The U.S. government has filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by an American filmmaker who spent two months in an Iraqi prison.
Attorneys for the government responded Friday to a suit filed in July in California by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Cyrus Kar.
The ACLU suit says the detention in 2005 violated Kar’s civil rights, the Geneva Convention and the law of nations.
“I found it disturbing that their position is that American citizens can be treated with impunity by American officials without a recognition that the constitution applies,” said ACLU legal director Mark Rosenbaum, who added that the government's response to the lawsuit was troubling.
Kar, of Iranian descent, was taken into custody in May 2005 while visiting Iraq to make a documentary about the Persian king who wrote the world’s first human rights charter.
The lawsuit says the 45-year-old filmmaker was sometimes hooded, threatened, humiliated and abused when a U.S. soldier slammed his head into a wall. He was detained without charges for the two months.
Military officials say Kar was “an imperative security threat” and that his situation had been handled appropriately.
Kar has said that he, his cameraman and the Iraqi driver were stopped at a checkpoint and were all taken to a police station north of Baghdad after Iraqi police found a bag of washing machine timers in the trunk – devices that could be used to set off bombs.
He says he had repeatedly told the American soldiers that he was a U.S. citizen. He was eventually taken to a detention camp at Baghdad airport while the FBI researched his background and story.
Kar said it took 47 days to get a hearing with the military's detainee status board and another six more days before he was released.
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