Arabs, Muslims detained in U.S. post-9/11 may be able to sue top law enforcement officials

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A divided U.S. appeals court said the federal government's top law enforcers can be sued by former inmates who claim their civil rights were violated while jailed after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks because they were Arab, Muslim or stereotyped that way.

Wednesday's 2-1 decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals prompted an impassioned dissent that the ruling could make it harder to protect the country against terrorism.

The court revived claims against Bush administration officials including Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI director Robert Mueller and Immigration and Naturalization Services Commissioner James Ziglar by former inmates at Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center.

These inmates claimed they were illegally singled out as Muslims, Arabs or South Asians for 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, strip searches, sleep deprivation and other abuses.

"There was no legitimate governmental purpose in holding someone in the most restrictive conditions of confinement available simply because he happened to be-or, worse yet, appeared to be-Arab or Muslim," Circuit Judges Rosemary Pooler and Richard Wesley wrote in an unusual, 109-page joint decision.

U.S. District Judge John Gleeson in Brooklyn had in 2013 dismissed the claims against the U.S. officials, while allowing some claims against the jail's wardens.

But the 2nd Circuit said Ashcroft, Mueller and Ziglar could be sued under the 1971 Supreme Court precedent Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, over policies that treated some immigrant inmates as suspected terrorists though no suspicion existed.

Pooler and Wesley said it did not matter that the officials did not require or specify how the inmates should be confined.