Anthony Lewis has a terrific column in the new Mother Jones, One Liberty At a Time, in which he argues:

From the cages at Gunatanamo to a jail cell in Brooklyn, the administration isn't just threatening the rights of a few detainees—it's undermining the very foundation of democracy.

It is not just for Guantanamo that the alarm bells of American liberty should be sounding. Civil liberties are more broadly in a perilous state.... In the name of fighting terrorism, President Bush and his administration have abruptly overridden rights protected by the Constitution and international law. Ideas foreign to American principles—detention without trial, denial of access to lawyers, years of interrogation in isolation—are now American practices.

The danger of what is happening is more profound than the denial of justice to some individuals. The Bush administration is really attacking a basic premise of the American system: that we have a government under law.