Ann Wright
Ann Wright is a retired Army Reserve colonel and a 29-year veteran of the Army and Army Reserves. She was also a diplomat in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She received the State Department’s Award for Heroism for her actions during the civil war in Sierra Leone. She resigned from the Department of State on March 19, 2003, in opposition to the Iraq war. She is the co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience and and appeared in the documentary “Uncovered”.
Greta Zarro
Greta Zarro has a background in issue-based community organizing. Her experience includes volunteer recruitment and engagement, event organizing, coalition building, legislative and media outreach, and public speaking. Greta graduated as valedictorian from St. Michael’s College with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology/Anthropology. She then pursued a master’s in Food Studies at New York University before accepting a full-time community organizing job with leading non-profit Food & Water Watch. There, she worked on issues related to fracking, genetically engineered foods, climate change, and the corporate control of our common resources. Greta describes herself as a vegetarian sociologist-environmentalist. She is interested in the interconnections of social-ecological systems and sees the profligacy of the military-industrial complex, as part of the larger corporatocracy, as the root of many cultural and environmental ills. She and her partner currently live in an off-grid tiny home on their organic fruit and vegetable farm in Upstate New York. Greta can be reached at greta@worldbeyondwar.org.
Kathy Kelly
Kathy Kelly co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence, (www.vcnv.org) a campaign to end U.S. military and economic warfare.During several trips to Afghanistan since 2010, Kathy Kelly has lived alongside ordinary Afghan people in a working class neighborhood in Kabul. She and other Voices activists have been guests of the Afghan Peace Volunteers. They share in common a belief that “where you stand determines what you see.”
Kelly and her companions insist that the U.S. has not been waging a “humanitarian war” in Afghanistan and that the U.S. should pay reparations for the suffering caused in both Afghanistan and Iraq.Kelly has also joined with activists in various regions of the country to protest drone warfare by holding demonstrations outside of remote operations bases in Nevada, upstate New York, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
From January to April 2015, Kathy was imprisoned in Lexington, KY after a federal judge convicted her for attempting to deliver a loaf of bread and a letter about drone warfare to the commander of Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri.
From 1996 – 2003, Voices activists formed 70 delegations that openly defied economic sanctions by bringing medicines to children and families in Iraq. Kathy and her companions lived in Baghdad throughout the 2003 “Shock and Awe” bombing. They have also lived alongside people during warfare in Gaza, Lebanon, Bosnia and Nicaragua.
She was sentenced to one year in federal prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites (1988-89) and spent three months in prison, in 2004, for crossing the line at Fort Benning’s military training school. As a war tax refuser, she has refused payment of all forms of federal income tax since 1980.
Rosemary Armao
Rosemary Armao returned to work as an editor for the Organized Crime and Corruption Project based in Amman Jordan last year after an 8 ½ year stint at the State University of New York at Albany in her US hometown. There she was an associate professor and director of the Journalism Program. She also was a panelist on public affairs and media programs airing on the National Public Radio affiliate in Albany, WAMC. She has written and edited for six U.S. newspapers and a wire service, taught journalism and writing at five U.S. universities and worked on reporting and media development projects in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe as well as the Middle East. She has written reports on media development for the U.S. State Department. She is a former head of the Journalism and Women’s Symposium and of Investigative Reporters & Editors. She holds degrees from Syracuse and Ohio State universities.
William Rivers Pitt
William Rivers Pitt is a senior editor and lead columnist at Truthout. He is also a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of three books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know, The Greatest Sedition Is Silencea nd House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation.His fourth book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible, co-written with DahrJamail, is available now on Amazon. He lives and works in New Hampshire.
Ray McGovern
Ray McGovern leads the “Speaking Truth to Power” section of Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. A former co-director of the Servant Leadership School (1998-2004), he has been teaching there for more than 20 years. His current course is: “On the Morality of Whistleblowing.”
Ray came to Washington from his native Bronx in the early Sixties as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then served as a CIA analyst for 27 years, from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. Ray’s duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan’s five most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985.
In January 2003, Ray co-created Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) to expose how intelligence was being falsified to “justify” war on Iraq.