From Filmmaker in Los Angeles to Iraq Detainee
LOS ANGELES, July 5 - Like a lot of aspiring filmmakers in Los Angeles, Cyrus Kar was obsessed with his project, a documentary about an ancient Persian king who championed tolerance and human rights even as he built an empire that stretched across the Near East.
But Mr. Kar, 44, a naturalized American born in Iran, followed his dream where few others might have gone. In mid-May, he traveled to Iraq with an Iranian cameraman to film archaeological sites around Babylon. After a taxi they were in was stopped in Baghdad, the two men were arrested by Iraqi security forces, who found what they suspected might be bomb parts in the vehicle.
Since then, Mr. Kar has been held in what his relatives and their lawyers describe as a frightening netherworld of American military detention in Iraq - charged with no crime but nonetheless unable to gain his freedom or even tell his family where he is being held.
He is one of four men with dual American citizenship who have been detained in Iraq beginning in April, a Defense Department official said. But none of the others - all Iraqi-Americans suspected of ties to the insurgency - nor an accused Jordanian-American terrorist operative captured in a raid last year appear to have had anything like Mr. Kar's ties to the United States.
Mr. Kar, the son of an Iranian physician, came to the United States when he was 2 and was raised partly in Utah and Washington State, where he played high school football. He attended college in California, received a master's degree in technology management from Pepperdine University, worked for years in Silicon Valley and served in the United States Navy and the Naval Reserve.
The question must be asked, would this be happening to him if he was white?
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