Detaining Cyrus Kar
by TChris
Update: The Washington Post writes about the four other U.S. citizens detained by the U.S. after being arrested in Iraq.
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Cyrus Kar was born in Iran, but he's lived in the United States since he was two years old. He's a naturalized citizen who played high school football in Utah and Washington before serving in the Navy. Kar's ambition was to make a documentary about "an ancient Persian king who championed tolerance and human rights." To that end, he traveled to Iraq to film archeological sites. But tolerance and human rights, increasingly scarce commodities in the U.S., are even less in fashion in Iraq. Kay was busted in Bhagdad, supposedly because "suspected bomb parts" were in the taxi in which he was riding.
Since then, Mr. Kar has been held in what his relatives and their lawyers describe as a frightening netherworld of American military detention in Iraq - charged with no crime but nonetheless unable to gain his freedom or even tell his family where he is being held.
Although an FBI search of Kar's LA apartment (and the contents of his computer) found no evidence that Kar supports terrorism, the Bush administration has been stonewalling the efforts Kar's relatives are making to find him.
Mr. Kar's relatives and their lawyers said they had been utterly stymied in trying to learn his fate despite repeated inquires at the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the State Department, the allied forces in Iraq and the offices of two United States senators.
The administration's callous disregard of fundamental rights is a poor model for the free democratic society that the administration claims to have created in Iraq.
"Saddam Hussein has had more due process than Cyrus Kar," said Mark Rosenbaum, the lead lawyer in the case. "This is a detention policy that was drafted by Kafka."
Ironically, Kar supported the president's decision to "export democracy" to Iraq. Perhaps he misunderstood the nature of Bush democracy: the kind that reserves autocratic powers to the administration and its military.
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