In America, the worst punishment for publishing an op-ed in the Washington Post is perhaps a critical letter to the editor or an unflattering blog entry. But in Egypt, it can get you sentenced to two years in prison. That is what happened to Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a sociologist and democracy activist who now lives in exile, on August 2, when an Egyptian court announced that he was guilty of the crime of defaming the nation and handed down the prison term.

When judges punish intellectuals in say, Iran, for publishing their opinions in foreign newspapers, there is very little a White House can do other than show solidarity, noting that an attack on freedom abroad is an attack on all of us. But in the case of Egypt we have other options. Egypt receives more than $1.7 billion annually in American foreign aid, most of it for the country’s over-fed military. Last year, Congress proposed that $100 million of that $1.7 billion be deducted in light of Egypt’s atrocious human rights record and its failure even to slow the tide of rockets making their way into Gaza through the Sinai.

Unfortunately, the State Department made sure President Bush waived the penalty and that Hosni Mubarak’s regime got every penny of the military and economic aid to which it has grown accustomed. A better move would have been to do what the Bush administration did back in 2002 and 2003. Back then, Condoleezza Rice made sure to at least threaten some of the aid to Egypt when Mr. Ibrahim was in jail for charges of taking foreign money to defame the Egyptian government. After some hard bargaining, the scholar was released after having spent 10 months in prison.

Since 2003, the Egyptians have grown more brazen. In 2005, a court imprisoned Ayman Nour, a politician who challenged Mr. Mubarak in that year’s presidential contest and received 7% of the vote. The courts worked to shut down the investigation of Egyptian judges who examined corruption in the parliamentary elections that same year. When some students protested these moves in 2006, not only were they too arrested, one of them was sodomized and tortured in jail, sending a chilling effect to all of the country’s liberalizers.

It’s good to see a new ambassador in Egypt, Margaret Scobey, take these offenses seriously. An improvement on her predecessor, Francis Ricciardone, Ambassador Scobey provoked a minor uproar in Egypt by publicly denouncing Mr. Ibrahim’s sentence as a “shame.” That prompted a clarification from an embassy spokeswoman, Margaret White, who told a local paper, “There doesn’t seem to be a directly equivalent translation from English into Arabic that expresses the meaning of ‘It’s a shame.'” Alas.