Delivered at the Free Getu Coalition Press Conference on June 13, 2002:
Since September 11, Americans have been asking themselves about the need to choose between “homeland security” and civil rights, between suspending the judicial process and using reason to distinguish actual danger from imagined threats. The case of Getu Berhanu Tewolde shows that this is a false choice – what is being done in the name of counter-terrorism today has nothing to do with security or vigilance, because what happened to Getu has not made any of us safer. Instead, it has everything to do with fear and hysteria, because we convince ourselves to be afraid of people who we think are different from us.
All Getu had to do to be considered a threat to “civilization” and “democracy” was accidentally brush up against a manager on a Greyhound bus in Pittsburgh. When Getu apologized, the manager immediately treated Getu as a threat, and the police were called. The situation was labeled a Class I Bomb Threat, and the Bomb Squad, SWAT Units, and the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force were called. Getu left the bus when ordered by the driver. At the station he was approached by a police officer who did not identify himself or show a badge. Getu says that the man looked like he was out to attack someone rather than investigate the facts. When the man ordered Getu to sit, Getu refused -- the officer's first actions were to physically attack Getu, giving him a black eye and “disarming” him of a pen he was holding away from the officer.
Of course, the police did not find any bomb at the Greyhound station, and the FBI cleared Getu and refused to charge him. The Pittsburgh Police arrested him anyway -- because of the “totality of the circumstances,” according to Commander Valenta. This admission shows that what really happened here is not vigilance against terrorism, where objective facts are used to find criminals. Instead, people feared Getu because he seemed different from them. They thought they would be safer if Getu was beaten up and locked away in jail. So what has happened here is not an example of reasonable security measures, but unrestrained hysteria. Getu maintains he neither said nor did anything threatening. Even though no explosives were found, and the FBI cleared him, the Pittsburgh Police thought he should be arrested anyway.
When we treat people who we think are different from us as the “other” and as the “enemy,” we dehumanize them. This leads to horrible consequences, where we treat others in ways we would never tolerate for “ourselves.” In prison, Getu was treated as less than human. He was kept in 24-hour solitary confinement, forced to take heavy doses of psychiatric drugs that were unjustified, and denied visits from a lawyer until the Free Getu Coalition and ACLU intervened. This is not meting out justice or incarcerating a criminal -- it is abuse.
The courts, which we are told weigh the evidence and offer due process, were going to let Getu slip deeper into this nightmare. They've done it twice before here in post 9/11 Pittsburgh. An art student who was arrested at the airport for having an Exacto knife went through a similar experience and had to plea bargain to leave the country even though there is no evidence that he is a terrorist. Another man was arrested at the train station for asking why bags were not being checked by security as someone could bring a bomb -- he faced similar charges as Getu, but plead guilty because he thought he would be treated worse if he fought what was happening to him. A system that can allow these people to be victims in this way is not a system of justice, but a system bent on prosecuting and persecuting as much as possible those who look or act “different.”
If we in Pittsburgh, and in the US, do not see that what is happening today is not about security but about racial fears and war hysteria, and that criminalizing people based on fear does not make us any safer, then there will be more Getus. Zi asks that you join the Free Getu Coalition in spreading awareness of this case and the pattern of abuse it exposes, as well as in demanding that all charges against Getu be dropped. Work with us to change our society.
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