen who not being integrated into the ISF.

Finally, differences between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have been dealt with primarily by deferring difficult decisions on such key issues as the status of Kirkuk, governance in Ninawa province, oil, peshmerga/ISF relations, and the KRG constitution.

NGOs, IOs, and Neighbors

Numerous foreign NGOs have supported the reconciliation process by training conflict resolution facilitators and sponsoring workshops and conferences to promote dialogue among Iraqis, resolve local conflicts, and forge a common future vision for the country.

The UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) has promoted reconciliation by supporting elections, working to resolve the issue of Kirkuk, and helping draft the International Compact with Iraq. The Arab League sponsored the Conference for National Reconciliation in Cairo in November 2005 and dispatched a permanent mission to Baghdad in April 2006. The League's effectiveness, however, has been limited due to its failure to continuously staff its Baghdad office and tensions between its largely Sunni Arab membership and the largely Shiite Iraqi government. Finally, the government of Jordan has hosted a number of conferences to promote dialogue and reconciliation among Iraqis.

While it is hard to assess the overall impact of these diverse activities, some NGO-sponsored peace-building efforts have yielded important local benefits.

Reconciliation Challenges

A number of factors are likely to complicate efforts to achieve national reconciliation in Iraq:

Vested interests. Perhaps the biggest challenge is that key political parties have successfully exploited ethnosectarian grievances as a means of mobilizing support. These parties have a vested interest in perpetuating the political status quo and would stand to lose a great deal if a postsectarian style of politics in Iraq were to emerge as a result of a successful reconciliation process.

Persistent violence. Ongoing violence, although at greatly reduced levels, prevents old wounds from healing, opens new wounds, and creates the potential for renewed civil war. This reality lends immediacy to one of the principal conclusions of a landmark World Bank study on civil conflict: nearly half of all countries emerging from civil war suffer a relapse within five years.

Elusive consensus. Fundamental disagreements remain among Iraqis on a number of key issues, such as de-Baathification, the oil law, and Kirkuk. The fragmentation of Iraqi politics (more than four hundred parties and entities participated in recent provincial elections) complicates efforts to identify individuals capable of speaking for and negotiating on behalf of broad constituencies.

Justice denied. Many of those responsible for the worst bloodletting in recent years -- including leaders of antigovernment insurgent groups and government death squads -- are still involved in public life as members of provincial councils, the ISF, or parliament and show no contrition for their actions.

Demographic complexity. Because various population groups remain intermingled throughout the country despite years of ethnosectarian cleansing, incidents in one place may have broad consequences elsewhere.

Multilayered conflicts. Iraq's civil war involved conflicts within, as well as between, communities: the "nationalist resistance" vs. AQI, Awakening councils vs. Islamists, Jaish al-Mahdi vs. ISF units aligned with the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. For this reason, intra- and intercommunal reconciliation is needed. To date, most reconciliation efforts have focused on the legacy of intercommunal conflicts, though ultimately both legacies need to be addressed.

Iraqi political culture. While Arab tribal culture and Islam have provided the normative justifications and mechanisms for reconciliation at the local level, the desire for revenge, a zero-sum approach to politics, and religious extremism have hindered reconciliation at the national level.

Election-year politics. In March 2009, when the government expressed a willingness to reconcile with some Baathists, a number of civil society organizations (all apparently linked to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq) were formed to thwart these efforts. It will be difficult for the government to ignore these organizations in the run-up to the January 2010 elections, lest it appear "soft" on Baathism and lose the support of key constituencies.

External meddling. Syria, the Gulf Arab states, and Iran supported groups such as AQI and Jaish al-Mahdi, contributing greatly to the 2006-2007 Iraqi civil war and ongoing violence. Preventing the arming, training, and funding of such spoilers is key to keeping the peace in Iraq and moving the reconciliation process forward.

For all these reasons, Iraqis are likely to coexist uneasily for the foreseeable future. National reconciliation, if it occurs at all, could take years.

Next Steps

Preventing major renewed outbreaks of violence is an essential condition for successful reconciliation in Iraq. Accordingly, the main U.S. priorities in the next two years should be to press the Iraqi government to find stable employment -- even if "make work" -- for former SOI personnel and army officers who participated in the insurgency, and to prevent clashes between the ISF and KRG forces in contested areas.

This will require the United States, first, to expend significant political capital to convince the Iraqi government to take steps it finds extremely distasteful and, second, to continue to discourage the KRG from undertaking actions that could be perceived as provocative by other Iraqis. By the same token, the United States will have to tolerate al-Maliki's efforts to reconcile with members of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's movement, including "special group" militants who have American blood on their hands.

Furthermore, the United States and the international community should seek to advance the reconciliation process by:

* Working to enhance the capacity and professionalism of SCDNR and the Ministry of Justice, which plays a key role with regard to a number of potentially sensitive transitional justice issues
* Making foreign aid, investment, and debt forgiveness contingent on the Iraqi government's progress toward reconciliation, and by supporting, financially and materially, those organizations and entities, both Iraqi and foreign, actively working toward this goal
* Encouraging postsectarian politics in Iraq by funding NGOs that assist in the development of issue-based parties; urging the passage of a law that would require parties to declare sources of financing and proscribe funding from foreign sources (thereby reducing opportunities for foreign meddling in Iraqi politics); and pushing for the adoption of an open-list, multiple-district system for the January 2010 national elections, which is more likely to produce cross-sectarian political coalitions
* Fostering the creation of professional, nonsectarian civil service and security forces by offering merit-based training, education, and scholarships in the United States and elsewhere. Military assistance should be made contingent on continued progress toward creating an apolitical, professional, and reasonably representative officer corps
* Tapping into the widespread yearning for change in Iraq by issuing statements to the Iraqi and Arab media supportive of issue-based politics and free and fair elections. This will limit al-Maliki's ability to indulge his sectarian instincts and avoid meaningful reconciliation.

Finally, the international community should encourage the establishment of an independent, nonpartisan Iraqi organization, whose board of governors is confirmed by parliament, to coordinate and prioritize nongovernmental reconciliation activities and to serve as a counterbalance to IFCNR and SCDNR. UNAMI, if properly resourced, might assist with this effort. Such an entity would help NGOs and local and provincial governments facilitate bottom-up reconciliation.

Iraq is unlikely to resolve the many issues on its reconciliation agenda in the near -- or even distant -- future. Nonetheless, an energized reconciliation process that facilitates incremental progress on key issues, bolsters the security gains of the past two years, and helps tamp down ongoing violence is vital to the interests of both the United States and Iraq.

