October 11, 2016
Washington — The Supreme Court (click here) agreed on Tuesday to decide whether high-ranking George W. Bush administration officials — including John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, and Robert S. Mueller III, the former F.B.I. director — may be held liable for policies adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The
case began as a class action in 2002 filed by immigrants, most of them
Muslim, over policies and practices that swept hundreds of people into
the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn on immigration violations
in the weeks after the attacks. The plaintiffs said they had been
subjected to beatings, humiliating searches and other abuses.
The
roundups drew criticism from the inspector general of the Justice
Department, who in 2003 issued reports saying that the government had
made little or no effort to distinguish between genuine suspects and
Muslim immigrants with minor visa violations.
A
divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the
Second Circuit, in New York, let the case proceed last year.
“The
suffering endured by those who were imprisoned merely because they were
caught up in the hysteria of the days immediately following 9/11 is not
without a remedy,” Judges Rosemary S. Pooler and Richard C. Wesley
wrote in a joint opinion....