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.

The new plan that’s reportedly winning broad support appears to repair that major flaw.

Despite Sen. John McCain’s and many House Republicans’ refusal on Friday to go along with the amended bailout plan — a rare compromise worked out between the Bush administration and congressional Democrats that reveals more the depth of this crisis than any new ideological meeting of the minds — a new proposal seems to have been negotiated.

Though details are still being worked out, the new bill reportedly includes a congressional oversight board and pay limits for executives whose companies seek government help. It requires the government, as owner of distressed mortgage-backed securities, to try to prevent foreclosures. It would also give the government some equity stake in companies seeking financial aid — allowing taxpayers to profit should their financial health be restored. Let’s hope that equity stake is a strong one.

News reports aren’t addressing directly whether aggrieved shareholders could sue the Treasury secretary if he mismanaged their holdings, or what other role there might be for judicial review.

But Washington lawyers following the negotiations closely tell me that the offensive Section 8 of the plan – which Huffington Post and others described in vivid detail last week — has been removed. So have other limitations on legal review, like Treasury’s powers to hire private contractors without following any of the usual public contracting laws designed to prevent conflicts of interest — including hiring friends, family or companies in which the secretary has a financial interest.

Whether enough Republicans will go along with the plan to make it work, or at least to convince some of the less secure Democrats that it’s a risk worth taking, remains to be seen.

The public, understandably baffled by how this could all work and wary of handing this administration more billions of dollars to spend at its will, may need some educating and convincing that this is all actually in the public interest.

But the new plan — both what it includes and what it leaves out — suggests that Congress is well on its way to not only restoring some stability to the economy, but to restoring the rule of law and the separation of powers threatened by the original Paulson plan.

In a plan that’s being widely questioned by economic experts, the president wants the Department of Treasury to use Americans’ tax money to pay premium prices for bad mortgage-backed assets from the major financial institutions in an effort to restore public confidence in them. As reported by Bloomberg, the plan will require spending as much as the combined budgets of the Departments of Defense, Education and Health and Human Services, and would give Treasury Sec. Paulson the power to hire asset managers and award contracts to private companies. While Democrats have promised there will be unspecified “oversight” of all this, the proposal to ban any legal actions against the Treasury for its handling of the crisis deliberately removes the federal courts from the oversight role that that they’re constitutionally designed for.

Despite the repeated efforts of this Administration to push them aside, the courts are, in fact, the Third Branch of government, designed to check the Executive and Congress. While some limitations on opportunistic lawsuits might be necessary to prevent any feared onslaught, preventing any court judgment of Treasury’s actions would, once again, give this Administration far more power than its management of the economy thus far would suggest that it deserves.