 Hi, so I'm Karen Malpied and I'm going to be talking about my experiences with the war and before the war. So I was at home in Brooklyn on the morning of September 11th, 2001 when a close friend phoned and advised that I turn the television on. America is under attack, she said. Later that day my partner and I walked from our home in Clinton Hill to the Brooklyn promenade on the East River where we joined others in silent vigil watching the wreckage of the tower's burn. Still later I walked from Clinton Hill to Park Slope with my daughter crossing Flatbush Avenue. We saw groups of the survivors, glassy eyed like ghosts. Their skin and clothing covered in a thick sticky white paste so that they were all the same in human bloodless color. Some stood like statues on a flatbed truck. Others trudged silently, slowly toward their homes. In the three weeks that followed, New Yorkers gathered in Union Square and Central Park to chant, our grief is not a cause for war. We had seen firsthand the devastation of massive civilian death. We did not wish to inflict on others what it was we were having to tolerate and struggling to comprehend. On October 7th, 2001, we woke to the streets that had been swept free of the collectively created memorials. The bombing of Afghanistan had begun. The energy changed at once from shared contemplative mourning to an aroused mood of vengeance and this cry for revenge has become now 16 years later our national ethos and this growing cry for vengeance has led directly to the election of Donald Trump. It is impossible to look forward without first holding ourselves accountable and our elected officials as well for past crimes. The subsequent assassination of Osama bin Laden without trial which was widely cheered meant that there would be no full accounting of his crimes or of the Obama administration's continued extraditional murders by drones. Iraq was not in possession of weapons of mass destruction and Colin Powell was lying at the behest of the Bush administration when he held up a vial of white powder in the UN. Both these lies are uncovered in my anti-torture play another life as our other lies obtained by torture and used to terrify the American public. I have written and co-produced four plays about the U.S. and Iraq. The first going to Iraq blue heaven was about Gulf War one which coincided with the height of the AIDS crisis at home and it is an imaginative reaching back and forth between two devastated cultures. Then in 2005 Iraq speaking of war a documentary drama of the war's first two years told in the actual voices of Iraqis and Americans punctuated by a chorus of names of and ages of children killed including 18 year old Americans but in a ratio of 15 Iraqis to one American which was then accurate. In 2006 I began prophecy a play about intergenerational war trauma from Vietnam to Iraq acts of forgiveness and veteran suicide the epidemic of which was just beginning to be noted and in 2010 another life a surreal retelling of the U.S. torture program. Both plays were produced in London and New York. I have created many festivals of conscience found performance of my plays in which human rights and anti-war activists dialogue with audiences. As I tried to tell the truth and to engage audiences by storytelling about the war I found myself increasingly cut off from funding sources and theater venues and I have been regularly vilified by mainstream theater critics in this country though not in London. At the same time my plays have received high praise from major artists and activists and from audiences hungry for the experience of being truly moved. The dead and hurt have exponentially multiplied since September 11th 2001 uncounted millions of ghostly victims coated in cement and human remains struggle out from the rubble in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Gaza, Yemen, Syria. The rise of ISIS is equally a result of our Iraq invasion and torture problem program. Donald Trump's ascendancy proves our failures a nation to address the lies and illegalities of the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and of the US torture program. The same Islamophobia used to fuel the so-called war on terror was used by Trump to propel him to power because our nation never held itself accountable for illegal invasions wars and assassinations and has continued to punish whistleblowers and truth tellers instead of putting tortures and liars on trial. We are entering in an even darker and more dangerous time when hatred of the other has been given full-throated permission to thrive and climate change with its growing conflicts and refugee crisis is not only being ignored but expedited. We will need an underground life-affirming culture more than ever in the years to come.