Kar was in Iraq working on a documentary on Persian emperor Cyrus the Great (576-529 BCE) when US soldiers arrested him and his Iranian cameraman at checkpoint northeast of Baghdad on May 17.

Soldiers said they found washing machine timers -- often used as key parts for roadside bombs in Iraq -- inside the taxi the two were traveling in.

Kar, a US navy veteran of Iranian ancestry, was set free only after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued for his release.

Kar became a US citizen in 1966 after immigrating to the United States with his family from
Iran.

According to the lawsuit, Kar was hooded and handcuffed when he was transported to a detention center, where he was aggressively interrogated and was exposed to hours in the sun in extremely hot temperatures.

A soldier at the notorious
Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad even slammed his head into a concrete wall at one point, according to the suit.

"For almost two months, Mr. Kar sat alone for 23 hours each day in a cramped jail cell, not knowing why he was there or whether he would ever be released," reads the lawsuit, filed on Kar's behalf by the ACLU.

Even though FBI agents cleared him of suspicion, he did not have access to an attorney and was able to make only a few short phone calls to his family. And the US military did nothing to send him home even after a military panel recommended his immediate release, according to the court papers.

The suit seeks unspecified damages.

Ex-soldier Steven D. Green was arrested last week in North Carolina and has pleaded not guilty to one count of rape and four counts of murder. He was ordered held without bond on the charges, which carry a possible death penalty.

The U.S. statement said the five soldiers still on active duty will face an Article 32 investigation, similar to a grand jury hearing in civilian law. The Article 32 proceeding will determine whether there is enough evidence to place them on trial.

One of the soldiers was charged with failing to report the attack but is not believed to have participated in it directly, the statement said. The four facing murder charges could face the death penalty if convicted.

The names of the five were not released, but a U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation, said Sunday that the soldiers recently charged are two sergeants, two privates first-class and one specialist.

The March 12 attack on the family was among the worst in a series of cases of U.S. troops accused of killing and abusing Iraqi civilians.

U.S. officials are concerned the alleged rape-slaying will strain relations with the new U.S.-backed government and increase calls for changes in an agreement that exempts American soldiers from prosecution in Iraqi courts.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has demanded an independent investigation into the case, which followed a series of claims that U.S. troops killed and mistreated Iraqi civilians.

According to an FBI affidavit filed in Green's case, he and at least two others targeted the teenager and her family for a week before the attack, which was not revealed until witnesses came forward in late June.

The soldiers drank alcohol, abandoned their checkpoint, changed clothes to avoid detection and headed to the victims' house, about 200 yards from a U.S. military checkpoint in the so-called "Triangle of Death," a Sunni Arab area south of Baghdad known for its violence, the affidavit said.

The affidavit estimated the rape victim was about 25. But a doctor at the Mahmoudiya hospital gave her age as 14. He refused to be identified for fear of reprisals.

Green is accused of raping the woman and killing her and three relatives - an adult male and female and a girl estimated to be 5 years old. An official familiar with the investigation said he set fire to the rape victim's body in an apparent cover-up attempt.

Iraqi authorities identified the rape victim as Abeer Qassim Hamza. The other victims were her father, Qassim Hamza; her mother, Fikhriya Taha; and her sister, Hadeel Qassim Hamza.

The Sunni killings began in the western neighborhood of Jihad when gunmen set up checkpoints and started shooting people based on their ID cards, witnesses said.

"They also went into certain Sunni houses and killed everyone inside," a witness who declined to be named told AFP.

"Outside the mosque I saw the bodies of 10 men, all shot in the head, and they showed severe signs of torture," said Sheikh Abdel Samad al-Obeidi, imam of the Sunni Fakhri Shanshal mosque in the neighborhood, which was bombed on Friday killing two.

"I blame the Mehdi Army militiamen for this killing -- it is all in the open now," he added, referring to the armed group linked to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

He also accused police commandos, who have checkpoints in the area, of being "complicit in the crime for turning a blind eye".

In the runup to Sunday's rampage, Sunni and Shiite holy places were increasingly targeted in ongoing civil strife in Baghdad, with the Shiite Fatima Zahra mosque being bombed on Saturday killing seven and wounding 17.

In the past months there have been more and more sectarian-linked attacks in the capital's neighborhoods.

