Hear Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, political journalist William Kristol, policy analyst Carl Conetta, Baghdad-born activist Yanar Mohammed, and writer Lawrence Wright on this edition of Fresh Air.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff. He became an outspoken critic of the Bush administration after leaving the State Department in January 2005. Wilkerson is a veteran of the Vietnam War. He also served in Korea, Japan, and Hawaii and participated in military exercises throughout the Pacific.

William Kristol is editor and cofounder of the Washington-based political magazine The Weekly Standard and an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. He also regularly appears on Fox News Sunday and the Fox News Channel.

Carl Conetta is the co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA). Conetta was previously a Research Fellow of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS) and served for three years as the editor of the IDDS journal Defense and Disarmament Alternatives and the Arms Control Reporter.

Yanar Mohammed is the co-founder and director of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq. She left Iraq in 1993, but since 2003, she has split her time between Iraq and her home in Canada. Mohammed has become the target of death threats because of her activism. Her organization works to stop atrocities against Iraqi women and defend their rights.

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for The New Yorker. Wright is on the Council for Foreign Relations and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. [Broadcast Date: January 17, 2008]