Justices Turn Back Ex-Detainee’s Suit Over Prison Abuses

a 5 to 4 decision......the precedent has been set

WASHINGTON — A Pakistani Muslim man who was arrested after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks may not sue John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for abuses he said he suffered in Brooklyn detention center, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in the 5-to-4 decision, said a lawsuit filed by the man, Javaid Iqbal, must be dismissed at a preliminary stage because he had failed to allege a plausible link between the officials’ conduct and the abuses he said he suffered.

“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 should produce a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims, even though the purpose of the policy was to target neither Arabs nor Muslims,” Justice Kennedy wrote.

Mr. Iqbal, who used to be a cable television installer on Long Island, was among thousands of Muslim men rounded up after the Sept. 11 attacks. Some of them were considered to be ”of high interest,” and they were held in a special housing unit of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

While there, Mr. Iqbal said, he was kept in solitary confinement, subjected to daily body-cavity searches, beatings and extreme temperatures. He said that he was called a terrorist and a ”Muslim killer,” and that he lost 40 pounds during six months in the special unit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/us/19scotus.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Hopefully one of these men will feel the need to retire soon.

i assume it's torture