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I'm disappointed in the lack of genre fiction, some of which deals directly and in ways very well-suited to your criteria with the sorts of issues that Salon regularly discusses.
2007 saw the publication of Jo Walton's Ha'penny, a spectacular alternate history that touches on terrorism, loyalty, the rule of law, whether killing someone truly can change the direction of politics, and the clash between pragmatism and ideals. It's compulsively readable, the sort of book that you can't put down, with memorable characters and ideas that are stronger the more you think about them.
It's a sequel (that can be read stand-alone) of the earlier Farthing, which was sadly overlooked and uses alternate history to look at the tactics people such as Bush use to undermine civil liberty. But Ha'penny is even stronger.
Highly recommended.
