“This desk kills fascism” was the sign Kiriakou wrote on a page from a legal pad and taped to the desk in his cell at FCI Loretto, a play on “This machine kills fascists,” which the folk singer Woody Guthrie had stencilled on his beat-up old guitar.[1][2]
The manuscript
The sign was a response to an escalating attempt to deprive him of the means of writing. Roughly twelve hours after finishing one letter from Loretto, Kiriakou was summoned to the Special Investigative Service office, where an officer returned an envelope containing the first 20,000 words of his book — which he had not realised was missing since a cell shakedown. The officer who had taken it claimed the manuscript had “made threats against staff”; the SIS officer said he had read it himself and believed it contained no such threats, and returned it in its entirety, though Kiriakou assumes a copy was made.[3][4]
The desk
The staff were, in his account, furious about the letters he was writing, and the next move was against the furniture: they would take his desk off the wall so that he could not write.[5][4] He had warning. A friendly guard told him what was coming, and the bolts were stripped before the attempt was made — Kiriakou has said in his earlier tellings that he paid another prisoner a bag of tuna fish to strip the screws, and in a later one that he had stripped them himself as a preemptive measure.[5][2][4]
Either way it held. Two hours after the warning the guards arrived with a drill, tried to take the desk off the wall, could not, and eventually walked away.[5] A work order was issued to chip the desk off the wall, and Kiriakou went to the unit manager, who promised the desk would stay. It did.[4][6]
The sign
Kiriakou then took a legal pad, wrote “this desk kills fascism” on it and stuck it to the desk. It hung a couple of hours, until one of the officers making the daily count — a count run five to seven times a day — tore it off, crumpled it into a ball and threw it at him.[7][1] That reaction was the point: “which is really what I wanted him to do.”[7] He flattened the page out and mailed it home to himself, and keeps it as a reminder that he was not alone in what he went through.[7][1]
The print
The page had an afterlife. In prison Kiriakou took a couple of art classes, found he had something of a knack for it, and made a screen print of the page — a hundred copies.[7] He sold the prints through his website to raise money for his attorney’s fees.[8] By April 2022 he said he had nine or ten of them left.[9]
His broader characterisation of the episode is that crude, amateurish attempts to deprive him of his rights do not originate with a low-level correctional officer but come from higher up, from officials who should know better.[6]