The authors would like to acknowledge the work of William J. Long and Peter Brecke, authors of War and Reconciliation: Reason and Emotion in Conflict Resolution. A list of additional published sources used in this paper is available upon request.

Foreign Pipeline Plan Matters by Simon Henderson and Marc Grossman

Two recent pieces of news from overseas deserve Americans' careful consideration:

-- Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Turkey signed an agreement last Monday in the Turkish capital Ankara that cleared a key hurdle blocking the construction of the Nabucco natural gas pipeline, designed to stretch 2,000 miles from the Caspian Sea through Turkey to Austria.

-- Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced at the Ankara ceremony that Baghdad would supply the proposed Nabucco line with 15 billion cubic meters of gas a year by 2015. That would fill half the line's capacity and start to address the project's greatest obstacle: not enough committed gas so far to make it viable.

The goal in building Nabucco is to diversify Europe's natural gas supplies by using Middle Eastern and Central Asian gas reserves that would not pass through Russia or be controlled by its Russian energy giant Gazprom. Until al-Maliki's offer, Azerbaijan was the only country considered to be a serious potential supplier to Nabucco.

Other countries with natural gas supplies -- Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Iran -- are not viable possibilities. Using Iranian gas is impossible because of Tehran's pursuit of nuclear weapons; significant political and technological roadblocks prevent getting gas from Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan into a Nabucco pipeline.

This puts Iraq in the right place at the right time.

Many challenges remain before construction on the pipeline can begin. The list is long:

Nabucco still has no formally committed suppliers; al-Maliki's offer is not a firm promise. Iraq needs energy laws. And while Baghdad wants to expand its gas production, it needs foreign help. A first round of deals on participation earlier this month went poorly; there will be a second round later this year.

But al-Maliki's offer to supply half of Nabucco's gas shows that Baghdad understands it must convince governments and companies that it is serious about its energy future.

The U.S. administration can do something important to support the Nabucco project by working to make concrete al-Maliki's offer of gas for the pipeline. Just as American backing of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (which critics said would never be built but today brings oil from the Caspian through Turkey to world markets) was crucial to its creation, Washington can play a decisive role in making Nabucco a reality.

This pipeline would have at least three benefits for the U.S. beyond increasing global gas supplies:

-- America's European allies and friends would diversify their gas supplies and not be so dependent on Russia.

-- The pipeline would be a positive development in the relationship between Europe and Turkey.

-- By participating, Iraq would take another vital step toward economic success and stability. Plus, Nabucco executives say significant amounts of gas could be available for the pipeline from Kurdish areas in northern Iraq, a possible basis for further Turkish-Kurdish reconciliation.

Getting Nabucco built and more Caspian gas flowing to world markets as part of a coherent Western energy strategy based on an East-West energy corridor has, thanks to the signing in Ankara and the far-sighted offer from Baghdad, become an opportunity for America.

President Barack Obama appointed Ambassador Richard Morningstar as special envoy for Eurasian energy in April. Morningstar, along with Sen. Richard Lugar, attended the Ankara signing. The ambassador's marching orders are now clear.

Israel 'Spy Scandal' Figure Larry Franklin Breaks Silence by Jeff Stein

He insists he did it for his country, to head off a disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq.

But instead, Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin found himself charged with giving classified information to suspected agents of Israel. In 2006 he was sentenced to almost 13 years in prison and a $10,000 fine, later reduced to probation and 10 months house arrest for cooperating with the feds.

Today, the former Iran specialist is mopping floors at a Roy Rogers near his home in West Virginia and serving a 100 hour community service sentence at a halfway house for abused children.

Now, breaking silence for the first time since he became entangled in the Israel-spy-ring-that wasn't, Franklin says he gave sensitive information to a pro-Israel lobbyist in hopes that it would be passed on to the White House.

He also admitted telling an Israeli official "that the Iranians were planning to kill Americans in Iraq."

The information was a "mosaic" of Iran's secret preparations for combating U.S. troops in Iraq, Franklin said, including the names and locations of Iran's secret agents and safe houses in Iraq.

He didn't think it was classified, he says. Now he realizes at least some of it was. He pled guilty in 2006.

But back in 2003, with the invasion of Iraq only weeks away, he was desperate to persuade the White House to put on the brakes.

So when Steven J. Rosen, an official with the American-Israel Public affairs Committee (AIPAC), told Franklin that he was friendly with Elliott Abrams, head of the Middle East desk in the White House National Security Council, Franklin said he "jumped at the chance" to get the information to him.

As it turned out, however, the FBI had an open investigation of Israeli espionage in Washington, going back to the 1990s.

Franklin, Rosen and Keith Weissman, another AIPAC official with whom he had been meeting, had just walked into it.

On May 2005, all three were charged with violations of the 1917 Espionage Act.

Only later, Franklin said, did he find out that "two tics" (items) on his list were considered classified.

Critics complained loudly that a conviction would criminalize the routine exchange of information among officials, journalists and think tanks.

Exactly four years later the charges were dropped. The government said the judge set too high a bar for the government to prove that the defendants had conspired to harm the national security of the United States.

Last week, Franklin, 62, said he was ready to talk.

"I have been silent for five years ..." he said by e-mail. "The release will be therapeutic."

We met at the Dupont Circle office of his attorney, famed criminal defense lawyer Plato Cacheris.

Looking tired and disheveled, Franklin sounded like he could use some therapy.

Once a top Iran expert at the Pentagon, holder of a PhD in Asian Studies, Franklin has found only odd jobs since being confronted by the FBI in 2004: ditch digger, church janitor, cleaning sewers, parking lot attendant at Charles Town Race Track, and so on. His wife is wheelchair-bound with a spinal disease. A teenage son was traumatized by the FBI investigation, he says.

Over an hour-long interview with Cacheris at his side, however, Franklin was more than happy to discuss a range of topic that had fascinated national security journalists since the case broke in 2004.

Among them: his leaks to AIPAC officials; details of a secret meeting he attended in Rome in December 2001 with the legendary Iranian conspirator, Manucher Ghorbanifar; and reports that someone had encouraged him to fake his suicide to avoid testifying against the AIPAC defendants.

Franklin also had bitter complaints about the FBI, which tapped his phone and forced him to wear a wire during a meeting in which he offered Rosen a phony classified document that the bureau had prepared.

