The American military is holding five U.S. citizens, apparently including a Los Angeles filmmaker, among more than 10,000 detainees in Iraq on suspicion of possible terrorist or other criminal activity, the Pentagon said on Wednesday. All of the five are being held without charges or access to lawyers. Three have dual Iraqi citizenship, one dual Iranian citizenship and a fifth man, arrested late last year in Iraq, dual Jordanian citizenship.Of the four arrested this year, one was taken into custody in April, two in May and another in June. Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman declined to identify the five. But the New York Times and Los Angeles Times on Wednesday identified one as Cyrus Kar, 44, an aspiring filmmaker from Los Angeles who was arrested in Iraq in May. Kar's Los Angeles-based relatives told the two newspapers that Kar traveled to Iraq in mid-May to work on a documentary. He was arrested when he was stopped in a taxi in Baghdad by Iraqi security forces, who found what they suspected might be bomb parts in the car. Whitman said they included "several dozen" washing machine timers. Kar's relatives told the two newspapers that on June 14 an FBI agent, John D. Wilson, returned items seized on May 23 from Kar's Los Angeles area apartment and assured them the FBI had found no reason to suspect Kar. "He's cleared," one of Kar's aunts, Parvin Modarress, quoted Wilson as saying, the newspapers reported.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California said it had filed a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Kar in federal court in Washington D.C. and asked for an expedited court date early next week. Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the ACLU's southern California chapter, said Kar, an Iranian-American and Navy veteran, had been "virtually incommunicado" from the outside world and his family for 50 days. Rosenbaum called his detention "illegal, unconstitutional and inhumane."
| My heart bleeds. I'll prob'ly cry myself to sleep tonight, fall into a deep depression and refuse to speak, ending my days as a hollow-eyed hermit... Unless I forget all about it by the time I'm done reading this article. |