Sheikh Mahmud al-Sudani, the imam of the Shiite mosque attacked Saturday, told AFP the operation was carried out by relatives of Shiites who had been killed or driven out of the predominantly Sunni neighborhood in recent months.

"For the past five months Shiites have been killed and evicted from the neighborhood. Those Shiites killed come from tribes from the south that wanted to take revenge," said Sudani, a follower of Sadr.

"The hair that broke the camel's back was the attack on the mosque yesterday (Saturday)," he said.

Fakhria Hussein, a Shiite resident of the Sunni neighborhood targeted on Sunday but who works outside it, received a call from her son telling her not to come home because it was too dangerous.

"He told me that masked men stormed into our neighbors' home, a Sunni, and he heard shots and screams," she said.

Firas Shimmari, a security guard, received a similar call from his brother who reported that the gunmen were checking people's IDs and attacking them if they indicated the person was Sunni.

"They looked at his ID and asked him where he was from and he said (the Shiite holy city of) Karbala, so they told him 'you are fine'," said Shimmari, adding that his brother had seen corpses by the side of the checkpoint.

The massacre ended only when US and Iraqi forces surrounded the area and imposed a curfew.

"Our beloved Iraq is going through a very difficult period and the security situation is getting worse despite the presence of an allegedly sovereign government," said radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr whose partisans were accused of the Sunni Arab killings.

"To stop the flow of Iraqi blood, I call on all political and religious leaders to meet together to block the Western plot of starting a civilian and sectarian war."

Sadr also called on parliament to hold an emergency session.

"People are looking up to you to save them from the sea of blood, maybe it's time to hold an emergency meeting for the sake of your people," he said in a mocking tone from his home in the southern shrine city of Najaf.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani called for calm.

"Today we face a very a deep and dangerous slope, which is killing based on identity," Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, said in a statement.

"I call on the the Iraqi people to control themselves and avoid knee-jerk reactions which can only lead to regret and pain."

For his part Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, a Sunni Arab, said the government must take immediate steps to protect civilians by purging the country's security forces of the influence of Shiite militiamen.

"This is a plea from the vice president to the prime minister to do the right thing and protect the lives of innocent people who have become targets for the militias amid the silence and non-intervention of some security forces," he told state television Al-Iraqiya.

Sunday's rampage came despite an ongoing security operation in the capital since mid-June involving tens of thousands of troops patrolling the streets.

Elsewhere nine people were killed including two Sunni clerics from the powerful Muslim Scholars Association, a Sunni religious body.

The US military said it had charged five more soldiers in connection with the rape and murder of an Iraqi woman and the killing of three of her family members on March 12 south of Baghdad.

Four of the five soldiers indicted Sunday were charged with rape and murder and the fifth with dereliction of duty for failing to report the offences.

An army veteran of the Iraq war, Steven Green, 21, was charged by the US civilian authorities last week in the same case.

Lovely to watch how people like Cheney, and the minions who support his ilk, conveniently forget that there was no terrorism in Iraq prior to the US invasion/occupation. And one must love his "logic." For according to Cheney, "whether we complete the job or not in Iraq" his beloved "terrorism" will "continue" ... "only it'll get worse."

Then why stay in Iraq, Dick?

Because when Dick said, "only it'll get worse," if he'd been referring to the situation on the ground in Iraq, he'd have been 100% accurate.

For starters, things for the US military continue to disintegrate. With raping and pillaging being carried out by soldiers who have long since surrendered the war for "hearts and minds," other lesser reported developments underscore the trajectory of the military in Iraq.

According to the Arabic al-Sharqiyah Television channel, on July 6th : "Gunmen shot down two US Apaches in al-Zur village, north of al-Miqdadiyah in Diyala Governorate, northeast of Baghdad. Security sources and local residents said that both gunships were seen crashing in one of the village's farms, and reported that a US APC carrying 15 US soldiers was destroyed in clashes that raged in the cities and villages located north of al-Miqdadiyah. The US Army is yet to comment on the incident, which comes at a time when US and Iraqi forces are besieging areas north of al-Miqdadiyah, including al-Zur village."

This comes at a time when the US military are once again aggressively attacking the forces of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr - an action which threatens to spread violence deeper into southern Iraq as well as unifying Shia and Sunni against the occupation forces. Think March and April, 2004 - a time when Shia and Sunni were, at times, literally fighting side by side against US soldiers in places like Najaf and Fallujah.

