What happens when an innocent American citizen is arrested in Iraq in 2005? He spends 55 days in prison, never gets to see a lawyer, and is only released after the ACLU, the Los Angeles Times and the The New York Times get involved. Fifty-one days after arrest, the Detainee Status Board at Camp Victory in Iraq released a report which says the man was an “Innocent Civilian . . . who does not pose a threat to the security of coalition forces, or its mission, and should be immediately returned to his home or released.” The man sits in prison for four more days before being released.
Read the details of Cyrus Kar’s imprisonment in the LA Times article, A Journey Through Military Justice in Iraq. (The photo at right is by Ann Johansson for The New York Times.)
From the article:
Based on the discovery of washing-machine timers in the trunk of that cab, Kar was accused of being of a terrorist “that the president will hear about.”
Blindfolded, shackled and handcuffed, he was shuttled — in Humvees and helicopters — to four prisons. His American captors posed him against his will with the alleged bomb components, and kept him in solitary confinement in the same prison where Saddam Hussein and other stalwarts of his regime were held.
Less than a month after he was detained, FBI officials told relatives in Los Angeles that he had been cleared. But it would take almost another month, after his story had appeared in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, and after the American Civil Liberties Union had sued in federal court, before he would be released.
The New York Times has another article about Kar, How a Trip to Film in Iraq Ended in a Military Jail Cell.
