Ian Welsh has a very good article at firedoglake: The Assault on Due Process and Civil Liberties, where he notes that the current attacks on our rights related to the war on terror and the increase in executive power didn’t just spring to life out of thin air — they were spawned from the drug war.

The joke about the ‹War on TerrorŠ is that it‰s the ‹War on Drugsá on crackŠ. As with most good jokes, it hurts and it‰s funny, because it‰s true – the ‹War on DrugsŠ is where America lost a lot of its civil liberties and due process. […]
Of course, many things did start under Bush – torture, repeal of habeas corpus and so on. But it‰s worth remembering, at the end of the day, that what has happened in the last 6 years did not happen in a vacuum – it was an acceleration of a trend that already existed towards the land of liberty becoming a land where due process was only something that some people, the right sort of people, had access to.

It is, of course, something we’ve been talking about for years.