OUTRAGEOUS IMPRISONMENT: Two Britons — Simon Sheppard, a writer and behavioral scientist, and Stephen Whittle, a freelance writer and satirist — languished a year in American jails though they committed no crimes whatever under American law. They fled to the U.S. seeking asylum because they fell afoul of tyrannical anti-free-speech laws in Britain and faced imprisonment merely for expressing their ideas and publishing the ideas of others — such as Robert Crumb cartoons! — on a Web page. If anyone deserves asylum here, they do. The pair, dubbed the Heretical Two, are prime examples of our abandonment of our once-proud tradition of freedom of expression. They’ve now been forcibly returned to Britain, where they face sentencing for their “crimes” on July 10. Before we cast stones at Iran, we need to examine our own societies.