My interview with Ann Wright was scheduled for late one morning when Wright, who was in New York City at the time, emailed to ask if we could reschedule.

“I have the opportunity for a live TV interview with Sky News Australia at 10:45 a.m. HST,” she explained. “It will be for less than 15 minutes.”

I was more than happy to accommodate her, as I was accustomed to Wright being in demand, both by the media and the protest groups she is aligned with.

At the time of our aborted interview earlier this year, Wright had just arrived in NYC from Havana, Cuba, where she would spend the next few days. It was her second Cuba trip of the year, and it followed other “fact-finding” trips to Washington, D.C., Minneapolis and Venezuela.

“I suspect I’m the only person from Hawaiʻi who has been to all of these areas in the past six weeks, or perhaps the last six years!” She wrote in an email.

But the 79-year-old Wright had to turn down a group heading to another world hot spot, Iran, because she was already set to sail in the Mediterranean as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla. It’s an international civilian and humanitarian convoy whose destinations include Gaza.

“It’s been a very active year so far and more to come with Trump out of control,” she explained.

Wright is a warrior for peace, an activist from Hawaiʻi whose work frequently takes her around the world. Through her writings, webinars, interviews and her physical presence — including places like convoy relief ships heading for Gaza — she walks her talk.

With global conflicts and uncertainty at a pitch this year, most folks can feel pretty helpless as we watch gas and food prices spiral. But Wright’s crusade shows that there are ways to forcefully yet peacefully speak out and speak up.

Wright is not just any protester. She first gained attention when she resigned from the U.S. State Department in 2003 in opposition to President George W. Bush’s decision to attack and invade Iraq. At the time she was the deputy U.S. ambassador to Mongolia.

I first met Wright over 20 years ago during the Iraq War. A retired U.S. Army colonel and retired State Department official, she was then gaining attention for her outspoken opposition to the conflict.

Even though she has a comprehensive Wikipedia page, it seems that some reporters and their staff do not do their due diligence before interviewing her. That was the case with the interview with Sky News Australia, which is owned by News Corp Australia, a conservative media outlet once tied to Rupert Murdoch and often compared to Fox News.

“Apparently, they didn’t read my CV, because when I really started talking about the U.S.-Israeli need to defend against Iran, oh, my God, for him it went downhill from there,” Wright told me last month when we finally connected by phone — this time in Houston, where she has family.

Wright has a plain, straightforward way of talking and is not afraid of correcting her interlocutor on factual errors.

“I mean, I blasted the shit out all of the stuff that he was doing,” she said about the Sky News Australia interview. “You could just see his face was kind of turning in different colors. And he kept asking questions because he had like, five minutes or eight minutes to fill. And I just kept after him with it.”

Wright concluded: “At the very end of it, he said, ‘Well, that was certainly an alternative view.’”

In Wright’s view, her opinion on world affairs is not an alternative take but rather an informed, accurate and compassionate understanding. It is her duty, she believes, to tell the truth as she sees it, something informed not only from her 29 years as a soldier and a diplomat but as someone who is deeply tuned in to current events and often near the frontlines themselves.

Wright’s many writings and media appearances are chronicled on her website, Voices of Conscience, which is also the title of a 2023 book by Wright and Susan Dixon.

The book, about government insiders like her who dissented over the Iraq War, features a forward by the late Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame.

“This country will not escape further human, legal, and moral catastrophes, or preserve itself as a democratic, constitutional republic, if that does not happen,” Ellsberg wrote. “If you’re at all like me, you will have a whole set of new heroes when you finish reading this.”

The ‘Peace Part’

Wright’s voice is not always sought out by the mainstream media in the U.S.

“Most of us in the peace community don’t really get invitations,” Wright told me. “There are a few people that do, but not too many, because the national networks don’t want to hear this stuff. CNN will say they go after the Republican administrations a bit strongly. But they don’t really want to hear the peace part of this thing.”

The “peace part” is an obvious imperative to Wright: The U.S. should not be fighting Iran, nor abducting the leader of Venezuela, nor contemplating invading Cuba, nor aiding and abetting Israel in Gaza and Lebanon.

It also should not be arresting, holding or killing anyone in this country under the auspices of immigration control. And in Hawaiʻi, the U.S. should move away from the over-militarization of the islands and instead focus on helping residents.

“This mammoth military complex located in the Hawaiian Islands makes the islands a major target for potential adversaries, particularly Oʻahu, where one nuclear bomb dropped on the island would destroy the U.S. military command and control for the Pacific and Asia,” she wrote for the website World Beyond War in 2022.

My interest in Wright first came through my job as political reporter for Hawaiʻi Public Radio in the mid-aughts. In addition to local interviews, I once interviewed her in Washington, D.C., during a massive Iraq War protest on The Mall.

