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Cyrus Kar Released
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. |
American officials told him that his United States passport had been destroyed in the course of an effort to test its authenticity, his lawyers said, and that he might have to wait a week before a new one could be issued.
In addition to messing with his passport, Kar's military captors were not good custodians of his other property.
Mr. Kar's camera and laptop computer were also missing or stolen, the lawyers said. The school ring he got with his master's degree from Pepperdine University was gone, his relatives said, and even most of his clothes had been lost.
Fortunately, Kar recovered the film he shot for his documentary.
Cyrus Kar Released | 19 comments (19 topical, 0 hidden)
Cyrus Kar Released | 19 comments (19 topical, 0 hidden)
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