Back when news of the dramatic hospital bed story broke in May 2007, John Ashcroft took over from John McCain as the reigning St. John of American politics.

Some news that appeared late Friday evening, and got buried over the holiday weekend, shines a light on the other side of John Ashcroft.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that former attorney general John Ashcroft can be sued by a Muslim American who was detained for more than two weeks in 2003 in The War Against Terror:

Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is not immune from being sued by a man who claims he was illegally detained under Justice Department policies implemented after the September 11 terror attacks, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

The man, a native-born U.S. citizen who was once a college football star, was held and interrogated by the FBI for 16 days in 2003 and his travel was limited for another year, court documents said.
[...]
Abdullah al-Kidd‘s lawyers claimed Ashcroft developed a policy under which the FBI and Justice Department would use the federal material witness law as a pretext “to arrest and detain terrorism suspects about whom they did not have sufficient evidence to arrest on criminal charges but wished to hold preventatively or to investigate further.”

His arrest warrant was based on an FBI affidavit that said he was needed to testify at the trial of a Saudi man who had been indicted on visa fraud.

Al-Kidd was never called as a witness in that case, in which the defendant was acquitted, court documents said.

The decision said that “al-Kidd’s arrest functioned as an investigatory arrest or national security-related pre-emptive detention, rather than as one to secure a witness’s testimony for trial.”

How unexpected. Apparently, under U.S. law, you can’t just make up shit and arrest someone on trumped-up charges, not even in the great and glorious cause of TWAT. Who would ever have guessed?

The opinion bemoaned that some “confidently assert that the government has the power to arrest and detain or restrict American citizens for months on end, in sometimes primitive conditions . . . because the government wishes to investigate them for possible wrongdoing or to prevent them from having contact with others in the outside world. We find this to be repugnant.”

It’s also apparently frowned upon when you lie to judges. In al-Kidd’s case, federal agents managed to pull off both lies of omission and lies of commission:

The agents failed to tell the magistrate who issued the warrant that al-Kidd was an American citizen with family in the United States, or that he had previously cooperated with the FBI, his lawyers said. They also told the judge he had a one-way ticket, when he actually held a round-trip ticket, they said.

It probably didn’t/won’t help Ashcroft’s case that he has bragged about adopting precisely the strategy he is now accused of following:

At the heart of the lawsuit is a strategy launched by the Justice Department and the FBI after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Ashcroft, the attorney general at the time, asserted that authorities would take “suspected terrorists off the street” and engage in “aggressive detention of lawbreakers and material witnesses” to disrupt possible al-Qaeda plots.

Neither will it help Ashcroft much that al-Kidd was treated more like a terrorism suspect than a material witness:

Al-Kidd, a Muslim convert who had been a standout running back on the University of Idaho football team, was confined in a high-security cell lit 24 hours a day, according to the opinion. He was strip-searched and transported, in shackles, across three states for 16 days before a court ordered his release. Authorities could not offer evidence of criminal wrongdoing by al-Kidd, and he never testified in a court proceeding.

Ashcroft clearly felt that TWAT armed him with such wide-ranging powers to trample the rights of American citizens that there wasn’t even any need to keep up the pretense under which you were arrested.

George Bush sure knew how to pick Attorneys General, didn’t he?