WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court served notice Monday that it would set a high bar for anyone seeking to hold top government officials liable for abuse suffered by prisoners held as part of the Bush administration's war on terrorism.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy spoke for a 5-4 majority in throwing out a lawsuit against former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that claimed the two ordered the roundup of hundreds of Muslim men after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"It should come as no surprise that a legitimate policy directing law enforcement to arrest and detain individuals because of their suspected link to the attacks would produce a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims, even though the purpose of the policy was to target neither Arabs nor Muslims," Kennedy said. "The Sept. 11 attacks were perpetrated by 19 Arab Muslim hijackers who counted themselves members in good standing of Al Qaeda, an Islamic fundamentalist group."
The ruling could serve as a procedural barrier for lawsuits against former officials who have been sued by prisoners being held as "enemy combatants."
The suit dismissed Monday alleged that Javaid Iqbal -- who worked as a cable television installer on Long Island, N.Y. -- was roughed up, strip-searched, shackled and locked in a maximum-security facility for months because he was a Pakistani Muslim.
His case, the first involving the post-Sept. 11 detention of more than 700 men in the U.S. to get to the Supreme Court, described Ashcroft as the "principal architect" of the policy. None of those arrested was charged as a terrorist, although many pleaded guilty to immigration offenses.
In the decision, the high court shielded Ashcroft and Mueller from being sued because Iqbal could not show that the two personally ordered that he be mistreated.
Peter S. Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, said other former prisoners would "face an insoluble dilemma. They will need information to meet the heightened pleading requirement. But they won't be able to get it without discovery [the pretrial phase during which relevant facts must be disclosed], which today's ruling will preclude."
Several former detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have sued top Pentagon officials, alleging they were subjected to abuse.
