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Former President George W. Bush, the father of the global war on terror that has suppressed and killed millions of people across the world, has announced that he is releasing a book of paintings called The Call of Freedom: Portraits of Political Prisoners and Dissidents.
The book is being published by Penguin Random House imprint Crown, and includes paintings and biographical information on 44 subjects. It is slated to be released on March 9, 2027.
The foreword is being written by former Soviet Union dissident and Israeli politician Natan Sharansky. Sharansky is a former Israeli cabinet minister across four successive Israeli governments and, at one point, was deputy prime minister under Ariel Sharon. He is also the founder of the Yisrael B’Aliyah political party, which merged with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party in 2003; today, he defends and cheers Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The book is slated to extol human rights and dissent, despite the Bush administration’s legacy of having massively eroded those principles. Bush’s presidential library is also selling admission to an exhibit displaying the portraits.
Some subjects include Iranian dissident Mahsa Amini, who died in Iranian custody in 2022, and Nicaragua critic Rolando Álvarez, a Catholic bishop imprisoned in the country after refusing to be exiled in 2023. The cover of the book appears to also include figures like the current Dalai Lama, Malala Yousafzai, and Nelson Mandela.
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Bush said that the goal of the book is “highlighting the courage and resilience of political prisoners and dissidents in the face of tyrants.”
“My hope is that these 44 paintings and the stories that accompany them will inspire that same fearlessness and determination in others,” he said. “[T]his project sends a message that the United States cares deeply about people seeking freedom — and that we who live in liberty have a duty to stand with those who do not.”
However, those in the U.S. whose “fearlessness” may be inspired by the book could face punishment by the very federal structures that the Bush administration set up to suppress dissent — structures that every successive president has expanded. The Bush administration established or ushered in the post-9/11 PATRIOT Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the war on terror and “forever wars,” and other sweeping measures that fundamentally transformed the nation’s legal systems to supercharge violence, war, surveillance, and criminalization.
Bush himself imprisoned political dissidents. After 9/11, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established a global network of “black sites,” the extent of which are still unknown today, where U.S. operatives extrajudicially imprisoned and tortured countless people. The most famous of these is notorious torture camp Guantánamo Bay.
Bush admitted to authorizing torture in his 2010 memoir, and such tactics were used extensively at torture site Abu Ghraib, in Iraq. There, the U.S. interrogated and tortured many political prisoners, at least hundreds of them civilians. When chilling images of the abuses were leaked in 2003, Bush downplayed them, saying that the abuses were committed by a few “bad apples.” The military launched supposed investigations into the torture that were designed to shield higher level officials from facing consequences, and top officials walked free.
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