CODEPINK Radio

This week on CODEPINK radio join Matthew Hoh, Ann Wright, Dr. Zaher Wahabfor, Phyllis Bennis and CODEPINK's Medea Benjamin for a discussion on Afghanistan With the collapse of the US-backed Afghan government and the Taliban set to return to a position of power they occupied 20 years ago, who is responsible for this colossal failure? Who should be held accountable and how? And what can we do to make sure that lessons are learned that will stop the US government from future invasions/occupations?

With the collapse of the US-backed Afghan government and the Taliban set to return to a position of power they occupied 20 years ago, who is responsible for this colossal failure? Who should be held accountable and how? And what can we do to make sure that lessons are learned that will stop the US government from future invasions/occupations?   

Army Colonel Ann Wright, former State Dept official Matthew Hoh, and Dr. Zaher Wahab join us in conversation. 

Zaher Wahab was born and schooled in Afghanistan, received a BA in sociology from The American University of Beirut, an MA in comparative education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and an MA in anthropology, and a PhD in international development education from Stanford University. 

Dr. Wahab was the first person in his family’s history to attend the village school, a boarding school in Kabul, and receive scholarships to attend college in Lebanon and the US. Dr. Wahab served as senior advisor to the Minister of Higher Education in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006. he has written and presented numerous papers at regional, national, and international forums on education, was profiled in the Stanford Magazine, Academe, The Portland Alliance, The Oregonian, The Lake Oswego Review and Lewis & Clark’s The Chronicle Magazine for his achievements and for his services in the U.S. and Afghanistan, and is a frequent speaker at educational, civic and media organizations.

Matthew Hoh has nearly 12 years of experience with America’s wars overseas with the US Marine Corps, Department of Defense, and State Department. He has been a senior fellow with the Center For International Policy since 2010. In 2009, Matthew resigned in protest from his post in Afghanistan with the State Department over the American escalation of the war. His writings have appeared in publications such as the Defense News, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He has been a guest on hundreds of radio and television networks and is an active member of Veterans for Peace.  

Ann Wright is a retired Army Colonel who was a diplomat in the State Department for 16 years, serving in the U.S. embassies of Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Grenada and Nicaragua. She was on the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in December 2001 and remained five months. On March 13, 2003, Wright sent a letter of resignation to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. Since that day, she has worked for peace, writing and speaking all over the world and has returned three times to Afghanistan. Wright is co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience and is active with CODEPINK, Veterans for Peace, and other organizations.  

Moderated by Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK and author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection, and Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran

This week on CODEPINK radio, we hear from three young Cuban women in an excerpt taken from a recent CODEPINK webinar on Cuba. In the second half of the program, CODEPINK's Teri Mattson will interview Diego Sequera of Mision Verdad, an independent Venezuelan think tank, about the upcoming dialogue in Mexico between the Venezuelan government and various factions of the opposition.

This week on CODEPINK Radio, CODEPINK China is Not Our Enemy Campaign coordinator Madison Tang interviews Dr. Zhun Xu on his experience as an academic in both China and the United States, and on his analysis of the Western discourse surrounding Xinjiang and Hong Kong, two regions of China that the US gov’t & MSM have become increasingly fixated on in the past three years in order to manufacture consent for hybrid economic, military, and information war on China. In the second half of the show, we will hear from Chris Hedges, a pulitzer prize winning journalist, television host, and author about U.S. empire, militarism, racism, and propaganda in both the US’s war on Afghanistan and its escalating war on China.

This week on CODEPINK radio Danaka Katovich from the CODEPINK Middle East Team discusses Daniel Hale, a whistleblower who was sentenced to prison earlier this week. After that, Danaka hears from CODEPINK co-director Ariel Gold with updates from Palestine, then hears from journalist Abby Martin about "Gaza Fights for Freedom". Following the break, Matthew Petti talks about the Quincy Institute's most recent report on Middle East interventionism over the last ten years, US involvement, and the Iran Nuclear Deal.

This week on CODEPINK Radio host Marcy Winograd interviews Marylia Kelly, Executive Director of Tri-Valley Cares, an anti-nuclear organization based in Livermore. The organization is part of a coalition suing the Department of Energy for failing to conduct a comprehensive programmatic environmental assessment of increased nuclear bomb core production for new nuclear Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. (ICBM's) This show also features CODEPINK Congress interviews with author Rivera Sun, activist Ed Hasbrouck  and Veterans for Peace President Adrienne Kinne on legislation to abolish the Selective Service and efforts to defeat legislation to expand Selective Service to include women. Lastly, this episode also contains testimony from March 2021 hearings conducted by New York Senator Kristin Gillibrand who has introduced legislation to address the problem of rampant sexual harassment and sexual assault in the U.S. military.

On this episode, CODEPINK's Leonardo Flores will interview Dr. Jemima Pierre from the Black Alliance for Peace about the assassination of Haitian leader Jovenel Moise and the possibility of a U.S. intervention in the country. In the second half of the program, we will hear from several speakers, including Daniel Menocal of the Cuban Embassy and Angelica Salazar of ACERE (Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect) about the protests in Cuba and the 60+ year U.S. blockade.

On this episode, join us to hear from Dr. Catherine Wilkerson about how the U.S.'s scapegoating of China for the global pandemic is both a deflection of U.S. accountability to contain the virus and a propaganda strategy for manufacturing public consent for war with China. In the second half of the show, CODEPINK team member RJ Thomsen discusses the House Foreign Affairs Committee's markup for the anti-China EAGLE Act, which uses the inflated threat of China as intellectual justification for further military spending.

This episode features comments by Sonali Kolhatkar, Co-Director of the Afghan Women's Mission, Mark Perry, Senior Analyst of the Quincy Institute, Assal Rad, policy researcher with the National Iranian American Council and Alex Main, director, Center for Economic Policy. Our guests were recently featured on CODEPINK Congress, a Tuesday night program focused on demilitarization and foriegn policy. In this episode, CODEPINK Radio refutes the argument that the US should continue its 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, discusses the movement to defund nuclear weapons and examines life under debilitating US sanctions in Iran and Venezuela.

In this episode, we'll take a deep dive into the Pentagon budget. During the first half of the program, Carley Towne interviews Miriam Pemberton, author of Six Stops on the National Security Tour: Warfare Economies & Other Ambitions about how we can demilitarize the economy. Then, CODEPINK organizer Cody Urban talks with James Ehlers, an activist in Vermont, about our ongoing campaign to Divest Vermont from the War Machine and the F-35 program there.