Tex Abe, President and CEO of Sumisho Electronics Co., Ltd., has lead the Company since June 2002. During his tenure, he carried out management reforms including several M&As and board structure change. Prior to joining the Company, he was president and CEO of Presidio Venture Partners, LLC, a leading corporate venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, where he made his mark in new-venture funding and management. Presidio is a vehicle for early to mid stage IT investment, backed by a major Japanese trading company, Sumitomo Corporation.

Abe has more than 20 years of experience in Sumitomo, where he developed his career on the information technology, utility, and independent power industries. Through assignments in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angels, Houston, and Tokyo, he has gained expertise in project development and management, project finance, corporate management, full turnkey contracting, and major equipment sales and marketing.

Feisal Istrabadi is the Deputy Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations, and one of Iraq's most important constitutional thinkers. He was one of the principal legal drafters of Iraq's interim constitution (adopted on March 8 of 2004) and the lead author of its Bill of Fundamental Rights. During 2002-2003 he was a member of the Democratic Principles Working Group and the Transitional Justice Working Group of the Future of Iraq project. A native of Iraq, he was schooled in the United States and practiced law in the central United States for fifteen years, with extensive trial and appellate court experience. He holds Bachelor's of Science and Doctor of Jurisprudence degrees from Indiana University, and has been a senior fellow at the International Human Rights Law Institute, College of Law, DePaul University, Chicago.

Bennett Freeman is a managing director in the Washington, DC office of Burson-Marsteller, where he leads the firm's Global Corporate Responsibility practice advising multinational corporations on issues ranging from human rights and labor practices to the environment and sustainable development. Prior to joining Burson-Marsteller in May 2003, Freeman advised companies, international institutions and NGOs on corporate responsibility and human rights as Principal of Sustainable Investment Strategies. In 2002, he co-authored an independent Human Rights Impact Assessment of the BP Tangguh project in Papua, Indonesia, the first such assessment undertaken in advance of a major energy project in the world.

Freeman served as a presidential appointee in three positions in the State Department across the full span of the Clinton Administration. As U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from 1999 to early 2001, Freeman led the State Department's bilateral human rights diplomacy around the world under Assistant Secretary Harold Koh. In that capacity, he was the principal architect of the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights, the first human rights standard forged by governments, companies and NGOs for the oil and mining industries. Previously he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and chief speechwriter for Secretary of State Warren Christopher from early 1993 to early 1997.

A buffet lunch will be available to those who reserve with Debbie Warren dawarren@stanford.edu by Friday, November 12.

Ambassador Charles L. Pritchard, an expert on U.S. relations with Japan and Korea, was a top aide to President Bush in the administration's negotiations with North Korea and the U.S. Representative to the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO). He was also special assistant to the President and senior director for Asian affairs in the Clinton administration. Pritchard joined the Brookings Institution as a visiting fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program on September 2, 2003. While at Brookings, Pritchard has published "North Korea Needs A Personal Touch", Los Angeles Times (09/10/03); "A Guarantee to Bring Kim into Line", Financial Times (10/10/03); "Freeze on North Korea Nuclear Program is Imperative", The Korea Herald (01/09/04); "What I Saw in North Korea", New York Times (01/21/04), "While the US Looked for Iraqi WMD North Korea Built Theirs", YaleGlobal(01/01/04), and "U.S. Should Confide in Allies on North Korean Nukes", Asahi Shimbun/International Herald Tribune (08/06-07/04).

Following a twenty-eight year career in the army, during which he held military assign-ments with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as its country director for Japan, and as the U.S. Army Attaché in Tokyo, Pritchard joined the National Security Council in 1996.

Pritchard obtained his B.A. in Political Science from Mercer University in Georgia and his M.A. in International Studies from the University of Hawaii. He is the recipient of the Defense Distinguished Service Medal.

I am a child of the Cold War. As such, my thinking for decades was conditioned by the great issue of that era: How to maintain freedom in the face of our perceptions of Soviet ambitions for world domination?

For the first few decades of the Cold War, the United States strategy for achieving this objective was containment backed up with a powerful nuclear deterrence. But as the nuclear arms race heated up, it became increasingly clear that this strategy risked precipitating a nuclear holocaust. Thus, by the late sixties, nuclear arms control had become the overriding security issue - certainly it dominated my thinking on security during that era.

But with the ending of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear holocaust receded and arms control, as we had practiced it during that era, was no longer the dominant security issue. The most serious threat to the United States became nuclear weapons in the hands of failed states or terrorists - used not in a standard military operation, but in extortive or apocalyptic ways. Therefore, in the present era, preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons replaces arms control as the organizing principle for our security. Certainly it has dominated my thinking on security for the last decade.