Former US president George W. Bush’s top law enforcer John Ashcroft could be sued and held personally responsible for the wrongful detention of a US “terror” witness, a federal appeals court said.Placing responsibility on Bush administration officials, especially Ashcroft who was attorney general at the time, the judge at the ninth circuit court of appeals in Boise, Idaho ruled Friday in favor of Abdullah al-Kidd, an American citizen who brought the complaint.
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Arrested on March 16, 2003 at Washington’s Dulles Airport, al-Kidd was held for 13 months in maximum security prisons.
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In such circumstances, [Judge Milan Smith] wrote, such powers were used “not because there is evidence that they have committed a crime, but merely because the government wishes to investigate them for possible wrongdoing, or to prevent them from having contact with others in the outside world.”
The court, said attorney Lee Gelernt, who argued the appeal, “made it very clear today that former attorney general Ashcroft’s use of the federal material witness law circumvented the Constitution.
The real significance of this case is that it highlights the dangers and evils of preventive detention -- an issue that will be front and center when Obama shortly presents his proposal for a preventive detention scheme, something he first advocated in May.[...]
John Ashcroft's abuse of the material witness statute to "preventively detain" numerous American Muslims who had done nothing wrong was "repugnant," dangerous and tyrannical -- and that's exactly what any Congressional scheme would be that purports to vest the President with the legal power to "preventively detain" people in the absence of criminal charges.
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