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The Attorney General Is a Very Busy ManThe Supreme Court seems to think that also makes him immune from litigation.

By Dahlia LithwickPosted Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2008, at 7:12 PM ET

John Ashcroft and Robert MuellerIs the claim that former Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were involved in post-9/11 detention policies more or less plausible than the assertion that the CEO of Coca-Cola has intentionally slipped a mouse into your soda bottle? How busy do you have to be in order to evade a civil lawsuit? What is the plural form of mouse? These are the big questions the Supreme Court grapples with this morning as it sticks a toe into the waters of a raging national debate about legal accountability for high-level government actors for wrongs committed in pursuit of the war on terrorism.

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Javaid Iqbal is a former cable installer and Pakistani citizen who was swept up along with more than 700 Muslim and Arab men in the massive post-9/11 terrorism dragnet. Not one of them was ever charged with terrorism-related crimes. Some of those deemed, like Iqbal, to be of "high interest" were detained under a "hold until cleared" policy at a high-security facility in Brooklyn. Iqbal claims that during 150 days of detention based solely on his religion and national origin, he was subject to solitary confinement, repeated cavity searches, denied medical care, and brutally beaten. He pleaded guilty to immigration charges (unrelated to terrorism) and was sent back to Pakistan in 2003. He then sued 34 current and former government officials, right up the chain of command from the prison staff to John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller. Ashcroft and Mueller moved to get themselves out of the case, claiming, among other things, that any connections between themselves and the Brooklyn detention policies were based on mere "conclusory allegations." A federal district court and the 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, allowing the suit to go forward against the two men based on the "likelihood that these senior officials would have concerned themselves with the formulation and implementation" of these policies.

Solicitor General Gregory Garre opens his argument this morning with the claim that high-ranking officials are entitled to qualified immunity—the doctrine that shields government officials from personal liability for actions taken in their official capacities. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stops him short, explaining that qualified immunity is a defense, yes, but not a mechanism for tossing the lawsuit altogether.

Justice David Souter pokes at the government claim that there is nothing connecting Ashcroft and Mueller to the detention policy, asking whether the complaint doesn't quite specifically allege that Ashcroft and Mueller "willfully and maliciously" designed it. Garre responds that the formal policy of "holding persons until cleared" was neutral and reasonable on its face. He says racial or religious classifications under the policy were made by FBI officials in the field. (You may remember this as the "bad apples" defense born at Abu Ghraib.)

The sticky wicket in this case is a 2007 Supreme Court decision called Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, which changed the test for how much evidence a plaintiff needs to show to keep from being tossed out of court. This may not sound all that consequential to you, but to America's civil-procedure professors, the effect of Twombly was akin to releasing a live ferret amid the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

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But Garre makes a big point of arguing that he's not seeking higher pleading standards for his clients. He just wants the court to take "context" into account. And the context here seems to be that some people are just too busy to be sued. This arises both insofar as Ashcroft and Mueller are evidently too busy to be subjected to the discovery-and-trial process but also because they were too busy, post-9/11, to bother with "microscopic" decision-making about "micromanaging" detention policy in Brooklyn.

Justice Steven Breyer then offers up the hypothetical that keeps on giving: Suppose, he asks Garre, "Jones sues the president of Coca-Cola for personally putting a mouse in his bottle. Where is the rule that says he can go to the judge and say, 'I have no time for this'?" Garre says the plaintiff needs to show some kind of plausible claim. Souter points out that "plausible" claims are not the same as claims that can "probably be proven true." Souter says an allegation that "the president of Coke is personally putting mouses [sic] in bottles" is simply bizarre. Whereas Iqbal's allegation that the FBI director was involved in its detention policies is not.

Breyer—claiming to be forgetting civil procedure ("it was probably taught on Day 4 ...")—repeats that he knows of no rule allowing people to evade the discovery rules because they are too busy. "Yes, the attorney general is very busy, and what he does is very important," Breyer says. "The president of Coca-Cola is very busy. The president of General Motors is also very busy. In fact, he's very busy at the moment. Lots of people are very important and very busy. ..."