All through that 10-week period, he and Cacheris said, the FBI never advised him he could be arrested himself and should get a lawyer.

***

Franklin says he was desperate in early 2003 to get his information about Iranian preparations to kill Americans in Iraq into the hands of a White House policy-maker.

The problem was, he didn't know anyone close to White House National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

Even though he worked for two of the most powerful officials in the Pentagon, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the undersecretary for policy, Douglas Feith, "I was just a little guy," he insisted.

He says he was worried that the Bush administration had "no policy on Iran," much less a plan for dealing with Iranian subversion when U.S. troops entered Iraq.

"By that time I was underwhelmed by the Bush-Rice team," he said.

Even Wolfowitz and Feith, leading neoconservative hawks, Franklin said, "thought Iran could be part of the solution in Iraq and not part of the problem, that they would see a common interest with us in getting rid of Saddam, and that by shock-and-awe we would scare them into ground-level neutrality."

("That's not at all an accurate rendering of my thinking," Feith responded by e-mail.)

Franklin said he was "entirely convinced" that the invading Americans would be "coming home in body bags in bunches," as a result of Iranian-sponsored terrorism, about which the administration knew nothing.

"They were preparing an entrapment for us, to get us in and never let us out," Franklin maintained, and the Bush administration had "no policy" to deal with it.

"Larry was frustrated because U.S. policy was contradictory," Hillary Mann Leverett, a national security council official who dealt with Franklin, recalled in a telephone interview.

On the one hand, Pentagon neoconservatives were pressing for "regime change," said Leverett, who was the NSC's director of Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs in 2002-2003.

On the other, White House and State Department officials were arguing for continuing discreet talks with Iran over Afghanistan and Al Qaeda.

The gridlock prevented the administration from producing a concensus National Security Policy Directive, on Iran.

"My impression was that we didn't have a policy," said another Bush White House official who worked on Middle East issues, "the principals were way too polarized. In that sense, it's correct to say we didn't have a policy."

So when AIPAC official Rosen intimated that he had good White House contacts, Franklin "jumped at the chance" to get his report into the right hands, he said.

"Rosen boasted of his contacts in the NSC and the State Department - he was dropping all these names that I recognized -- he dropped the name of Elliott Abrams, head of Middle East policy for the national security staff," Franklin said.

"When Rosen dropped his name, among others, I seized upon that ... If I could get [Abrams] to slow things down, maybe I could get Rice - Condoleezza Rice, to pause and say, 'Hey, maybe we really do need a foreign policy on Iran before we invade the country next door.'"

Rosen assured him he would get his Iran information to Abrams, Franklin said.

"But he didn't do that. He went to The Washington Post and the political officer at the Israeli embassy." (Rosen's indictment spelled out those acts.)

"He was duped -- he was duped real, real good," said a senior law enforcement official involved in the case. Another said, "My feeling was that they took advantage of him."

Franklin shook his head.

"No...this was my initiative. I was not directed by him," he said.

Why, I asked didn't he just call Abrams or somebody else at the NSC himself? Surely they would know who he was - or he could quickly inform them.

Franklin turned up a palm.

"Again, I was just - even though I had access to Wolfowitz and could go up to his office, I was just a little guy."

"I should have done a lot of things," he added. "I mean, I made some stupid decisions. Yeah, that would've been the better thing to do."

What's next? A book, of course.

An Ex-Green Beret Models His TV-Star Hat for His Comrades by Greg Jaffe

Roger Carstens went on a mission over the weekend to present his new reality show, "The Wanted," to his fellow special-ops commandos outside MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. Unlike all the other missions this soldier has undertaken since graduating from West Point in 1986, there was no way to train for this particular sort of military theater.

The earnest, 44-year-old counterterrorism expert had a case of the nerves. He downed two glasses of wine before the screening. Media ethicists and a human-rights group had already trashed the show, but if his fellow soldiers hated it too, then that would crush him. The NBC series (airing at 10 p.m. Monday) purports to track down terrorists and war criminals and deliver them to justice, no matter where in the world they are hiding. It goes after these suspected evildoers with a blend of military know-how, "The Bourne Identity" camera trickery, and gotcha journalism. Months before it aired, critics were making unflattering comparisons to "Dateline NBC's" controversial "To Catch a Predator" series.

Would real soldiers think Carstens's show -- in which he is cast as the polished Green Beret alongside a Navy SEAL and an investigative journalist -- is an artful, pulse-quickening action reel for their values? Or some perverse showcase for showboats?

The Tampa event was the second outreach screening Carstens had to sweat through. The first was a Thursday viewing for invited lawmakers on Capitol Hill. There he'd introduced the premiere episode and stood off to the side as a crowd of about 300 lawmakers, journalists and defense think-tankers watched in the main theater of the Capitol's opulent marble visitor center. Rep. Donald Payne (D-N.J.), who heads the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa and was interviewed for an episode in the works on Rwanda, gave a brief introduction.

The lights dimmed in the theater and an explosion from Iraq filled the theater's 40-foot-wide screen. After about a minute, Carstens, square-jawed and fit, appeared sprinting up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. "Roger Carstens is one of the world's leading authorities on unconventional warfare," a narrator says on screen. "He's what the Pentagon likes to call a snake-eater." The camera cut to a shot of Carstens in sunglasses charging forward and firing an M-16 rifle. A few seconds later, he's clad in a suit, shaking hands with Adam Ciralsky, the show's investigative reporter, on a crowded Washington street.

"The bottom line: We are going to do our own work on the ground?" he asks Ciralsky.

"Absolutely," the NBC reporter says.

"Sign me up," Carstens replies.

A few minutes later, Carstens, Ciralsky and Scott Tyler, a Navy SEAL, gather in a dark command center that is cluttered with maps, flat-screen televisions and photographs. The camera quickly pans past the television unit's "Super Friends"-esque insignia -- a panther striding across a globe, an olive-leaf wreath and a trident reminiscent of the Navy SEALs' trademark.

The room where the trio meet is actually a soundstage. Their target is real: an Islamic militant leader called Mullah Krekar who lives in Norway. Krekar fled Iraq in the early 1990s and spent the next decade shuttling between Oslo and Kurdistan, where he founded an armed separatist movement called Ansar al-Islam. The group, which has ties to al-Qaeda, has carried out attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and is responsible for dozens of beheadings and suicide bombings that killed Iraqi civilians.

