Matthew Rothschild The New McCarthyism progressive.org
[ elsewhere in the land of the free and the home of the brave . . . Clip: ]
She is a freshman at Durham Tech in North Carolina. Her name is A.J. Brown. She's gotten a scholarship from the ACLU to help her attend college. But that didn't prepare her for the knock on the door that came on October 26. "It was 5:00 on Friday, and I was getting ready for a date," she says. When she heard the knock, she opened the door. Here's her account.
"Hi, we're from the Raleigh branch of the Secret Service," two agents said.
"And they flip out their little ID cards, and I was like, 'What?'
"And they say, 'We're here because we have a report that you have un-American material in your apartment.' And I was like, 'What? No, I don't have anything like that.'
" 'Are you sure? Because we got a report that you've got a poster that's anti-American.'
"And I said no."
They asked if they could come into the apartment. "Do you have a warrant?" Brown asked. "And they said no, they didn't have a warrant, but they wanted to just come in and look around. And I said, 'Sorry, you're not coming in.' "
One of the agents told Brown, "We already know what it is. It's a poster of Bush hanging himself," she recalls. "And I said no, and she was like, 'Well, then, it's a poster with a target on Bush's head,' and I was like, nope."
The poster they seemed interested in was one that depicted Bush holding a rope, with the words: "We Hang on Your Every Word. George Bush, Wanted: 152 Dead." The poster has sketches of people being hanged, and it refers to the number who were put to death in Texas while Bush was governor, she explains.
Ultimately, Brown agreed to open her door so that the agents could see the poster on the wall of her apartment, though she did not let them enter. "They just kept looking at the wall," which contained political posters from the Bush counter-inaugural, a "Free Mumia" poster, a picture of Jesse Jackson, and a Pink Floyd poster with the quotation: "Mother, should I trust the government?"
At one point in the conversation, one of the agents mentioned Brown's mother, saying, "She's in the armed forces, isn't she?" (Her mother, in fact, is in the Army Reserve.)
After they were done inspecting the wall, one of the agents "pulled out his little slip of paper, and he asked me some really stupid questions, like, my name, my Social Security number, my phone number," she says. "Then they asked, 'Do you have any pro-Taliban stuff in your apartment, any posters, any maps?'
"I was like, 'No, I don't, and personally, I think the Taliban is just a bunch of assholes.' "
With that, they left. They had been at her apartment for forty minutes.
"They called me two days later to make sure my information was correct: where I lived, my phone number (hello!), and my nicknames," she says.
Brown says she's "really annoyed" about the Secret Service visit. "Obviously, I'm on some list somewhere." |
