Over at the website for National Review, Robert VerBruggen has an article criticizing the treatment of Bradley Manning, accusing the government of “inflicting arbitrary and pointless miseries “ on him. It's not exactly revolutionary stuff, and VerBruggen does not speak for the magazine as a whole, but it was a pleasant surprise because National Review has long been the flagship publication of American conservatism and has often demonstrated the failings all too typical of that movement. It was nice to see something like this article getting published there, even if the comments section quickly crushed whatever feelings of hope and goodwill VerBruggen himself had engendered by reminding me of why his example was so heartening in the first place. (The clinical term for this is “Greenwald Effect.")
Nevertheless, this means that if measured according to the conventional political spectrum, on the issue of due process and humane treatment of prisoners the country's foremost journal of mainstream national security state conservatism is now to the Left of Barack Obama.
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