Court: Bush-era officials untouchable

The US Supreme Court drops a case against FBI Chief and former Attorney General for their alleged 9/11 abuse, saying no Bush-era official could be subject to such cases.

The Supreme Court on Monday overturned a New York federal appeals court decision stating former Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller and former attorney general John Ashcroft could be held responsible for their alleged mistreatment of the Pakistani terror suspect Javaid Iqbal.

Iqbal is a 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 behind the policy that led to his highly restrictive conditions.

Iqbal says his confinement was simply the result of unlawful ethnic and religious discrimination against him.

There is a heated debate in the US over prosecuting the Bush administration officials for their abuse of detainees and authorization of tortures.

President Obama has been deeply ambivalent on the subject. On the one hand, he immediately halted authorization of what Bush euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” and recently released torture memos, on the other, he has insisted that the CIA agents who employed these methods should not be prosecuted and has advised members of Congress against launching a commission to investigate the abuses.

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