… would be an understatement.
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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.”
The New York Times has a story about Cyrus Kar, a Los Angeles filmmaker who spent 55 days imprisoned in Iraq, because both the locals and the U.S. army decided that he was an enemy combatant. From the looks of it, if it weren’t for the ACLU he would still be in there. It also stands as a great example of classified evidence or secret trial standing as proxies for shoddy evidence gathering and prisoner abuse.