by TChris

Update: Kar discusses his confinement:

"I don't hold anything against them for holding us," he said. "What I hold against them is they put us in a cell and forgot us."

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Cyrus Kar, the filmmaker who has been detained in a military prison in Bahgdad for seven weeks, was released Sunday. (TalkLeft background here.) Justifying the detention, military officials claim that Kar represented "an imperative security threat to Iraq" which had been resolved "appropriately." In other words, there was no evidence that Kar was a threat at all, and unfavorable publicity forced the military to release him.

While the military claims that Kar was given a meaningful hearing, and that his release shows how well detention review panels work, Kar's lawyers cut through the spin:

"He was never told what if any charges were being made against him," said one of the lawyers, Mark D. Rosenbaum. "He never had access to a lawyer. He was never told that he passed a lie-detector test. He was virtually incommunicado. That's not a model detention policy. And that was for 50 days - for a guy who got into the wrong cab."

Kar's ordeal is not quite over.