The concept of "law" becomes foggy when you're dealing with state-backed criminals. I'm confident that the US intelligence apparatus has properly identified the perps, what they were transporting, and the cooperation they got from their "government."
Just like the IC story about Iraqi uranium refining was a "slam dunk"?
That's not actually to impugn the US IC, exactly. It's more to call out that the IC can do their job thoroughly and correctly and the powers that be will misuse or misrepresent their work product for their own purposes. Unless you know otherwise, we have to consider (among other things) that the US IC has nothing showing these boats are implicated, but the admin proceeded anyway.
You're assuming a level of adherence to norms, best practices, and laws that the current administration has demonstrated they do not do. They're not even bothering to present weak evidence.
Remember that Saddam was not cooperating with UNMOVIC, and not denying that he was building nukes. It seems crazy that he would do this until you recognize that his power depended upon being seen as strong and defiant of "The Great Satan."
Yeah, it turned out that he wasn't building nukes, but he provably did have WMD (chemical weapons), and had used them.
I don't doubt that GWB wanted "to finish the job" that his father started, and may have influenced the IC into producing "evidence" to support his goals. Obama did the same thing with the "Russia Collusion" hoax.
Most civil servants are stand up people who would never go along with anything illegal or unethical. The politicians are a different breed.
I will agree with this from personal experience. I've worked with several gov'ts on various projects and found almost everyone to be simply interested in doing their job well.
The story of the Iraq War and how faulty intelligence played into it is very different from that view. You have George Tenet, head of the CIA, telling GWB that the intel was a slam dunk for Iraqi attempts to build nukes when there was no such intel. Colin Powell, the day before his presentation to the UN on the Iraqi nuke program, went to Langley and demanded to review the evidence himself. When shown the paltry shreds they'd collected, he blew up at Tenet, saying "this is all you've got?"
Cheney set up his own mini-intel operation in the White House, headed by Douglas Feith, to look at the "raw" intel and construct their own case because the CIA analysts were unwilling to produce a National Security Assessment saying the same. It was 100% a case of the admin claiming that the US IC supported their policies when they did not (and the IC wasn't free to publicly dispute it).
The integrity of the IC is not a reason to believe that any admin has their work product to justify their actions... especially when they won't reveal that evidence.
The problem with revealing the evidence is the risk it poses to the "methods and sources." For this reason, it's highly unusual for CIA to release "raw" intel to anybody. They always want to "process" it. This feature can be exploited by politicians, as it was by President Obama and John Brennan against their political adversaries.
South American governments that refuse to stop the cartels are in effect supporting them. The cartels are powerful, and use any and every means to get what they want. The US recently offered to help Claudia Sheinbaum, and that offer was rejected. Nicolás Maduro is most likely supportive of the cartels because they pay him, and their actions are destructive to his enemies (namely us).
If they have the cooperation/encouragement of their government, how is this any different from a military attack? How should we respond to a military attack? Should we try to arrest and prosecute the attackers? If we adopt that attitude, we may just as well eliminate our entire military. What do you suppose would happen then?