In 2007, a Norwegian court declared that Krekar should be expelled, but there's a catch: Norwegian law won't allow him to be deported back to a country where torture or execution are likely to follow. In recent years, Krekar has sued Norway for violating his rights. Not mentioned in the show: He's also done more than a dozen interviews with U.S. and other Western publications. His wife teaches at an Oslo kindergarten. The portly jihadi is hardly in hiding.

Tyler and another former commando spend much of the first episode lurking outside Krekar's house. The show delves deeply into their clandestine techniques: the blacked-out windows in their van, the cameras they hang in trees and the hours of sweaty boredom they spend waiting and watching. Ciralsky travels to Iraqi Kurdistan to secure promises from Kurdish officials that they won't execute Krekar. Carstens and David Crane, the show's case vetter, meet with politicians from Norway's opposition party, who are outraged that a terrorist is living openly among them.

The episode ends when the NBC team interviews Krekar in his apartment.

"When I served in Iraq, I went over thinking that I would put my life on the line to liberate the Iraqi people," Carstens says to Krekar.

"You deserved to be killed when you were in the streets of Baghdad," Krekar shoots back. "You are one of the soldiers of the new Hitler. And you came to kill us and destroy our mosques. You came to tear our Koran."

The lights came up and the stars of the show took a few questions.

"How did you keep a straight face when you were talking to Mullah Krekar?" one of Carstens's former Army buddies asked. A few skeptics asked about legal issues surrounding the Krekar case.

Finally a friend in the crowd wondered if Carstens worried about his safety. "As a soldier your job is to get on and off the objective without the enemy ever knowing who you are," Carstens replied. On the TV show that wasn't an option. "But I've always believed a noble cause is worthy of your life," he said.

After the event, the crowd moved into a nearby ballroom for wine and beer. Charlie Ebersol, the show's co-executive producer and son of NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol, was already focused on the next episode, which involves a car chase through the streets of Hamburg. The suspected terrorist had been speeding the wrong way down a one-way street when Carstens took control of one of the show's helicopters, which had been shooting panoramic shots of the city's skyline.

"He retasked my helicopter to conduct surveillance on the target," said Ebersol, who was dressed in an expensive gray suit and black Chuck Taylor Converse shoes. A Tag Heuer watch dangled from his wrist. The thought of a Green Beret interfering with his airborne B-roll camera made the 26-year-old producer grin.

* * *

"The Wanted" producers found Carstens through a somewhat incestuous telephone game among Washington defense and intelligence insiders.

Carstens left the Army in 2007 because he couldn't persuade the service to send him back to war. He was going through a divorce and was ready to go back. His only post-9/11 tour had been a five-month deployment in 2007. It's one of the oddities of the Army that while some soldiers have deployed as many as three times to Iraq or Afghanistan, about one-third of the force has yet to go anywhere. As a lieutenant colonel in the Army's Special Forces, Carstens had relatively few battlefield assignments available to him.

Instead he helped run Special Forces training at Fort Bragg, N.C. Next, he schmoozed lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides for U.S. Special Operations Command. "I got tired of begging the Special Forces branch to send me to Iraq, Afghanistan or the Philippines. If I was fighting for al-Qaeda, I'd have seven years on the battlefield," he said recently. "There are times I actually envy my enemy. At least he gets to fight."

In early 2008, Carstens began a comfortable stint -- catered lunches, in-office espresso machine -- with the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington whose senior fellows are scattered throughout the top levels of the Obama administration. (Full disclosure: I was a writer-in-residence at the think tank for a year, while working on a book about the Army.) Carstens volunteered as a part-time foreign policy adviser to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign. But the work preparing think-tank reports left him unfulfilled. "I had a hard time connecting the sinews between what I was writing and the impact it was having on policy," he says.

After about a year at the think tank, Carstens got a call from Kenneth M. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former analyst at the CIA. "I know someone at NBC who needs a guy just like you," Pollack told him.

It was Ciralsky, the NBC television reporter, who was assembling a cast for "The Wanted." Ciralsky had worked with Pollack at the CIA before becoming a journalist, and was now looking for a Special Forces officer with a military intelligence background, Pollack recalled, "who liked to live life on the edge."

"After I got over my initial shock at the whole thing, I thought of Roger," Pollack said. "It really wasn't like anything I had heard of, but I don't watch much reality TV."

Carstens certainly fit the part. He is unfailingly polite, even in unguarded moments, and walks with a military bearing, almost as if he's marching. He keeps himself in top shape. He's good at casual patter. The first episode makes a joke of him asking Crane -- the former head of the U.N. war-crimes tribunal for Sierra Leone -- about his "peeps" in Norway (Crane is of Norwegian descent). Even when you put Carstens in a suit, he still looks like a Green Beret.

Carstens, of course, wasn't doing the show because he wanted a future in television. He'd signed up for the series, despite its weirdness, because he really thinks it can make a difference. That's why reaction of his fellow soldiers at Special Operations Command in Tampa meant so much to him.

Anxiety is mounting. Will this show ruin his 23-year military record, his serious career in Washington? Has he set himself up to be a part of some "reality-show embarrassment," as some fellow soldiers warned him before he signed on?

On Saturday night, after the Tampa screening ended, a recently retired two-star general approached him, slapped him on the shoulder and said, "Roger, you made SOCOM proud." For the next hour, Carstens was mobbed by soldiers and their spouses. He was so pumped, he said, he stayed out talking and drinking and telling stories about the show until 2 o'clock in the morning.

Saudi Efforts to Combat Terrorist Financing by Michael Jacobson

This past week, Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner traveled to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for his first official visit to the Middle East since assuming his current position. Although in many respects the Obama administration is off to a bumpy start with Saudi Arabia, Geithner praised Saudi efforts in combating terrorist financing, which is a significant departure from statements made by senior Treasury officials in recent years. His remarks in Riyadh were more than just empty praise, reflecting the broader view in Washington that the Saudis are finally beginning to make progress on this important front. Despite improved Saudi efforts, however, the kingdom remains one of the major sources of terrorist financing throughout the world, with significant funds continuing to go to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Laskhar-e Taiba (LET), among other groups.

Targeting Operatives, Not Financiers

Al-Qaeda's May 2003 attacks in Riyadh have been described as a watershed event in Saudi Arabia, awakening the Saudi government to the terrorist group's threat to the kingdom's survival. In the wake of that attack, Saudi Arabia aggressively took on Usama bin Laden's networks in the kingdom, arresting and killing numerous operatives, and effectively dismantling al-Qaeda's Saudi-based operational infrastructure. The Saudis however, did not bring that same aggressiveness to their efforts to combat terrorist financing, particularly when it came to money exiting the kingdom for terrorist groups abroad.

