Another one that's true

The New York Times has a story by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker about the raid into Syria:

The raid was carried out by Special Operations forces, who killed an Iraqi militant responsible for running weapons, money and foreign fighters across the border into Iraq, American officials said.
The helicopter-borne attack into Syria was by far the boldest by American commandos in the five years since the United States invaded Iraq and began to condemn Syria’s role in stoking the Iraqi insurgency.
The timing was startling, not least because American officials praised Syria in recent months for its efforts to halt traffic across the border. In justifying the attack, American officials said the Bush administration was determined to operate under an expansive definition of self-defense that provided a rationale for strikes on militant targets in sovereign nations without those countries’ consent.
Together with a similar American commando raid into Pakistan more than seven weeks ago, the operation on Sunday appeared to reflect an intensifying effort by the Bush administration to find a way during its waning months to attack militants even beyond the borders of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States is at war.
Administration officials declined to say whether the emerging application of self-defense could lead to strikes against camps inside Iran that have been used to train Shiite “special groups” that have fought with the American military and Iraqi security forces.
American officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the raid said the mission had been mounted rapidly over the weekend on orders from the Central Intelligence Agency when the location of the man suspected of leading an insurgent cell, an Iraqi known as Abu Ghadiya, was confirmed. About two dozen American commandos in specially equipped Black Hawk helicopters swooped into the village of Sukkariyah, six miles from the Iraqi border, just before 5 p.m., and fought a brief gun battle with Abu Ghadiya and several members of his cell, the officials said. It was unclear whether Abu Ghadiya died near his tent on the battlefield or after he was taken into American custody, one senior American official said.
One United States official described Abu Ghadiya as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia’s “most prominent” smuggler of foreign operatives crossing the Syrian border into Iraq, and in February the Treasury Department named him as one of four major figures in that group living in Syria.
The official said Abu Ghadiya was in his late 20s and came from a family of smugglers in Anbar Province, in western Iraq. He was also suspected of having led an attack in May on a police station in western Iraq that killed 11 Iraqi officers, an American official said. Spokesmen for the Defense Department and the CIA declined to comment on the attack. On Sunday, an American military official had denied that American military helicopters had played a part in the raid.
Since the September 11 attacks, the United States has attacked terrorism suspects in the ungoverned spaces of countries like Yemen and Somalia. But administration officials said Monday that the strikes in Pakistan and Syria were carried out on the basis of a legal argument that has been refined in recent months to justify strikes by troops and by rockets on militants in countries with which the United States is not at war.
n seeking support in international law for its actions, the Bush administration is joining a list of nations that have cited Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which enshrines the right of individual or collective self-defense to all member states. Over the years, a growing body of legal argument has made the case that this right of self-defense allows a nation to take military action on the territory of another sovereign nation that is unable or unwilling to take measures on its own to halt the threat.

Rico says "strikes on militant targets in sovereign nations without those countries’ consent"... Sounds like pretty aggressive international police work to him.