War & law
The Pentagon has just published
1,204 pages on how it thinks you can behave legally during a war. Looking through this "Law of War Manual" at various hot topics, one finds some atrocities excused as acceptable (cluster bombs, nuclear bombs) and others rejected as completely disallowed (torture) even when in reality they are routinely engaged in.
Beginning to wonder what the point is of writing out such a lengthy description of laws when someone could just read the laws themselves in less time, I notice that nowhere does this document strengthen any actual law, while in many places it weakens them.
Willy Stern has a very interesting essay at the Weekly Standard about “Dabla,” the Israeli Defense Force’s elite operational lawyers. The thrust of the story is that because these lawyers ensure that IDF soldiers stay far on the side of legality, and are especially cautious with regard to civilian casualties, it is perverse that a “powerful coalition of self-righteous journalists, pro-Palestinian NGOs, left-leaning academics, biased human rights organizations, and … the United Nations … routinely accuse[] the IDF of perpetrating war crimes.” 