Although many U.S. government officials began to laud Saudi Arabia's counterterrorism efforts publicly in the years after the Riyadh attack, Treasury officials continued to heavily criticize Riyadh's handling of terrorist-financing-related issues. In a widely quoted September 11, 2007, appearance on ABC, Treasury undersecretary Stuart Levey stated: "If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country [for terrorism], it would be Saudi Arabia." Levey also criticized the Saudis for failing to prosecute terrorist financiers and called on Saudi officials to treat the financing of terrorism as real terrorism. Former Treasury secretary Henry Paulson had offered similar sentiments in a speech several months earlier, cautioning that although the Saudis are "very effective at dealing with terrorists within the kingdom," the Saudis "need to do a better job holding people accountable who finance terrorism around the world."

Major Steps Forward

Over the past several years, Saudi Arabia has made significant improvements to its counterterrorism-financing efforts. In the week prior to Geithner's visit, the Saudis announced that 330 individuals had been convicted of terrorism charges in the first trials involving the kingdom's new specialized terrorism court. Although the Saudis provided few details about these cases, it was notable that the charges included terrorist-finance-related offenses, an indication that Riyadh may have begun to consider terrorist financing as "real terrorism," as Levey put it. Saudi Arabia no longer appears to be focused solely on al-Qaeda; the kingdom has expanded its efforts to crack down on Taliban fundraising activities as well.

Saudi Arabia was recently admitted to the Egmont Group, the international network of Financial Intelligence Units, and is reportedly cooperating and sharing information actively with their Egmont counterparts. In addition, the kingdom's financial regulatory agency, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA), maintains fairly strong oversight over banks operating in the country, and bank executives are now more aware than in the past of their counterterrorist financing obligations. Bankers throughout the region also regard SAMA as the most serious and professional banking-sector regulator in the Gulf.

The first sign that Saudi Arabia finally may have understood the importance of combating terrorist financing was in late 2007, when Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Asheikh -- the most senior Wahhabi cleric in the kingdom -- released a rather surprising religious edict. In his fatwa, al-Asheikh addressed potential donors to terrorism for the first time, urging them "to be careful about where [their money is] spent so it does not damage young Muslims." After years of refusing to acknowledge that Saudi Arabia is a source of terrorist financing, or that Saudi counterterrorism efforts were inadequate, this statement proved to be a major step forward.

Saudi Arabia Remains Major Source

Despite its improved efforts, Saudi Arabia remains a major source of financing for terrorist groups, largely from private donors. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, has repeatedly and publicly expressed his frustration about the funding emanating from the Gulf -- specifically Saudi Arabia -- for the Taliban. Holbrooke stated that "while in the past, there was a feeling that the money all came from drugs in Afghanistan. That is simply not true . . . [the Taliban] get a lot more money out of the Gulf, according to our intelligence sources." Given estimates that the Taliban raises hundreds of millions annually through the drug trade, Holbrooke's concern raises alarms about the volume of money coming from the Gulf.

LET, the group accused of executing the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, also continues to operate in Saudi Arabia. Muhammad Omar Madni, head of LET's Nepal operations and a close associate of the group's chief, was recently arrested by Indian authorities. Reports indicate that Madni recently traveled to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region to raise funds for LET and to build its logistical networks throughout the region. LET's ties to the kingdom also emerged during the Indian government's investigation into the 2006 bombing of a Mumbai commuter train. During a raid of the LET chief's house in Mumbai, Indian government investigators discovered thirty-seven thousand Saudi Riyals, which apparently were sent from Saudi Arabia through the hawala network.

The extent of this terrorist activity illustrates the difficulty that the Saudis face in tackling these issues. While the Saudi government is now more focused on terrorist financing, the scale and volume make it an uphill battle. In Saudi Arabia's conservative society, some support for al-Qaeda -- and undoubtedly more support for Hamas -- still exists. Furthermore, because Saudi Arabia remains a wealthy, cash-based society where carrying or transferring large sums of money is not unusual, it is far more difficult for governments to trace and detect illicit transactions.

Continued Pressure on the Saudis

Treasury secretary Geithner was right to publicly recognize Saudi Arabia's progress over the past several years. Washington, however, should continue to press the Saudis to move forward and make further improvements, given both the serious problems that remain and the risk of backsliding on this issue by the political leadership. The United States should also encourage the kingdom to further increase the transparency of its counterterrorism efforts, particularly when it comes to prosecuting terrorist financiers. This will not only demonstrate to critics the seriousness of Riyadh's efforts, but may also help deter other potential donors who will realize that support for terrorism is no longer tolerated. Putting a stop to Saudi terrorist financing would not only benefit the United States, but would, as the Grand Mufti al-Asheikh recognized in his 2007 statement, also benefit Saudi Arabia in the long term.

Treasury Announces Sanctions of Mexican Drug Lords (TG-220)

As part of an ongoing effort to apply financial measures against narcotics traffickers worldwide, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) today designated four drug cartel leaders as Specially Designated Narcotics Traffickers pursuant to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act). The four individuals designated today are leaders of the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas, groups that are responsible for much of the violence taking place in Mexico today.

"Following on the heels of the President's naming of Los Zetas as a drug kingpin organization in April, we are today targeting sanctions against four drug lords who are senior leaders in Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel," said OFAC Director Adam J. Szubin. "We remain committed to using all tools at our disposal to assist President Calderon in his courageous efforts against Mexico's deadly narcotics cartels."

OFAC designated the following two individuals, who are leaders of the Gulf Cartel:

* Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sanchez (alias "El Coss")
* Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen (alias "Tony Tormenta")

The following two individuals were also designated and are leaders of Los Zetas:

* Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano (alias "Lazca")
* Miguel Angel Trevino Morales (alias "Cuarenta")

Today's action is the latest in a series of coordinated efforts by the U.S. government to neutralize and dismantle Mexico's violent drug cartels. The Department of Justice, in coordination with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), has today announced new drug trafficking charges against Miguel Angel Trevino Morales. In June 2009, the Department of Justice charged 19 of the drug cartels' top lieutenants, including Jorge Costilla Sanchez, Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen, Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, and Miguel Trevino Morales with drug trafficking-related crimes. Today, the State Department announced rewards of up to $5 million each, for information leading to the capture or conviction of 10 Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas leader, including Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen, Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano and Miguel Trevino Morales. The State Department is also offering a $5 million reward for Jorge Costilla Sanchez. In 2008, Jorge Costilla Sanchez, Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen, Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, and Miguel Trevino Morales were previously charged with drug trafficking crimes in the District of Colombia. Jorge Costilla Sanchez and Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen are also subjects of drug trafficking charges in the Southern District of Texas. The Mexican Attorney General's Office also announced rewards of up to $2.4 million dollars (30,000,000 pesos), per individual, for information leading to their capture.

