Director Laura Poitras Learns Why She Was Being Detained at Airports

For six years, “Citizenfour” filmmaker Laura Poitras was stopped at airports without an explanation. Recently, a lawsuit uncovered the startling reason.

From The Associated Press:

[Poitras] was stopped without explanation more than 50 times on foreign travel, and dozens more times on domestic trips, before the extra searches suddenly stopped in 2012. Only now is Poitras beginning to unravel the mystery, which goes back to a bloody day in Baghdad in 2004. … On Nov. 20, 2004, Poitras was in Baghdad filming “My Country, My Country.” The film depicts Iraqi elections from the perspective of an Iraqi doctor, who criticized the U.S. occupation yet hoped democracy would take root in his homeland.

Members of a U.S. Army National Guard unit from Oregon reported seeing a “white female” holding a camera on a rooftop just before they were attacked. David Roustum, 22, an Army National Guardsman from West Seneca, New York, was killed. Several troops were wounded. Some guardsmen who saw Poitras suspected she had a heads-up about the attack and didn’t share that information with American forces because she wanted to film it. If true, Poitras would have broken U.S. criminal law.

Poitras called the allegation false and said she didn’t film the attack.

Read more.

— Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata