Posted by
mgraves on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 6:05:11 PM
What is sad is that four justices felt he had a
case.
Mr Iqbal attempt to sue Atty General Ashcroft and FBI Director Mueller for alleged misconduct, including ethnic and religious discrimination, during his detention in late 2001 and 2002. Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority stated, ""The complaint does not show or even intimate that petitioners
purposefully housed detainees" in prison "due to their race, religion
or national origin, ...""
Mr Iqbal was deported in January 2003 after pleading guilty to fraud.
To prove his case, Mr Iqbal would have had to demonstrate that either he was singled out for discriminatory treatment and that such mistreatment occurred at the direction of Mr Ashcroft and Mr Mueller, or that there was a pervasive policy implemented by Mr Ashcroft and Mr Mueller to discriminate against certain persons and that he (Mr Iqbal) fell within that class of discriminated against individuals. The latter seems more likely than the former (kind of a slim and none thing), but even so, it seems unlikely.
According to the BBC, "dozens" of Muslim men were detained after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and that of those "dozens", many of those held at the detention center that Mr Iqbal was held at suffered "abuse" (according to the DOJ inspector general).
Let us parse that claim. The fact that there were "dozens" of Muslim men detained after September 11 seems to imply that there may have been some sort of arbitrarily discriminatory policy. Until, of course, one looks beyond the mere implication.
The story does not put the detention of "dozens" of Muslim men in any kind of context. There is no discussion of what these men were detained for, how many Muslim men were detained prior to September 11 (to provide a control group), or anything of the sort. There is merely an unchallenged assertion of a discriminatory policy and an implication of an unusual number of persons of a particular identifiable group being detained.