Military officials have agreed to free Cyrus Kar, an aspiring American filmmaker who has been imprisoned without charge for nearly two months at a United States military detention center in Iraq, lawyers and relatives of Mr. Kar said Saturday.
The news of the planned release came as government lawyers prepared for a hearing on Monday afternoon in federal district court in Washington, where they had been ordered to show cause for his continued detention.
Last week, after his lawyers sued the government for his release through a petition for habeas corpus, Defense Department officials said Mr. Kar, 44, had been detained on May 17 with his Iranian cameraman, Farshid Faraji, on suspicion of involvement with the Iraqi insurgency.
The two men, who relatives said were in Iraq working on a historical documentary, were arrested after a search of a taxi they had taken from a Baghdad hotel turned up dozens of washing-machine timers of a type sometimes used by Iraqi insurgents to make improvised explosive devices, the officials said.
The above is from Tim Golden's "U.S. Says It Will Release American Held in Iraq" in this morning's New York Times. It's a strong story and one worth reading. The site doesn't comment on or link to Robin Toner's stories. (Members are free to read and make their own comments which, with permission, will go up here.)
We're doing another spotlight. It's not easy to find online (thanks Dallas for tracking it down) which is strange. But we'll credit the writer of the piece which is something the Times doesn't do online.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
