Hello my friends thank you so much for joining me today today

Today we're chatting with Emily Cassie who is an Emmy and Peabody Award Nominated

Investigative Journalist and she does work for places like the New York Times, Netflix, PBS, and she has a six-part

series out about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

I think you are absolutely going to value hearing her perspective on the role of

investigative journalism in a democracy and also about her perspective on this very complicated nuanced difficult topic of the

United States's involvement in the country of Afghanistan. So let's dive into this

conversation. I'm Sharon McMahon and welcome to the

Sharon Says So podcast. Emily, I'm so happy to have you here today. I know that people

are absolutely going to love hearing your perspective on some of the issues we're going to be discussing and they're very much going to enjoy watching your documentary work. So can you just tell us a little bit more about how you got started and

tell us a little bit more about the topics that interest you and what you're doing

right now? Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me Sharon.

I started being interested in storytelling and journalism and documentary at a very young age.

I made my first film when I was 13 years old about gay kids in religious high schools and what that experience was like for them. I think I was drawn to the closest injustice I saw in my life, which was that these kids who I was really good friends with, I was a big theater kid and so I had a really queer community and they felt like they were being mistreated or left out or not treated fairly by the schools that they were in or their peers.

And so I was interested in helping them tell that story and I found that that was really empowering it, that it could change people's minds that they had a reaction and it played in student film festivals in Toronto where I grew up and that kind of propelled me into thinking

oh wow this is a really powerful tool for impact and I shortly after saw shake hands with the devil, which was about the Canadian

General Romeo de laire who was in Rwanda and refused to leave

when the genocide was happening there.

And it was really the first exposure

I had had to kind of mass atrocity outside of the Holocaust and kind of what we learned about

World War II and World War I and I was really taken aback that this was a current history.

This was a recent history. And so I started traveling to

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