NYT: How a Trip to Film in Iraq Ended in a Military Jail Cell

[leftchick]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/national/nationalspecial3/24detainee.html

<snip>

After interrogating the driver, Mr. Kar said, the older soldier told him that the driver had admitted the timers were his. But when the three men were taken to the interrogation room again the next day, it was to be photographed together kneeling before a map of Iraq on which their camera equipment and the 35 timers had been carefully arranged.

The men were driven first to a detention camp at Tikrit. Then Mr. Kar and Mr. Faraji were taken by helicopter to Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, where their treatment immediately got rougher.

In a crowded processing room, Mr. Kar said, guards yelled and cursed at the two men, with one of them shouting: "You terrorist! You here to kill Americans?"

Another soldier screamed at Mr. Faraji to strip, although the crowd of soldiers around him included women, Mr. Kar said.

"What hit me was, there was no mercy," Mr. Kar recalled.

[mbperrin]

1. Lucky he wasn't in London, I guess,

where he could be shot to death while being held down with no questions at all..

what a sad world the leadership(?) of this country has created...

[dArKeR]

2. Is that ii, two pages? Seems like the report stopped in the middle.

[leesa]

3. Better jail than dead, given the huge number of journalists the military

keeps "accidentally" knocking off. Missed one, huh?

[wli]

4. I thought they usually bombed the journalists

After all, they wouldn't want their little mini-massacres caught on tape.

[highnooner]

5. You have rights, Sure, you do! Just don't ask to use them them.

"After his first four days in solitary confinement at an American military prison in Iraq, Cyrus Kar was taken from his small cell and brought before two F.B.I. agents, who before questioning him gave him a sheet of paper listing his rights.

"I have the right to a lawyer?" Mr. Kar, an aspiring filmmaker from Los Angeles, said he asked as he scanned the list.

"Yes," he said he was told by one of the agents, whom he knew only as Robert.

"Do you actually have lawyers here?" Mr. Kar inquired.

"No," he quoted the agent as explaining. "The last guy who requested one is still waiting two years later, in Afghanistan."

[Starfury]

6. Here's a more detailed link to the story from the LA Times:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-cyrus24jul24,0,5285780.story?page=1

This is a total disgrace.

[leftchick]

7. The FBI asked him who he VOTED for???

Thank you for the link Starfury. This is a very thorough report..

This is outrageous...

<snip>

During the interrogation, Kar said, he was asked one question that startled him.

"Are you registered to vote in California?" he was asked.

He said he was.

"Who did you vote for?"

He hesitated. "For a split second, I realized what a political prisoner must feel like in a fascist state," Kar said he thought to himself.

"I voted for Kerry," Kar said he told the agents, then proceeded to justify his vote. "But I believe in Bush's foreign policy. I believed in bringing democracy to countries where . . . bullies kept kicking people when they were down."

"How come you're so on top of politics?" he said one of the agenst asked.

[MeDeMax]

8. voted for Kerry ? how dare he

If this had happened before Nov 2nd, they would have voted on his behalf for *.

[suffragette]

9. and the documentary he was filming

was "about Cyrus the Great, the Persian conqueror who freed the Jews from Babylon and wrote the first charters of human rights."

What irony that he felt compelled to go make a film about early "charters of human rights" only to have his rights violated by his own government.