Born in Arkansas, Wright attended the University of Arkansas, which led to her military recruitment. Her later work with the Foreign Service included postings to U.S. embassies in Nicaragua, Somalia, Grenada, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, the Federated States of Micronesia and Afghanistan.

By the time she retired, in the same year she quit her diplomatic post, Wright had made Hawaiʻi her permanent base. She had been to the islands before, including on special assignment from the State Department from 2001 to 2002, where Wright worked for 18 months in the Hawaiʻi governor’s Office of International Affairs during the Cayetano administration.

Wright’s peripatetic pace has only intensified in the past few years, a time dominated by the Russia-Ukraine war. That conflict has for now been bumped from the headlines due to the “excursion,” as President Trump has deemed it, into Iran.

That conflict, which as of this week was in a ceasefire as negotiators worked toward a solution, is of particular worry to Wright.

“This is probably one of the most concentrated military operations with military ordinance since part of the Vietnam War, where we dropped bombs on the DMZ and in Vietnam that were more than apparently we dropped in World War II in Europe — some staggering figure,” she said. “What Trump is doing here is, I mean, it’s dangerous for the world. There is going to be blowback here in the continental United States at some stage.”

She continued: “I mean, I cannot imagine that militants around the world are going to let a U.S. administration get away with what they’re doing in Iran, and the Iranians have plenty of operators all over the world. So I would suspect that the security around Trump and all the senior leaders of that administration must be extraordinarily high, because the threat level must be very high on them for what they’re doing.”

Educating The Public

Wright helps fundraise for groups like Code Pink, a women-led anti-war nonprofit, and Veterans for Peace, a nonprofit of military vets that promotes alternatives to war. She has worked with groups such as Women Cross DMZ, which has pushed for peace in Korea and women’s leadership in the peace process. And she has accepted funds for travel purposes from groups like Code Pink for trips to Cuba, Venezuela, Yemen and Iran.

But Wright insists that she is not “a paid propagandist” working at someone else’s behest — something that her own sister, a Fox News obsessive, has accused her of.

“Virtually any place our government doesn’t really want American citizens to go to see the effects of what our policies are, then I’m with a crowd of people that say, ‘Well, screw that. We’re going to go anyway and see and report back,’” she said. “Part of our obligation is to write about what we see and do videos about what we see and try to educate the American public and the world public of what we perceive is going on as the effects of U.S. policies.”

Wright said she also uses her retirement money from the U.S. military to help pay for her work and travel.

“Pete Hegseth, when he hears about this, will probably go after me like he did that astronaut-senator from Arizona,” she cracked.

Wright’s work is not without risks. Wright estimates that she’s been arrested or detained more than 40 times. It has included appearances before congressional hearings, where a committee chair was forced to call security during an organized disruption such as during the Iraq War with groups like Code Pink.

Protesters like Wright are trained to be peaceful. She said she now tells the Capitol police that she’s almost 80 and has had a hip replacement and a knee replacement — “Don’t hurt me, I can walk,” she will tell them.

The latest post I saw from Wright was two weeks ago, reporting, as she wrote in a widely distributed email, from “the Flotilla Crisis Center” in Istanbul, Turkiye.

(Yes, Turkiye, as its government prefers, not Turkey. Wright is ever the diplomat.)

She wrote that the 54-boat flotilla, which included boats from the Global Sumud Flotilla as well as groups from Turkiye, Malaysia and Indonesia, had been intercepted the day before by Israel. The flotilla’s mission is to break the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza in order to deliver aid to the war-ravaged region.

“Their boats have been purposely damaged by the Israeli military and left adrift as a hazard to international shipping and as another violation of international law by the Israeli government,” wrote Wright.

For its part, Israel called the flotilla “a provocation for the sake of provocation” with no real intent to deliver aid to Gaza, according to a PBS report.

The world may not change overnight through protest, but Wright said she finds great value in the work. And support for peaceful protesting is growing, she noted, pointing to the large turnouts for the No Kings protests against Trump.

“You know, the people that are taking the time to go out to do this are also taking the time to encourage their neighbors and family members to get out there and vote in the midterm elections,” she said.

“And if you’re upset about what’s going on internationally, upset about what’s going on domestically and higher prices and curtailment of this, that or the other thing — if you think that humans, even if they may be in our country illegally, should be treated with a little more respect than throwing them in these horrible facilities and making their lives miserable — then get out and vote.”

Tell us about a government program or service you think is working well. We’re also interested in people, especially public employees, who deserve to be celebrated for their service or their contributions to making Hawaiʻi a better place. Send to sunshine@civilbeat.org and include Bright Spots in the subject line please!