In 2007, the Gulf Cartel was identified as a significant foreign narcotics trafficker pursuant to the Kingpin Act. The Gulf Cartel is responsible for the smuggling and distribution of significant amounts of cocaine and marijuana to the United States. Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sanchez and Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen direct the Gulf Cartel's trafficking and sale of narcotics and ensure the flow of illicit proceeds earned from the drug trade back to the Gulf Cartel's coffers. Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen is the brother of Osiel Cardenas Guillen, who was identified as a significant foreign narcotics trafficker in 2001. Osiel Cardenas Guillen was extradited from Mexico to the United States in January 2007.

Los Zetas were identified under the Kingpin Act in 2009. Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano and Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, as leaders of Los Zetas, control drug smuggling operations and battle rival cartels trying to expand into Gulf Cartel/Zeta territory. Historically, Los Zetas are considered to be the armed-wing of the Gulf Cartel, but they often operate independently.

Treasury's OFAC is responsible for an ongoing effort under the Kingpin Act to apply financial measures against significant foreign narcotics traffickers worldwide. Since June 2000, more than 475 businesses and individuals associated with 82 drug kingpins have been designated by OFAC. Designation action freezes any assets the designees may have under U.S. jurisdiction and prohibits U.S. persons from conducting transactions or dealings in the property interests of the designated individuals and entities.

Penalties for violations of the Kingpin Act range from civil penalties of up to 1.075 million per violation to more severe criminal penalties. Criminal penalties for corporate officers may include up to 30 years in prison and fines of up to $5 million. Criminal fines for corporations may reach $10 million. Other individuals face up to ten years in prison for criminal violation of the Kingpin Act and fines pursuant to Title 18 of the United States Code.

Researchers Develop Process for 'Surgical' Genetic Changes by Iowa State University

Research led by scientists at Iowa State University's Plant Sciences Institute has resulted in a process that will make genetic changes in plant genes much more efficient, practical and safe.

The breakthrough was developed by David Wright, an associate scientist, and Jeffery Townsend, an assistant scientist, and allows targeted genetic manipulations in plant DNA, which could have a huge impact on plant genetic work in the future.

Until now, when scientists introduced DNA into plants, they would randomly inject that DNA into the plant cell. There was no way of knowing if it was in the right place or if it would work until many resulting plants were tested.

The new technique harnesses a natural process called homologous recombination to precisely introduce DNA at a predetermined location in the plant genome through targeted DNA breaks generated by zinc finger nucleases. This occurs about 1 in 50 attempts and is very efficient compared to unassisted methods that allow the same changes at a rate as low as 1 in 10 million.

"I've been working in this field for 29 years, just when we started learning how to modify genes," said Townsend. "From that day, this was the goal -- to actually get the research to the point where you can have homologous recombination. Now, we've done it."

Using this process, a specific gene is located in a living cell, then a break is made in the DNA of that gene. When the cell begins to heal itself, existing DNA can be deleted or modified, or new DNA can be added near the break site. Afterward, the cell carries the genetic change and passes the change on to its offspring.

"It's like surgery, only on the molecular level," said Wright.

"It's been known for a long time that you if you make a break in a cell, you can get some DNA into that spot," said Wright. "It's just that you have three meters of DNA in a cell if you unwound it. Putting the break where you want it has always been the problem."

Zinc finger nucleases solve the problem and allows scientists to take greater advantage of homologous recombination, according to Wright and Townsend.

The research, published in the journal Nature, was performed in Dan Voytas' lab at Iowa State. Voytas recently left the university for a position at the University of Minnesota.

In addition to the difficulty introducing changes where researchers want them using current methods, government regulations often slow the movement of research from the lab to the field.

Wright and Townsend hope the precision of this technique will speed the regulatory process.

"In the random process, regulators would say, 'You really don't know what you're doing,'" said Townsend. "With this new technology, we can tell them, 'The genome looks like this, this is exactly the change we want to make.'

"That's the power of this technology. It makes it (genetic engineering) practical and much safer. It was impractical, and now it is practical."

There are many applications for this that could allow stunning advances for many crops, according to Wright and Townsend.

For instance, canola is a commodity grown for its oil, just as soybeans. However, after the oils are extracted, soybean meal is sold as feed. Once oils are extracted from canola, the meal has a much lower value as a livestock feed due to several factors, including the presence of the chemical sinapoylcholine, also called sinapine.

The new technique could allow scientists to remove the genes that make sinapine. The result would be a more versatile canola product.

Farmers, especially in the upper Midwest and Canada, would benefit from this new market for canola meal.

Other plants could benefit as well.

Removing the genes that are responsible for peanut allergies, or removing genes that produce harmful chemicals or anti-nutritionals in other crops are just a few of the immediate crop improvements that Wright and Townsend envision for this technology.

Hizb ut-Tahrir America: Let's Not Exaggerate; Let's Be Accurate by Madeleine Gruen

Over the past few weeks, and particularly in the last 24 hours, there has been an upward spiral of exaggeration and untruths in the US media and in the blogosphere, and also from Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), about the nature of Hizb ut-Tahrir America's (HTA) Khilafah conference, which is being held today at the Hilton in Oak Lawn, IL.

This morning, "Fox and Friends" featured an interview with one of the activists who will be protesting outside of the conference venue. Fox's headline blared, "Al Qaeda Holding Recruiting Conference at Chicago Hilton." This is like a bizarre game of "Telephone" in which the nature of the threat has been distorted from one media report to another, until the message has been distilled to the crudest level. There is no need to overstate the potential threat a group like HTA poses in the United States by shrieking "al-Qaeda." It does not need to be al-Qaeda to be dangerous.