While the military futilely spins its giant wheels in the bloody sands of Iraq, it continues to be the Iraqi people who are suffering the most.

Here is a recent email from an Iraqi friend:

Dear Dahr,

How are you doing? I hope you are fine. I'm sorry for not keeping in touch with you, but as you know the situation is bad here and it gets so much worse and worse that words cannot describe it.

I really want you to remember someone named Abdul Razak who you met one day here. He was responsible for the corpses' freezer at one of the hospitals where you visited. This was the man who helped you as you nearly fainted when you tried to enter the freezer. This man, unfortunately, was found killed and his body thrown away on a street on the 4th of April of this year. I met his wife and his five children. The oldest child is a girl who is 20 years old and the youngest is 6 years old. They live in a rented house. The father's salary was the only source of money for the whole family. Now, as he is dead, they have no source of money. I tried to help them by getting some donations for them from the staff working in the hospital where he used to work, but it seems that it is not enough. Of course for a big family like his, this makes it more difficult. But I hope we can ease their pain and help them manage their life by finding someone who can donate some money. I am wondering if you can get some donations for this family to start a new life and construct a small project to help them manage their life. Thank you in advance ...

I get these regularly, and several of my colleagues who have also worked in Iraq are telling me that they too are receiving requests for help nowadays.

Here is another email I received the day before the aforementioned, from another friend in Baghdad:

Dear friend,

Maybe this is the last message I am going to send ... really I don't have anyone here. I am like a foreigner in my own country. I am really feeling very afraid. I am living next to Al Sadr City and the Al Sadr militia is killing anyone who is Sunni, especially when any explosion attacks the Shia. They come to our zone and take Sunni people from their houses and kill them. They killed one of my relatives. They killed my neighbor, who was only 26 years old. My friend, the situation now in Baghdad is very bad. Do you know that there is no work and no safety, even in my own house? I'm very sad to tell you that I am very tired from changing my house. My family and I leave the house every month for three weeks and we run away like some one who did a crime. What is our crime?

We are in a very bad situation. It is so bad now. Please help, is all that I ask as we need help now. We are living, just waiting for our turn to die ... Please help us if you can ... I don't have any one to ask but you.

So while Iraqis are being killed or fearing death as they suffer through the daily hell that is the US occupation, Cheney, the real force behind this "administration," tells CNN, "No matter how you carve it - you can call it anything you want - but basically, it is packing it in, going home, persuading and convincing and validating the theory that the Americans don't have the stomach for this fight."

Guess what, Dick - moral and sane Americans "don't have the stomach for this fight" because this fight should have never taken place. And anyone with a soul, let alone a conscience, should be more than happy to see US troops in Iraq "packing it in."

"It is necessary to stop the crossing of terrorist groups into Iraq who aim at creating insecurity, hatred and differences, and pave the way for the presence of foreign forces in Iraq," Ahmadinejad told the foreign ministers in Tehran.

He did not say from where or how the groups were entering.

Washington accuses Tehran of backing anti-U.S. insurgents in Iraq, a charge Tehran denies saying the U.S. occupation is to blame for the instability.

"We are all committed to try to restore stability, security and progress in Iraq," Ahmadinejad told the gathering.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki called for a timetable to be drawn up for foreign forces to leave and said Iraq's neighbors should not be blamed for the country's problems.

"It is impossible to bestow freedom and democracy by resorting to violence and to cover up the failures in Iraq by accusing and conspiring against its neighbors," he said in a speech to the closed session, a copy of which was handed out.

Syria has also been accused by Washington of not doing enough to stop militants crossing into Iraq. Asked what more Damascus could do to secure its border, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said: "We are doing our best."

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said Iraq wanted neighboring states to help improve security and to support the new government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and its national reconciliation plan.

"We asked them to use their influence over all the groups to participate, to embrace this national reconciliation initiative," Zebari told reporters without naming the groups.

Iraqi officials have said some Iraqi insurgents have asked Arab states to act as mediators following the offer of dialogue.

Most Arab states are ruled by Sunni Arabs, the majority sect within Islam, and some of these view with suspicion Iraq's Shi'ite majority. Non-Arab Iran is also mainly Shi'ite.

Ministers and officials from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Turkey were among those attending the meeting that ends on Sunday, as well as Egypt, which does not share a border with Iraq. Arab League chief Amr Moussa also attended.