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Ear to the Ground

High Court Lets Ashcroft, Mueller Off the Hook

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Posted on May 18, 2009
SCOTUS
Flickr / NCinDC

The nation’s top court decided on Monday that former Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI honcho Robert Mueller aren’t directly accountable for the abuses that Pakistani detainee Javaid Iqbal, a Muslim, says he endured as a result of his race and religion in a New York prison in 2002.

AP via Google News:

The court overturned a lower court decision that let Javaid Iqbal’s ... lawsuit against the high-ranking officials proceed.

Iqbal is a Pakistani Muslim who spent nearly six months in solitary confinement in New York in 2002. He had argued that while Ashcroft and Mueller did not single him out for mistreatment, they were responsible for a policy of confining detainees in highly restrictive conditions because of their religious beliefs or race.

But the government argued that there was nothing linking Mueller and Ashcroft to the abuses that happened to Iqbal at a Brooklyn, N.Y., prison’s Administrative Maximum Special Housing Unit, and the court agreed.

“The complaint does not show or even intimate, that petitioners purposefully housed detainees in the ADMAX SHU due to their race, religion or national origin,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion. “All it plausibly suggests is that the nation’s top law enforcement officers, in the aftermath of a devastating attack, sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available until the suspects could be cleared of terrorist activity.”

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By Inherit The Wind, May 20 at 7:16 am #

hippie4ever, May 19 at 12:51 pm #

Inherit The Wind, I agree with you except were Scalia to recuse himself whenever tainted, he’d never sit on any trials!
**********************************

What is wrong with THAT?

**********************************
Same for Thomas and that hack Roberts, the former who has NEVER written a significant decision;
***********************************

You mean the guy who was deciding who would be our next President in 2000 while his wife was busy vetting appointment candidates for Bush?

***********************************
the latter who couldn’t (competently) swear-in the President of the United States.
***********************************

If that was his worst problem I’d be delighted. Roberts’s flub was nothing really.  But his decisions consistently come down on the side of corporations or EXTREMELY liberal (in the true sense) interpretations of the breadth of the Executive Branch’s powers, that far exceed the Constitution or any intention of the framers or justices up till now.  THAT is the one definition of “Liberal” that’s both accurate and sickening.  And he’s not alone.  Alito is a clone.

*******************************************
This Court is disabled and will not fulfill its Constitutional mandate for years to come. This is one of the systemic problems that prevents the nation from following its own laws.
********************************************

Oh, it’s not disabled, but it needs to be. The rest of your statement in this paragraph is, however, 100% accurate.

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By hippie4ever, May 19 at 12:51 pm #

Inherit The Wind, I agree with you except were Scalia to recuse himself whenever tainted, he’d never sit on any trials! Same for Thomas and that hack Roberts, the former who has NEVER written a significant decision; the latter who couldn’t (competently) swear-in the President of the United States. This Court is disabled and will not fulfill its Constitutional mandate for years to come. This is one of the systemic problems that prevents the nation from following its own laws.

Report this

By Inherit The Wind, May 19 at 12:21 am #

About a year ago people here were fervently arguing for Botch to be impeached.  Now it’s blatantly obvious that that effort should have been to impeach Scalia for his obvious biases and refusals to recuse himself from cases where he either had a personal interest or was “tainted”.

No serious REAL law will be written as long as these five assholes are determined to shred the Constitution in favor of the powerful and the religious right.

Talk about judicial activism! These are the most activist justices in the last 100+ years.  NOTHING in the Constitution means anything to these 5, nothing.

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By Folktruther, May 18 at 6:26 pm #

Under the neoliberal police state that the Bushites initiated and Obama is continuing, the powerful are no longer constrained by law.  Being powerful means that what you do is no longer illegal.  The banksters steal in plain sight, the Dems rob the treasury for them, Obama continues torture, rigged trials, secret police spying spying on the population, lawless imprisonment and covering it all with Dem rebranding and liberal deceit.  Obama is intent on continuing to deprive the American people of power, including gutting social security and medicare to the extent he can get away with it.

Endless war abroad and a neoliberal police statte at home.  and lawless brutalizing of resistence.

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By NYCartist, May 18 at 5:02 pm #

Keep this (and other decisions) when letting your Senator know about Obama’s nominee for the next open seat on the US Supreme Court.  And do remind those who voted for Roberts, etc that we knew how he/they would vote on the Court.  Phooey. Where do we go from here?

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