HTA aspires to the same end goal as al-Qaeda; to establish an Islamic state with a military that will ultimately "carry" the Islamic system of government to the world. According to HTA's literature "Khilafah is the absolute leadership of Muslims everywhere." The major difference between al-Qaeda and HT is that HT's method is political, and does not include violence to achieve its immediate goals. However, HT radicalizes people, and causes them to hate America, democratic systems, and laws that protect public safety and civil freedom. It wishes to drive a rift between Muslims and everyone else; to realize "the strategy of Islam: enhance the physical might of Muslims, weaken that of non-Muslims, strengthen morale for sacrifice among Muslims, and develop the zeal to change reality not to yield to it."

In response to the recent stories in the U.S. media about HTA's Khilfah conference, HT issued a press release, titled, "Hizb ut-Tahrir Refutes Extremism Charges In An Interview With CBS News Before Its Upcoming Conference." Historically, HT attempts to modify its position and its tactics in order to portray itself as benign. However, all branches of HT worldwide adhere to the same ideology, as presented by the group's founder Taqiudin al-Nabhani in 1952. The press release issued by HT on July 18th quotes the conference spokesperson as saying that the group does not think capitalism will fall. Rather, he believes that this conference will cause Americans to embrace the Islamic economic system as an alternative to a system that is crumbling, as shown by the recent financial crisis. In fact, HT is not exclusively concerned with the implementation of an Islamic economic system. It is using the current economic crisis as an entree into a public dialogue to promote its ideology. Its system includes recruitment in the military, and the final stage includes the installation of an Islamic government that includes an Amir of Jihad.

HT's press release also claims that HT is not a "card-carrying organization." Rather, it is "an intellectual organization, so anybody who carries the ideas is a member." Again, the truth has been distorted. In fact, the process to become a member of HT is described clearly in its literature, and it involves years of study, which culminates in a pledge of unwavering loyalty to the organization.

Kill or Be Killed? by Daniel Byman

For months Israeli intelligence had hunted Salah Shehada, the leader of Hamas’s military wing and mastermind of dozens of terrorist attacks that had killed more than 200 Israelis. Israel aborted eight attempts to strike Mr. Shehada to avoid killing his daughter, who often stayed with him.

Eventually an informer presented Israeli intelligence with the opening it had been waiting for: on July 22, 2002, Mr. Shehada would be in an apartment building with no children nearby. Not knowing where in the building the master terrorist would be, the Israelis launched a 2,000-pound bomb, fearing that a smaller one would not kill him. But their intelligence was incomplete. When the bomb struck, Mr. Shehada was present, but so too were his wife and daughter, as well as squatters occupying the surrounding buildings. Fourteen civilians, including nine children, died in the strike.

World leaders condemned the Shehada killing, and even the usually sympathetic Bush White House declared that the president was “deeply troubled.” Over 100,000 enraged Palestinians chanting “Death to Israel” demonstrated to commemorate Mr. Shehada, with one man carrying the body of Dina Mater, only two months old, whose tiny face was the only thing visible from the Palestinian flag wrapped around her. Days later, Hamas bombed the cafeteria of Hebrew University in what it claimed was a revenge attack. Seven people died, including five Americans who were studying at the university.

Fast-forward two months later: Still reeling from the backlash from the Shehada killing, Israeli intelligence discovered a golden opportunity. A group of senior Hamas leaders—the “dream team,” as Israeli officials later called it— would all assemble. The meeting included Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the wheelchair-bound founder of Hamas; Ismail Haniyeh, who is now the leader of Hamas in Gaza; and Mohammad Deif, commander of Hamas’ military wing. Dreading the prospect of additional civilian casualties, Israel hit the building with a small bomb.

The terrorists emerged dusty but unharmed.

In the post 9/11 era, the U.S. is grappling with many of the ethical, operational, and political questions that Israel has long faced on targeted killings. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that a secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative, ended by Director Leon Panetta, was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives, according to officials familiar with the matter.

One former senior intelligence official said the program hadn’t come close to fruition, but the U.S. has engaged in an ambitious campaign to use drone strikes to kill terrorist leaders. Shortly after 9/11, the United States killed Mohammad Atef, al Qaeda’s military chief, in a strike in Afghanistan. In Iraq, U.S. forces devastated al Qaeda’s ranks by killing as well as arresting many militants—the most prominent being the 2006 killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. More recently, U.S. drone strikes have reportedly killed dozens of al Qaeda figures in Pakistan, and the pace of these attacks has increased since Barack Obama became president.

Such strikes are a painful necessity in the post-9/11 era, where U.S. foes cannot be found nor fought on a conventional battlefield. When terrorists can plot and organize with impunity, as they could in Afghanistan under the Taliban before 9/11, they become far more deadly. Killing terrorist leaders can disrupt a group’s operations, force its leaders underground, and at times even cripple the group permanently. But targeted killings carry a heavy moral burden, risk complicating diplomatic goals, and require difficult conditions to succeed.

Targeted killings wouldn’t be necessary if it were possible to arrest terrorists, even though the latter is derided as mere “law enforcement.” Dead terrorists don’t talk, while arrested terrorists can give valuable intelligence on the next plot and the location of their fellows. After the second intifada broke out, Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority ignored repeated requests from Israel to arrest Mr. Shehada and other terrorists operating in areas under their control. After Israel reoccupied the West Bank and solidified its control, it conducted fewer targeted killings there as its police and security services could capture most suspects.

But arrests are not always possible. In the first targeted killing of the second intifada, on Nov. 9, 2000, Apache helicopters blew up the jeep of the local terrorist cell leader, Hussein Abayat, in Bethlehem. The killing was a way around the prohibition of moving into areas put under Palestinian control in previous peace agreements.

At the time, Israel feared that sending troops to these areas would destroy any chance of getting the peace process back on track, but it could not allow Abayat to launch attack after attack with impunity, and Arafat’s security services would not stop Abayat. Similarly, Israel’s alleged killing of Hezbollah’s terrorist mastermind Imad Mugniyeh in Syria in 2008 came about because the Syrians would not arrest him, and in fact supported his terrorist activities.

The U.S. faces similar constraints with al Qaeda in Pakistan. The U.S. does not have direct access to much of the territory where al Qaeda operates, intelligence about al Qaeda leaders is often incomplete, and calls on Pakistan to arrest these leaders often fall on deaf ears.

The sudden death of a leader can throw a cell or even the entire organization into disarray, and at the very least plots are delayed as the group must recruit replacements. Some Israelis believe the killings make potential recruits think again before joining up and current leaders wary of engaging in attacks.

