Glenn Greenwald

When Glenn Greenwald first started writing political commentary a few years ago, his language was restrained and cautious, betraying his background as a lawyer.

While his eye is still as sharp, his writing has become more animated, bold and assertive. It's clear that what Greenwald has been seeing, the misdeeds of the Bush administration, the failures of Congress, the nature of press coverage, have made him angry, and it shapes his writing. (This happens.)

But, sadly, he is not exaggerating when he writes:.

The very nature of our country and our government fundamentally transforms step by step, with little opposition. We all were inculcated with the notion that what distinguished our free country from those horrendous authoritarian tyrannies, both right and left, of the Soviet bloc, Latin America and the Middle East were things like executive detentions, torture, secret prisons, spying on their own citizens, unprovoked invasions of sovereign countries, and exemptions from the law for the most powerful -- precisely the abuses which increasingly characterize our government and shape our political values. As but the latest example, read Mark Benjamin's superb though now-numbingly-familiar account of how we tortured Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah for 19 months and then just let him go once we realized that -- like so many others we've detained and tortured -- he was guilty of nothing.

This doesn't mean there is a complete erosion of freedom equal to all of those societies. Free speech still basically thrives; we elect our leaders; and individuals retain a fair amount of autonomy in their personal choices. But it is simply undeniable that many of the political attributes that were always used to define the oppressive societies against which we were supposedly fighting are now explicitly vested in our own government. By itself, the scope and breadth of domestic spying is just staggering, and much of it is illegal.

Greenwald has an ongoing blog at Salon.com. (For those without a Salon subscription, it's well worth the few seconds wait at the ad page to read.)