If you are a real defender of free speech, sometimes you will feel the little hairs standing up on the back of your neck. Freedom of speech doesn’t protect anyone if it doesn’t protect the people you’d most like to shut up. It doesn’t protect any ideas unless it protects the ideas you most wish to stifle.

If this guy doesn’t have freedom of speech, then no one does.

Seventy years ago, the world watched a modern, civilized nation slowly spiraling into madness.

When people were arrested without charges and held without a trial and without a chance to defend themselves, the world said, “These are trying times, and no one should be surprised at some excesses.” When laws were passed stripping certain citizens of most of their rights, the world said, “These things happen. At least it’s not everyone.” When the government turned a blind eye to riot and murder, the world said, “The German people have a proud heritage. Soon they will stand up to set things right.”

How did that all work out?

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert:

Terrible things were done to Maher Arar, and his extreme suffering was set in motion by the United States government. With the awful facts of his case carefully documented, he tried to sue for damages. But last week a federal judge waved the facts aside and told Mr. Arar, in effect, to get lost.

We’re in a new world now and the all-powerful U.S. government apparently has free rein to ruin innocent lives without even a nod in the direction of due process or fair play. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen who, according to all evidence, has led an exemplary life, was seized and shackled by U.S. authorities at Kennedy Airport in 2002, and then shipped off to Syria, his native country, where he was held in a dungeon for the better part of a year. He was tormented physically and psychologically, and at times tortured.

…

Mr. Arar’s case became a world-class embarrassment when even Syria’s torture professionals could elicit no evidence that he was in any way involved in terrorism. After 10 months, he was released. No charges were ever filed against him.

Mr. Arar is a 35-year-old software engineer who lives in Ottawa with his wife and their two young children. He’s never been in any kind of trouble. Commenting on the case in a local newspaper, a former Canadian official dryly observed that “accidents will happen” in the war on terror. The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York filed a lawsuit on Mr. Arar’s behalf, seeking damages from the U.S. government for his ordeal. The government said the case could not even be dealt with because the litigation would involve the revelation of state secrets.

In other words, it wouldn’t matter how hideously or egregiously Mr. Arar had been treated, or how illegally or disgustingly the government had behaved. The case would have to be dropped. Inquiries into this 21st-century Inquisition cannot be tolerated. Its activities must remain secret at all costs.

In a ruling that basically gave the green light to government barbarism, U.S. District Judge David Trager dismissed Mr. Arar’s lawsuit last Thursday.…

[Judge Trager] said that “the need for secrecy can hardly be doubted.”

Under that reasoning, of course, the government could literally get away with murder. With its bad actions cloaked in court-sanctioned secrecy, no one would be the wiser.

…

If kidnapping and torturing an innocent man is O.K., what’s not O.K.?

History repeats itself. This modern, civilized nation is slowly spiraling into madness. It’s time, right now, for the American people to stand up and set things right.

A few years ago I was being shown around some of the ritzier neighborhoods of Los Angeles. I saw a fancy sports car just ahead of us, with a vanity license plate that said, “MENSCH.”

“I know one thing about the guy in that car,” I said. “He’s no mensch.”

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes about the mensch gap:

“Be a mensch,” my parents told me. Literally, a mensch is a person. But by implication, a mensch is an upstanding person who takes responsibility for his actions.

The people now running America aren’t mensches.

Dick Cheney isn’t a mensch. There have been many attempts to turn the shooting of Harry Whittington into a political metaphor, but the most characteristic moment was the final act — the Moscow show-trial moment in which the victim of Mr. Cheney’s recklessness apologized for getting shot. Remember, Mr. Cheney, more than anyone else, misled us into the Iraq war. Then, when neither links to Al Qaeda nor W.M.D. materialized, he shifted the blame to the very intelligence agencies he bullied into inflating the threat.

Donald Rumsfeld isn’t a mensch. Before the Iraq war Mr. Rumsfeld muzzled commanders who warned that we were going in with too few troops, and sidelined State Department experts who warned that we needed a plan for the invasion’s aftermath. But when the war went wrong, he began talking about “unknown unknowns” and going to war with “the army you have…”

Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, isn’t a mensch. Remember his excuse for failing to respond to the drowning of New Orleans?…

Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, isn’t a mensch. He insists that the prescription drug plan’s catastrophic start doesn’t reflect poorly on his department, that “no logical person” would have expected “a transition happening that is so large without some problems.” In fact, Medicare’s 1966 startup went very smoothly.…

I could go on. Officials in this administration never take responsibility for their actions. When something goes wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault.

…

Whatever the reason for the woeful content of our leaders’ character, it has horrifying consequences. You can’t learn from mistakes if you won’t admit making any mistakes, an observation that explains a lot about the policy disasters of recent years — the failed occupation of Iraq, the failed response to Katrina, the failed drug plan.

During the campaign of 2004, I heard people complain that John Kerry was too smart; that he knew foreign languages; that he had traveled to many countries. One person said, “He thinks he’s better than us.”

Bush doesn’t?

Kerry showed he had the intellect for the job, and some Americans saw a threat to the idea that “all men are created equal,” I guess.

Personally, I want somebody way smarter than me as president, but many American voters seem uncomfortable with a president who’s too smart, so we get the fake down-home Texas boy, George W. Bush, and his team of Washington Blame-Dodgers.

Oy vey.