Back To the Water, uh, Drawing Board.
Doh.
I had no idea that the charge was "The government put me in here because they're racist/anti-Muslim." I had assumed that the charge was, "The government put me in here because they had no idea what to do, and oh yeah, people were tortured." Sure, flushing the sacred texts down a toilet is discriminatory, but was that really the purpose, or a means to an end?
And the way the WashPost phonetically pronounces the prosecution's name? Classy. And...how often do they do that for hard-to-say names anyway?
WASHINGTON -- A sharply divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that FBI Director Robert Mueller and former Attorney General John Ashcroft can't face a lawsuit from a former Sept. 11 detainee who argued they were responsible for his restrictive confinement because of his religious beliefs.
The court on Monday overturned a lower court decision that let Javaid Iqbal's (Ick-ball) 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."
I had no idea that the charge was "The government put me in here because they're racist/anti-Muslim." I had assumed that the charge was, "The government put me in here because they had no idea what to do, and oh yeah, people were tortured." Sure, flushing the sacred texts down a toilet is discriminatory, but was that really the purpose, or a means to an end?
And the way the WashPost phonetically pronounces the prosecution's name? Classy. And...how often do they do that for hard-to-say names anyway?
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