A federal judge rejected a claim by former US Attorney General John Ashcroft that a lawsuit alleging abuse of Muslim jail inmates should be dismissed partly because the threat of foreign terrorism exempts the government from following rules made in peacetime.
US District Judge John Gleeson upheld a lawsuit by two men claiming they were beaten, starved and in one instance violated with a flashlight while held under restrictive conditions after a roundup of Muslim men in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Egyptian immigrant Ehab Elmaghraby and Pakistani immigrant Javaid Iqbal filed the lawsuit last year against Ashcroft and dozens of other federal officials.
Right to appeal
They argued that the government violated their right to appeal their solitary confinement in a special unit of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Assignment to the unit entailed severe restrictions on movement and communication with the outside world.
Ashcroft said in a response to the lawsuit that the threat of terrorist attacks meant that the government should not have been required to follow regulations allowing inmates to appeal assignment to the special unit.
The FBI was frantically trying to find al-Qaeda cells in the US in the months after the attacks and needed time not envisioned in the regulations to complete the nationwide hunt for possible terrorists, Justice Department lawyers wrote on Ashcroft's behalf.
`Foreign threats'
"Regulations written in peacetime cannot circumscribe the government's discretion at a time of national emergency from foreign threats," they wrote.
Gleeson singled out that argument for particularly harsh criticism Wednesday on a 70-page decision upholding most of the charges in the lawsuit.
"This proposition, which suggests that, as a matter of law, constitutional and statutory rights must be suspended during times of crisis, is supported neither by statute nor the Constitution," he wrote.
Elmaghraby and Iqbal were deported to their home countries after serving time for charges unrelated to terrorism -- Elmaghraby for a counterfeiting charge and Iqbal for fraud.
One of their attorneys, Haeyoung Yoon, said on Wednesday that Gleeson's ruling confirmed the validity of the charges in the lawsuit.
"We do allege in the complaint that people at the highest levels of government were involved," she said.
A Justice Department spokesman, Charles Miller, said the government was still reviewing the decision and had not decided what action to take.
A 2003 Justice Department report found "significant problems" with the treatment of post-Sept. 11 detainees at the Metropolitan Detention Center, including physical abuse and mistreatment.
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