 It's my privilege to now introduce as our next speaker and true teller, Ann Wright. Ann was in the US Army for 29 years, and she retired as a colonel. She was also a US diplomat for 16 years and worked in nine embassies, including reopening the US Embassy in Afghanistan in 2001. She resigned from the US government 18 years ago in 2003, in opposition to the US war on Iraq. Since 2003, she has worked for peace around the world through delegations to North Korea, Iran, Gaza, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Cuba, Vietnam, Russia, China, South Korea, Japan, and Malaysia. Ann, you really get around. Thanks for all you do as you're on, Ann. Aloha from the occupied nation of Hawaii, one of the victims of US imperialism 120 years ago. I was on many Zoom calls today and they were very poignant, because they were talking about the Cold War that we have today. One of them was a two-hour conversation with women from the Asian countries that are here in Hawaii and from Hawaiians. Hawaii probably has the most diverse ethnic, diverse population in the country where the majority, like 90 percent of the people that live in this state, are of Asian background and they are worried. Even here in Hawaii, they're worried about the Cold War that we are now facing, that we are in the midst of where Asians are being brutalized on the streets and murdered in their places of work. I also was on another call with an old friend from 20 years ago. She worked in the US Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, but she's an ethnic Russian, but it lived in Kyrgyzstan all of her life, as all the Central Asian countries had a lot of ethnic Russians that lived there. She immigrated to the United States about 15 years ago, and as a new immigrant, I said, well, are you suffering any of this new Cold War, where the President of the United States is calling Putin a murderer and all of the stuff that's been going on and she said, well, yeah, we are. The Russian population in Portland, Oregon is feeling the effects of yet another Cold War. So there we are, a Cold War, 40 years, 30 years after the last one, kind of finished. I go back 60 years to the Cold War back in the 50s. I got acquainted with the Cold War through the Methodist Church, because the Methodist Church decided they would bring in the National Guard leader and he would every Sunday night, he'd tell all of us kids about the Cold War that we'd better be scared of, and that we'd better join the military. Well, I did. And as Frank mentioned, I stayed in an awful long time and then was a US diplomat for the Empire. So I have not been a part of this wonderful group that has been speaking for hours now about all of the, well, you've been speaking about a lot of the stuff that I was maybe not involved in, but I was certainly in the government during the time that a lot of this was going on. And I'm so grateful to all of these groups with Code P, Bets for Peace, Peace Action, that once I resigned, you took me in, you educated me, you gave me a really good education on what US history was. And I've been trying my best to live up to the opportunity to really call out what the US is doing. And in this new Cold War that we have, I just want to mention what's going on out here in the Pacific. And I know that Jodi is going to be coming on in just a few minutes to talk specifically about China. But I just wanted to mention that the things that we do have, like on March 1st, we had a commemoration here in Honolulu about the largest nuclear weapon that the United States ever tested, which was during the Castle Bravo test in the Marshall Islands, where a weapon that was 1,000 times more powerful than the weapon that was dropped on Hiroshima and on Nagasaki. It brings to mind that the United States is still just spending like crazy on developing, continuing to develop nuclear weapons and having new plants that are built for these nuclear weapons. That's the new strategy that the US has for the Western Pacific and for Asia includes an ornament about a crazy spending. Right now, we in Hawaii are battling back a $1.9 billion homeland radar that wouldn't even work if they get it built. It's not even built for the types of weaponry that's gonna be, if there is actually confrontation with other countries, this radar wouldn't work anyway, but it just shows the military congressional industrial complex where our congressional delegation here in Honolulu in Hawaii is battling desperately for this $1.9 billion to come in to the Hawaiian islands to build this radar that won't work. We're also the headquarters of the Indo-Pacific Command, which has the military purview of all of the Pacific and then all the way over into India. And the strategy that US military forces are developing for a potential, and now they're even calling it a war with China. Normally, US wording is a little more delicate than that, but now we're having actually the phrasing of a war with China, which is so scary, so disturbing because right now we're having confrontations in the Western Pacific where we have our modest of US naval ships that are in the South China Sea, that are doing what the US calls a freedom of navigation exercises, which are really war maneuvers of sending a lot of ships in through the South China Sea and weaving them among the islands where actually the Chinese have built military installations on tolls on coral areas, and then they've built them up. And they have their military on these islands. Then we're sending our military into it. And then the Trump administration having decided that it would change the policy of the US from the last 45 years of kind of non-recognition of Taiwan officially, but of course we have dealings with them. Well, the Trump administration sent in all the highest level US government officials that had been in Taiwan in 40 years. And that made the PRC mad. And so all of a sudden then we had an armada of aircraft that were flying from the mainland of China right to the edge of the air defense zone of Taiwan. So the things that are happening out here in the Pacific are very, very scary. It's like it's a continuation, as Bruce Gagnon mentioned in his presentation about NATO and that the NATO is spreading in different directions. And it's coming out here into the Pacific. The four partners of NATO, which are Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea, have been working with the United States on countering China. The NATO hierarchy has now put out a statement that China is a threat to even NATO in the North Atlantic. One of the reasons being that the Chinese who are very smart people and who decide that any sort of confrontation or challenge doesn't have to be military, it can be economic. And so they've been building roads all through Asia, all through Africa. They've been getting leases on ports. They have leases on parts of like 30 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean. And they even have some leases on some ports in the United States. So there is a definite challenge that China has, but even though they are increasing their military, but not nearly to the extent that the US has, and only one third of the amount of money put on as their military budget. But in order for our military industrial complex and congressional complex to have a way to spend US taxpayers' money for their own benefit, you need to have threats. So now we have them, both the Russians and the Chinese. So that's the report from out here in the Pacific. And we wanna thank you all very, very much for organizing this marathon that you've been doing. Thanks so much. Peace in the world. Aloha. Thank you, Anne. Yes, it's a marathon. We are spending the day putting the cold war on trial. That is for sure. Well, wonderful. Thank you so much for your testimony and it will be put in the record. I wanna show you a piece of paper I've been working on during our marathon session. I'm gonna put it in Code Pink on the landing page for all of this material. You guys will be on the landing page on the Code Pink website. But I've come up with so far 12 projects from this from all of your talks. So things that you've been bringing out. So anyway, we're gonna list them. Joe.