The U.S. Department of Transportation has said an airline didn't discriminate against six Muslim imams when it kicked them off a flight at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in 2006.

"While we acknowledge the actions of US Airways' personnel could be perceived by some as discriminatory in this circumstance, we find the decision to remove the Imams from the aircraft was based on information available to the captain at the time and was reasonable," Samuel Podberesky, the agency's assistant general counsel, wrote in a Jan. 14 letter to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR.

The Transportation Department did fault US Airways, though, for refusing to book the men on another flight after the FBI cleared them and a federal air marshal told the airline the men posed no threat.

Podberesky said the agency was "putting US Airways on notice" that if it didn't come up with written policies for such instances, "more formal action will be taken."

Dane Jaques, a lawyer in McLean, Va., who represents US Airways, did not return a call for comment.

The letter is among a stack of exhibits entered last week in a lawsuit the imams filed against the airline and the Metropolitan Airports Commission in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis. The men, who were flying to Phoenix after attending a conference in Minneapolis, claim they were the victims of racial and religious profiling because they appeared Middle Eastern and some of them prayed before boarding the flight.