The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether top government officials can be sued for damages by the Muslim men who were rounded up and imprisoned under harsh conditions in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The case is an appeal by the administration of US President George W. Bush on behalf of John Ashcroft, who at the time was attorney general, and Robert Mueller, director of the FBI.
The federal appeals court in Manhattan, in a pretrial decision last June, rejected the claims of immunity raised by the two officials, as well as by other defendants, including the former head of the Bureau of Prisons and the former warden of the Metropolitan Detention Center, where many of the men were held. The lower-ranking officials also appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, but the justices took no action on their petitions on Monday.
The lawsuit was filed by two men, Javaid Iqbal, a Pakistani, and Ehad Elmaghraby, an Egyptian, both of whom were deported after months of confinement in a section of the Brooklyn prison known as ADMAX-SHU, which stands for administrative maximum special housing unit. Elmaghraby settled his claims for a US$300,000 payment from the government and is no longer in the case.
Iqbal, who has not settled, was a 33-year-old cable television installer on Long Island at the time of his arrest on Nov. 2, 2001. He lived in Hicksville with his wife, a US citizen, and had an application pending for a green card. He was charged with document fraud for using a Social Security card that belonged to someone else.
Iqbal pleaded guilty after several months of confinement in the special unit, where he was subjected to daily body-cavity searches, sometimes several times a day, as well as to beatings and to extremes of hot and cold. He was kept in solitary confinement with the lights in his cell constantly on. He lost 18kg during six months in the special unit, before he was placed in the general prison population.
Iqbal’s lawsuit maintains that he was treated as a “high interest” prisoner solely because of his religion and national origin, under policies and procedures directed by Ashcroft and Mueller and carried out by the other defendants. The lawsuit also maintains that the conditions of confinement in the special unit violated minimal constitutional standards, of which the defendants should have been aware.
Although Iqbal is now the sole plaintiff in his case, the Supreme Court’s decision will affect another lawsuit that raises similar claims on behalf of seven named plaintiffs and a class of hundreds of others. That case, Turkmen v Ashcroft, was argued before the 2nd Circuit in February.
In refusing the defendants’ request to dismiss the Iqbal case, the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals found that the allegations, although not yet proven, were at least “plausible.”
That was sufficient to permit Iqbal’s lawyers to proceed to pretrial discovery to establish the facts, Judge Jon Newman wrote for the appeals court.
The government’s appeal maintains that the case against the two high officials should have been dismissed because it was based on nothing but “bare and conclusory allegations” and lacked evidence that the two condoned or even knew about the treatment Iqbal alleges to have occurred.
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