THE GOOD NEWS IS, YOUR PASSPORT WAS GENUINE ...

That's the good news for Cyrus Kar, “an aspiring filmmaker from Los Angeles ... freed Sunday in Baghdad ... after more than seven weeks in solitary confinement in a military prison in Iraq.” The bad news, though, “American officials told him [was] that his United States passport had been destroyed in the course of an effort to test its authenticity ... and ... he might have to wait a week before a new one could be issued.”

Kar, who was born in Iran, is a naturalized US citizen and former US Navy man who went to Iraq to shoot a film about his famous Persian namesake, Cyrus the Great. Unfortunately, he and his cameraman were in a cab that was stopped at a checkpoint, and in the trunk of which were found 35 washing machine timers, and, needless to say, no other washing machine parts. Obviously the timers were destined for use to trigger delayed detonation of improvised explosive devices. In Iraq, when your clothes are dry, everybody hears about it.

Wrong place, wrong time to make a movie. Kar spent his seven weeks in a 5-by-7 foot cell, down the hall from two famous captives: Tariq Aziz, Saddam's former main man, and one of Saddam's brothers. But for the efforts of his family, who are smart and well-connected (see San Jose Mercury article below), he'd still be there.

The military claims Kar has been released, but I'm sure he'll be withholding judgment until he is back in his own home, drinking a cold brew. War makes fools of everyone.

In Iraq war, justice for the savvy, not all

By Scott Herhold

Mercury News

It took serendipity for Cyrus Kar's sister to learn that the aspiring filmmaker was being held in Iraq by American forces. But it was no accident when he was released. That took a push on the levers of power.

A week after the 44-year-old San Jose State University graduate was booked into a detention camp near Baghdad, a Red Cross worker called Kar's sister, Anna, who happened to work for the Red Cross in Nairobi, Kenya.

The colleague told Anna that he had just seen her brother in Iraq. ``I said, `Oh, great, what a coincidence that you met him over there,'' Anna Kar told the New York Times.

The colleague straightened her out. He hadn't just bumped into Kar, a Navy veteran who had gone to Iraq to film a documentary. The Red Cross worker had visited Kar officially at Camp Cropper, an American military jail.

That news — and a call from Kar himself to his aunt in Los Angeles the same day — launched the family on a six-week quest to free the filmmaker from the suspicions of American military authorities.

They succeeded last weekend, when Kar and his cameraman were released. But his saga reveals two truths about our Iraq misadventure.

Bureaucratic war

First, we have more to fear from bureaucracy than from outright cruelty by American forces. Second, justice in the war on terror often depends on who is the most savvy.

``The lesson here is he had a family who knew what do to and they called us to get involved,'' said Mark Rosenbaum, the executive director of the ACLU Southern California Chapter, which filed suit to free Kar. ``He was very fortunate.''

Born in Tehran but raised in Washington state, Kar got a degree in marketing at San Jose State while moonlighting as a bartender. For much of the '90s, he worked in the valley's electronics industry.

After the collapse of the boom, he moved to Los Angeles and pursued a long-cherished project: a film on Cyrus the Great, an early Persian ruler known for his progressiveness.

``His goal of making the documentary was his full-time job,'' said his cousin Shahrzad Folger in a court declaration.

That passion led Kar this May to Iraq, where he hoped to film archeological sites at Babylon, an ancient city that Cyrus conquered in 538 BC. On his first day in Iraq, May 17, Kar and his cameraman climbed into the wrong taxi. It was stopped by Iraqi authorities, who found several washing machine timers in the trunk. The timers are commonly used in bombs.

FBI investigation

Kar and his cameraman protested that they knew nothing about the timers, that they were merely passengers. To no avail. They were both put in jail. And the FBI launched an investigation of the filmmaker, searching his Los Angeles apartment and seizing his personal computer.

His family knew nothing of this until a week later, when Kar called his aunt and the Red Cross worker called Nairobi. In some ways, the real story is how they responded.

Kar's cousin Folger, a University of Southern California graduate, took control of the effort. She called Sen. Barbara Boxer's office and the Navy. She called the State Department. She even tried a New York number for the U.S. Embassy in Iraq. All without much result.

An FBI investigator assured the family in mid-June that Kar had been cleared, passing a lie detector test. But when he still wasn't released, Folger contacted the ACLU.

And it was through a habeas corpus lawsuit — literally, produce the body — that the case got attention. When the story ran on the front page of the New York Times last week, you had the sense that the family had touched the real levers of power. Kar was released not long afterward.

Kar told reporters that although he nothing against U.S. forces, he had been treated as a ``mushroom'' — thrown into a dark spot, fed garbage, forgotten by the bureaucracy. His family knew enough to call the right people. But what about folks who aren't as savvy?