The Italian court convicted in absentia a CIA station chief and 22 other agents for abducting a Muslim cleric and sending him to Egypt, where he was tortured. Similarly, a British court recently ruled that a former detainee and torture victim has the right to obtain documents to prove he was mistreated — despite U.S. objections.

In contrast, in a recent case here in the United States, involving the abduction and extraordinary rendition of Canadian citizen Maher Arar to Syria by U.S. authorities, a federal appeals court ruled that Arar — who turned out to be innocent — has no right to redress.

Arar, as we now know, was arrested based on faulty intelligence at John F. Kennedy airport in New York, denied access to a lawyer, and shipped off to Syria for interrogation under torture. Both the Syrian and Canadian governments have since confirmed that Arar had done nothing wrong, and Arar sued U.S. officials for his unlawful treatment. Yet the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York recently ruled that the courts should not interfere in cases involving national security and foreign affairs — that’s for the executive and legislative branches alone.

As The Times notes today in an editorial, the ruling was an abdication of the role of the federal judiciary, which, after all, is the branch of government charged with upholding the rights granted in the U.S. Constitution.  Surely the right to be free from groundless abduction, rendition and torture is among them. As The Times’ editorial board puts it: “The ruling distorts precedent and the Constitutional separation of powers to deny justice to Mr. Arar and give officials a pass for egregious misconduct.”

What The Times neglects to mention is that another case, filed just yesterday on behalf of a U.S. citizen, raises precisely the same issues — and could meet the same fate. This time, however, as I explained yesterday, the plaintiff is a U.S. citizen, born and raised in New Jersey, abducted by U.S. authorities and held in three different African prisons where, he says, he was tortured and threatened by FBI agents, among others. He was eventually returned home without charge.

The judges who decided the Arar case earlier this month didn’t uniformly agree that he ought not be allowed to make his case in court. In fact, the 7-4 opinion spawned four dissenting opinions that are among the most eloquent statements on the role of the judiciary in upholding the U.S. Constitution that I’ve ever read.

As Judge Barrington Parker wrote, the court’s decision “risks a government that can interpret the law to suits its own ends, without scrutiny.” Parker cited a memo from former Deputy Assistant Attorneys General John Yoo and Robert Delahunty in the Bush Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel advising the top lawyer at the Pentagon in 2002 that the President enjoys “complete discretion” in conducting operations overseas, and that the Constitution’s Bill of Rights — such as the Fifth Amendment right to due process and the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” — do not apply to overseas interrogations.

This is a breakthrough for Mohamed, because while he claims that he was tortured while detained in Pakistan and interrogated by U.S. and British agents, he’s never been able to obtain evidence from the U.K. government that he says will prove his allegations. Meanwhile, the British Foreign Secretary had urged the British court not to make Mohamed’s specific torture claims public, citing a risk to relations between the United Kingdom and the United States, suggesting that the U.S. had urged him to keep the charges hidden.

Friday’s ruling, reported by JURIST over the weekend, reversed the previous decisions to redact Mohamed’s allegations, saying that “the public interest in making the paragraphs public is overwhelming” and “the risk to national security judged objectively on the evidence is not a serious one.”  The court’s earlier opinion therefore will be re-issued with the paragraphs restored.

More details on the court’s decision can be found at JURIST, and more on the strange and difficult case of Binyam Mohamed, who was released from Guantanamo and returned to the United Kingdom last February, can be found here and here.

The U.S. government tried to convince Mohamed to sign an agreement upon his release promising not to discuss his treatment by U.S. authorities. He refused.

Mohamed is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan, the Boeing subsidiary that allegedly helped the CIA conduct “extraordinary renditions” of terror suspects to foreign countries to be tortured. As I reported back in June, the Obama Justice Department has asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to re-hear the case after the court ordered that it can continue, despite the administration’s assertion of the “state secrets privilege.”

Most recently, the Chronicle notes, a British government lawyer told the U.K. High Court of Justice last month “that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had threatened to limit U.S. intelligence-sharing with Great Britain if the court disclosed details of Mohamed’s treatment in Guantanamo.”

A transcript of the British court’s July 29 hearing reveals that Lord Justice John Thomas rejected that argument, saying there was “nothing in the paragraphs (about the U.S. government’s treatment of Mohamed) that could conceivably identify anything that is of a national security interest.”

They also wanted Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen, to plead guilty — even though he was never charged with a crime.

Given the rising number of lawsuits being filed against the United States charging unlawful detention, torture and abuse in violation of U.S. and international law, the U.S. government’s attempt to get Mohamed to sign a release isn’t all that surprising. And the U.S. government’s pressure to keep the details of Mohamed’s ordeal secret is consistent with its previous pressure on the U.K. court not to release even a summary of his claims of torture.

But it raises the question: how many more former detainees have promised not to talk, or sue, or seek justice of any kind, in order to secure their release?