The operational disruption is biggest if the killing is part of a campaign rather than a one-off, as the legacy of Hussein Abayat’s killing indicates. After Israel killed Hussein his brother, Atef, took over. After failing to achieve his arrest, Israel blew him up in his car. Leadership then went to a third family member, Ibrahim. While the fighters respected his family pedigree, he lacked experience, and the quality of local leadership declined.

Even when they cannot be killed, terrorists being hunted must spend much of their time hiding. For their group to thrive, terrorist leaders must issue orders to subordinates, recruit and organize followers, and send out media statements. All of these tasks, however, are harder to carry out if the leaders are being targeted. Suspicion within the group grows, as it hunts constantly for informers, and leaders cannot trust their followers.

Politically, killings also counter terrorists’ efforts to undermine public confidence in government. Israeli politicians have found targeted killings immensely rewarding for a public hungry for revenge. This is crass politics, but it hits at a painful truth: publics want their governments to act, and the appearance of decisive action helps build resilience.

All these benefits, however, come at a painful moral price. Dina Mater is not the only innocent who died in a targeted killing attempt. In 1973, Mossad operatives in Norway shot a man whom they thought was a leader of the “Black September” cell that had carried out the Munich Olympics attack. In reality, they killed Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter, gunning him down while his pregnant wife watched.

B’Tselem, an Israeli human-rights organization, reports that from the outbreak of the second intifada through the end of 2008, Israel’s killing of 234 suspected terrorists also led to 143 noncombatant deaths. In 1986 the U.S. bombed one of the compounds of Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi because of his support for terrorism; the strike missed him, but accidentally killed a 15 month year old girl, whom Qaddafi claimed was his adopted daughter. Data are limited, but some reports suggest U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have killed over 600 noncombatants so far.

Politicians and the public can decry mistakes like these as “incompetence,” but the reality is that errors are more or less inevitable in targeted killing campaigns. Intelligence is often flawed, as in Bouchiki’s killing, or incomplete, as in Shehada’s. Muddying the moral and legal waters, terrorist leaders deliberately surround themselves with non-combatants, particularly children, in order to stay the hand of their casualty-averse enemies.

The killing of innocents is horrifying in and of itself, but politically it also reduces world support for counterterrorism. Civilized nations abhor terrorists because they deliberately target noncombatants; when governments kill civilians, even accidentally, in the name of counterterrorism, they risk losing the moral high ground.

Killings also can destabilize the host country. In 1973, Israeli special forces led by future Prime Minister Ehud Barak (disguised as a woman) among others, raided Beirut and killed several Palestinian terrorists there. As Palestinians and Israelis used Lebanon as the battleground in their private war, many Lebanese came to see their government as powerless. In response they formed their own militias, contributing to the country’s spiral into civil war.

In Pakistan today, the U.S. strikes on al Qaeda leaders are deeply unpopular and highlight the government’s inability to deal with the terrorists who operate on Pakistani soil. In both cases, foreign counterterrorism is but a small contributor to the host nation’s instability, but, as Lebanon shows collapse into civil war in 1975 shows, making a bad situation worse is always risky.

Revenge and escalation are other risks of targeted killings, as Israel learned after it killed Hezbollah’s Secretary General Sayyid Abbas Mussawi in 1992. Israel hoped that Mussawi’s death would cripple the Hezbollah, but the movement quickly regrouped, launching rockets at Israel and hitting Israeli targets in Turkey. Then it reached around the world to bomb the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29.

These operations are often difficult to carry out. Real-time intelligence is hard to acquire, and there are limited opportunities to strike. And failure has its own costs. When the U.S. tried to kill Osama bin Laden in 1998 with a cruise missile strike, not only did it miss, but the United States delivered a boon to al Qaeda. Mr. bin Laden crowed about the failure. The group’s apparently successful defiance of the U.S. attracted additional recruits and financial support.

The necessity of targeted killings and their many flaws requires that U.S. leaders pay careful attention to ensuring they are done only in the proper circumstances. A first question concerns the group’s bench: The deeper it is, the more leaders who must be killed to have an impact. The one-off killing of Mussawi did not disrupt Hezbollah because the group had many strong leaders; Mussawi’s replacement, Hassan Nasrallah, is a superb leader and one of the most admired men in the Arab world today.

Russia’s air strike that killed Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev in 1996 similarly did little, as new leaders rose to take his place. On the other hand, Israel killed the founder of Palestine Islamic Jihad, Fathi Shiqaqi, in Malta in 1995. His replacement was far less effective, and the small group floundered for several years.

Intelligence also must be superb. Constant “eyes on” capabilities are necessary to know not only where a terrorist is, but also if civilians are with him and whether the situation suddenly changes. To accomplish this, Israel has a near-constant presence in Palestinian areas. As former Shin Bet head Avi Dichter noted, “When a Palestinian child draws a picture of the sky, he doesn’t draw it without a helicopter.” Tribal parts of Pakistan are much larger than Palestinian areas and much harder to penetrate with human sources, making the challenge for the U.S. even bigger.

Timing is everything. In the aftermath of 9/11, Arafat was encouraging his subordinates to accept a cease-fire. In this period, Israel killed Raed Karmi, the leader of a terrorist cell linked to Arafat. Mr. Karmi himself was a thug, but he appeared to have accepted the ceasefire. The killing enraged Arafat’s followers, leading many to conclude Israel had no interest in a ceasefire and forcing them—if they wanted to stay in charge—to support revenge operations. Violence surged. A peace deal with al Qaeda today is impossible, of course, but timing still matters with regard to political conditions in Pakistan or other countries where the U.S. might strike.

Finally, for Israel killings are only one counterterrorism instrument among many, and often they are the least important one. Israel has built an extensive security barrier to keep out terrorists, has a web of checkpoints across the West Bank, cooperates with the security services of Egypt and Jordan, and arrests terrorists in the West Bank, among other actions. Killing terrorists reinforces these efforts.

For the U.S., this last concern is even more important. U.S. homeland defense remains weak, and American efforts overseas have a long way to go as well. In Pakistan, killings are a necessary evil that will only set al Qaeda back but will not disrupt it fatally. The long-term solution lies in increasing the Pakistani government’s ability and willingness to take on terrorists on its soil. In most other countries, including most of the Arab world, intelligence cooperation is the key counterterrorism instrument, and strikes there would be a mistake if they risk jeopardizing ties to the regime. Targeted killings must be part of a broader policy, not a replacement for one.