veterans employment and transition and healthcare. In April 2004, Zinni gave a lecture entitled "From the Battlefield to the Negotiating Table: Preventing Deadly Conflict" at the University of San Diego's Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice Distinguished Lecture Series. In 2004, Zinni was named in an investigative report by Diana B. Henriques of The New York Times as being among the "retired or former military people" recruited to the corporate boards and sales forces of investment firms engaged in deceptive marketing of financial instruments aimed at military veterans in order to lend them credibility. The investment firm that had recruited Zinni, First Command Financial Planning, Inc., responded in written comments to a subsequent United States House of Representatives investigation that "It would be unfortunate if anyone inferred that these honorable individuals would take any action or support any organization that did not act in the best interests of service members." The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) subsequently concluded that First Command "willfully violated the Securities Act of 1933 Section 17(a)(2) dealing with inter-state fraud." In particular, the SEC concluded that First Command had sold mutual fund investments to veterans termed "systematic plans" which had very high sales charges termed "front-end sales loads", "by, in part, making misleading statements and omissions concerning, among other things: (a) comparisons between the systematic plan and other mutual fund investments; (b) the availability of the Thrift Savings Plan ("TSP"), which offers military investors many of the features of a systematic plan at lower costs; and (c) the efficacy of the front-end sales load in ensuring that investors remain committed to the systematic plan." In December 2004, First Command entered into a $12 million settlement with the SEC and NASD without admitting guilt. In 2006, Zinni argued that more troops were needed in Iraq in the context of preventing the then-budding civil war. In 2007, he worked on a report entitled "National Security and the Threat of Climate Change" with 11 other retired military commanders. The report stated that global warming would act as a threat multiplier to global conflict. General Zinni is also a "Distinguished Military Fellow" for the Center for Defense Information, a part of the World Security Institute. In 2009, Zinni reported that he had been offered and accepted the post of United States Ambassador to Iraq for the Barack Obama administration, but