Before the World Trade Center attack, Javaid Iqbal was a Pakistani immigrant proud to be known as "the cable guy" to customers on Long Island, where he had lived for a decade and married an American. Ehab Elmaghraby, an Egyptian, had a weekend flea market stand at Aqueduct Raceway and a restaurant near Times Square where friendly police officers would joke, "Where's my shish kebab?"

But within weeks of Sept. 11, 2001, both had been picked up by federal agents in an anti-terror sweep. For 23 hours a day, they were locked in solitary confinement in the harsh maximum-security unit of a federal detention center in Brooklyn - the one cited by the Justice Department's inspector general last year for widespread physical abuse of its detainees.

[...]

The accusations are similar to those now being made against military officers guarding prisoners in Iraq.

The lawsuit charges that the men were repeatedly slammed into walls and dragged across the floor while shackled and manacled, kicked and punched until they bled, cursed as "terrorists" and "Muslim bastards," and subjected to multiple unnecessary body-cavity searches, including one during which correction officers inserted a flashlight into Mr. Elmaghraby's rectum, making him bleed.

At that point, the papers charge, he was confined without blankets, mattress or toilet paper to a tiny cell kept lighted 24 hours a day, and was denied adequate medical care or communication with his public defender. He said his attempts to pray or sleep were disrupted by guards banging on his door.

[...] Mr. Elmaghraby was picked up on Sept. 30, 2001, in his apartment in Maspeth, Queens, when federal agents were investigating his Muslim landlord, apparently because years earlier the landlord had applied for pilot training. Mr. Iqbal was arrested in his Long Island apartment on Nov. 2 by agents who were apparently following a tip about false identification cards. In his apartment they found a Time magazine showing the trade towers in flames and paperwork showing that he had been in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, picking up a work permit from immigration services. He was detained for nine months before the F.B.I. cleared him of any terrorist link.

[...] Though the lawsuit is not being filed as a class action, it is about more than redress for the mistreatment of two individuals singled out because of their race, religion and national origin, said Alexander Reinert, a lawyer for Koob & Magoolaghan, which joined with the Urban Justice Center, an advocacy organization, to prepare the papers.

"The case is about ensuring that in times of crisis we stand by the principles that are most important to our country, and those are principles of fairness and equality embodied in the Constitution," he said.

[...] Mr. Iqbal, 37, who lost 40 pounds in detention, said he suffers from chronic digestive problems, pain and depression and is still struggling to reconcile the two sides of America he experienced.

In a telephone interview from Faisalabad, Pakistan, he spoke wistfully of his early, around-the-clock jobs as a 7-Eleven clerk and as a gas station attendant in Huntington, N.Y., where customers brought him Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas gifts. But he is so haunted by memories of the terror, pain and humiliation that the federal officers inflicted on him, he said, that he starts to shake at the sight of his own brother, a policeman, in uniform.

"Before I go to prison, the America that I know is a beautiful country and Americans are such beautiful, kind, humble people," he said. "When I go to prison, I see there a different face of the United States of America."

[...] Unlike Mr. Elmaghraby, who spent his whole detention in the maximum-security unit, Mr. Iqbal was housed with the general inmate population for the first two months after his arrest. But on the evening of Jan. 8, 2002, he was told that he had a "legal visit" in a room on another floor.

Instead of a lawyer, he found more than a dozen federal officers waiting for him. As he and the lawsuit tell it, several officers picked him up and threw him against the wall. He said he heard one ask a senior person, "He's the one?" and when the reply was affirmative, an officer pressing Mr. Iqbal's head into the wall turned it around, looked him in the face and said, "Welcome to hell, buddy."

At that, he was dragged to the floor, kicked in the stomach with steel-toed shoes and punched in the face, he said, and the officers screamed death threats and curses as they beat him up. "Then the senior person said, 'Just take him out of my sight.' "

Hatred seemed to determine the rules on the unit in ways large and small, the men said. On cold days when it rained, Mr. Iqbal was left outside for hours without jacket or shoes. When he was returned to his cell drenched, officers turned on the air-conditioning, he said. At one point, the lawsuit said, Mr. Elmaghraby was mockingly displayed naked to a female staff member.

[...] The inspector general's report said last June that Mr. Ashcroft's policy was to hold detainees on any legal pretext until the F.B.I. cleared them, even though such clearances turned out to take months, not days, because they were given low priority. It said little effort was made to distinguish between legitimate terrorism suspects and the many people picked up by chance during the investigation.

[...] Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in the 5-to-4 decision, said a lawsuit filed by the man, Javaid Iqbal, must be dismissed at a preliminary stage because he failed to allege a plausible link between the officials’ conduct and the abuses he said he had suffered.

All that Mr. Iqbal’s suit plausibly suggested, Justice Kennedy wrote, “is that the nation’s top law enforcement officers, in the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack, sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available until the suspects could be cleared of terrorist activity.”

[...] “It should come as no surprise,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “that a legitimate policy directing law enforcement to arrest and detain individuals because of their suspected link to the attacks should produce a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims, even though the purpose of the policy was to target neither Arabs nor Muslims.”

[...] “Iqbal does not say merely that Ashcroft was the architect of some amorphous discrimination, or that Mueller was instrumental in some ill-defined constitutional violation; he alleges that they helped to create the discriminatory policy he has described,” Justice Souter wrote.

Justice Souter added that the majority had engaged in a sort of legal sleight of hand, ignoring a concession from the government that Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Mueller would be liable were Mr. Iqbal able to prove they actually knew of unconstitutional discrimination by their subordinates and were deliberately indifferent to it.

Instead of accepting that concession, Justice Souter continued, the majority decided that even proof of such knowledge was insufficient.

[...]

In his dissent, Justice Souter wrote that the assertions in Mr. Iqbal’s lawsuit, coupled with the government’s concession, should have been enough to allow it to proceed. At the early stages of a suit, Justice Souter added, such assertions need merely be plausible.

“The sole exception to this rule lies with allegations that are sufficiently fantastic to defy reality as we know it: claims about little green men, or the plaintiff’s recent trip to Pluto, or experiences in time travel,” Justice Souter wrote. “That is not what we have here.”

[...] Justice Kennedy, who was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., wrote that Mr. Iqbal’s “account of his prison ordeal could, if proved, demonstrate unconstitutional misconduct” by officials other than Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Mueller. Justice Kennedy added that the lower courts may yet decide to allow Mr. Iqbal to amend his lawsuit to make more specific allegations about the complicity of the two men.

[...] "I am not afraid," Mr. Iqbal wrote last week in an e-mail message about his return. "I am also sure that justice will be served because peoples of U.S.A. are justice-loving people regardless of race and religion."

[...] I once lived on Ocean Parkway, by the way, with plenty of similar Arab neighbors. I grew up in Midwood, Brooklyn, which was once largely Jewish, Italian, Greek, a bit of Irish, and other largely European-descended immigrants. In later decades, when I returned to live there for a time, it had becoming increasingly Jewish, but also considerably Pakistani, South Asian, and Arab, as well.

All very nice people. My neighbors. These guys could have been my neighbors.

[...] An Egyptian Muslim who was also part of the suit, Ehad Elmaghraby, settled with the government for $300,000. Similar suits are pending.