A boot stamping on a human face
Posted December 21st, 2005 by eliot
I’m sure by now you’ve all heard about the Bush administration’s four-year campaign of illegal spying on American citizens. Last Saturday, the NY Times broke the story that the National Security Agency has been monitoring the communications of as many as 500 Americans at any given time. This monitoring went on without warrants, on Bush’s personal order, in clear violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment.
Also revealed in the past week, the Pentagon is keeping a database of protests against military recruitment which labeled a kiss-in a credible threat. And it turns out the FBI is keeping tabs on probably every organization I respect in the United States. What else? A Dartmouth student who checked out Mao’s Little Red Book was visited by Homeland Security agents. A German citizen was kidnapped by the CIA, flown to Afghanistan, held for five months, beaten and tortured, and finally let go on a deserted stretch of road in Albania.
These are only the revelations from the past week. It goes on.
VR members have had compelling personal reasons of late to fear arbitrary government power. All this abstract political stuff has a way of getting really damn real sometimes. No one is immune to spying, arbitrary arrest, or other government intrusions. Feeling a little unable to deal with the recent wave of paranoia-inducing stories, I was glad to find an email from Scott Boylston in our inbox this morning:
like me, i’m sure you’re deeply disturbed by the latest blatant attempt at desecrating our constitution by bush and his puppeteers. i’ve attached a poster design i just did in response to the events of this past weekend. the image is taken from bush’s press conference yesterday. maybe you can put a call out for quick responses to this latest tyranny? we as a country have acquiesced to his insanity so many times in the past (times when i thought that surely, our country could see through his lies), and i’m afraid this, too, will be railroaded down our throats with little resistance from our congress and our people. it seems to be a very important point to make a stand.
Download the poster (pictured above) in JPG or PDF formats.
If anyone has poster or stencil designs related to free speech, free association, surveillance, spying, privacy, political prisoners, or police state tactics, send it in and we’ll post in on the site for download. For now, I’m re-posting some designs Scott sent us last year below the fold:
