This POLITICAL post affects everyone's interest...

[GALAZIO]

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009...ion-un-treaty/

LOST and Found: Senate Moves Toward Ratification of U.N.'s 'Law of the Sea Treaty'
The Senate is gearing up to ratify a decades-old U.N. treaty that critics warn could create a massive U.N. bureaucracy that could even claim powers over American waterways.

By Joseph Abrams
FOXNews.com
Thursday, March 12, 2009

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., is advocating ratification of a treaty that critics warn could give the U.N. powers over American waterways (Reuters).

The Senate is gearing up to ratify a Nixon-era U.N. treaty meant to create universal laws to govern the seas -- a treaty critics say will create a massive U.N. bureaucracy that could even claim powers over American waterways.

LOST -- the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, also called the Law of the Sea Treaty -- regulates all things oceanic, from fishing rights, navigation lanes and environmental concerns to what lies beneath: the seabed's oil and mineral wealth that companies hope to explore and exploit in coming years.

But critics say the treaty, which declares the sea and its bounty the "universal heritage of mankind," would redistribute American profits and have a reach extending into rivers and streams all the way up the mighty Mississippi.

The U.N. began working on LOST in 1973, and 157 nations have signed on to the treaty since it was concluded in 1982. Yet it has been stuck in dry dock for nearly 30 years in the U.S. and never even been brought to a full vote before the Senate.

But swelling approval in the Senate and the combined support of the White House, State Department and U.S. Navy mean LOST may be ready to unfurl its sails again.

Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said during a January confirmation hearing that he intends to push for ratification. "We are now laying the groundwork for and expect to try to take up the Law of the Sea Treaty. So that will be one of the priorities of the committee, and the key here is just timing -- how we proceed."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying the treaty is vital for American businesses and the Navy, told Kerry that his committee "will have a very receptive audience in our State Department and in our administration."

LOST apportions "Exclusive Economic Zones" that stretch 200 miles from a country's coast and establishes the International Seabed Authority to administer the communal territory farther out. The treaty's proponents say it clears up a murky legal area that has prevented companies from taking advantage of the deep seas' wealth.

"American firms and businesses want legal certainty so they can compete with foreign companies for marine resources," said Spencer Boyer, director of international law and diplomacy at the Center for American Progress. Without the clearly defined authority established by the treaty, "there's confusion -- a lot of businesses don't want to take that risk."

The American military is looking for another kind of certainty from LOST -- a guarantee of safe passage through all seaways, a right China sought to deny an unarmed Navy vessel Monday in its own Exclusive Economic Zone in the South China Sea.

"The Convention codifies navigation and overflight rights and high seas freedoms that are essential for the global mobility of our armed forces," the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote in a June 2007 letter to Senate leadership.

LOST has even managed to unify environmental groups and deep-sea miners, who both see something to gain in the treaty.

"We gain sovereignty, we gain territory, we gain access to places that we have not had access to as easily," said Don Kraus, president of Citizens for Global Solutions, a group that advocates strengthening international institutions. "We don't stand to lose anything."

But critics say clauses built into the treaty could directly harm American interests. They say it could force the U.S. to comply with unspecified environmental codes, and that the treaty gives environmental activists the legal standing to sue over river pollution and shut down industry, simply because rivers feed into the sea.

The treaty allows environmental groups to bring lawsuits to the Law of the Sea Tribunal in Germany, a panel of 21 U.N. judges who would have say over pollution levels in American rivers. Their rulings would have the force law in the U.S., according to a reading in a 2008 Supreme Court decision by Justice John Paul Stevens.

"You've got an unaccountable tribunal that will surely be stacked with jurists hostile to our interests," said Chris Horner, author of "Red Hot Lies," a book critical of environmentalists. "This would never pass muster if the Senate held an open, public debate about this."

Legal experts also warn that the treaty demands aid for landlocked countries that lack the access and technology to mine the deep seas -- and that it might not even benefit the U.S. at all.

"You have to pay royalties on the value of anything you extract (from the deep seabed), those royalties to be distributed as the new bureaucracy sees fit, primarily to landlocked countries and underdeveloped countries," said Steven Groves, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. American money would also go to fund the International Seabed Authority, which Groves warned "would have the potential to become the most massive U.N. bureaucracy on the planet."

"The whole theory of the treaty is that the world's oceans and everything below them are the common heritage of mankind," said Groves. "Very socialist."

Any nation that is party to the treaty can have a seat on the tribunal and seabed authority -- even ones that don't have access to the sea. The current vice president of the tribunal represents Austria, a landlocked nation that hasn't had a sea berth since the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved in the First World War.

Some legal experts worry that without ratification, the U.S. will lose a seat at the table as maritime law continues to be codified and resources get divvied up. But opponents note that many of the benefits offered the U.S., such as navigation rights, are already international custom, and that the U.S. has effected the treaty without being party to it. President Reagan's initial opposition on the basis of seabed laws forced the rewriting of the original treaty in 1994, which led the U.S. to sign it, but not to ratify it.

Its complexity, however, still beguiles even experts, who say it is unlikely to be understood when brought to a vote in the Senate.

"The thing is about 150 pages long -- meaning there are exactly zero people in the Senate who have read it," said Groves.

[GALAZIO]

May 14, 2007
The world government Law of the Sea treaty: it's baaaaack!
By Wes Vernon

Those who scheme night and day to curb America's sovereignty never — never ever ever — give up. Possessed with something akin to the patience of the Asian mind, they brush off defeat as if it were some annoying flyspeck, and then redouble their efforts.

Such is the case with the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) — rejected in 1982 by President Reagan and stopped in its tracks in the Senate in 2004 and 2005. It is a Marxist-inspired document. (We'll get to that shortly, so stick with us.)

Now LOST supporters — reportedly led by Vice President Cheney — have moved the Bush administration toward putting it once again on the front burner. That word comes to me from Frank Gaffney — President of the Center for Security Policy and a longtime LOST opponent.

Bush used to be against the idea

What is frustrating is that President Bush — in his heart of hearts — is known to have been suspicious about this World Government scheme in the past.

When a visitor talked to him about it at the White House in the 2004–2005 period and described the document to him, the president reportedly replied, "Well, I'm not for that."

The treaty's provisions

Critics have charged and provided supporting evidence that LOST (an ironically appropriate acronym) is the product of the Soviet-backed so-called "non-aligned" movement agenda of the '60s and '70s.

Among its most egregious provisions, LOST creates an International Seabed Authority (ISA) with unprecedented powers.

The ISA could impose international taxes. If you don't like the idea of international bureaucrats levying taxes without your say-so, too bad. Your congressman or senator would have nothing to say about it. You may have this quaint idea that if anyone is to impose a federal tax on you, it would be your elected representatives who need your vote in the next election. But LOST would toss that into the ash heap. One-worlders have been dreaming of this for years.

And just to make certain that the LOST edicts are followed, the ISA would be empowered to create a multinational court system to enforce its judgments. ISA could also regulate seven-tenths of the world's surface area, impose production quotas for deep-sea mining, oil production etc., and regulate ocean research and exploration.

War on terrorists hindered by LOST

The treaty also mandates sharing information that could be used by our enemies to facilitate attacks on our country. And obligatory technology transfers would equip our enemies — real and potential — with useful equipment and know-how.

The Law of the Sea Treaty would prohibit any American effort to interdict and board vessels suspected of ties to terrorism or carrying weapons of mass destruction. Communist China has a fixation on getting us on board with LOST, largely for that very reason. At a Senate hearing back in '04, I was approached by Liyu (Laurie) Wang, then first secretary of the Chinese embassy. She said her government was hoping the U.S. would "sign up" so all nations could have a standard for settling disputes. Given that China's People's Liberation Army (PLP) views the United States as "the main enemy," Ms. Wang's stance should make us all feel better — right?

Senators tried to sneak it through

On Feb. 25, 2004, Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) who then chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tried to ram the Law of the Sea Treaty through his panel.

A spokesman said at the time, the committee "looked around" and "couldn't find" opponents of the treaty to testify at the hearings the previous October (of 2003). Of course, with no publicity or warning that this was coming down the pike, you might as well have entered a cave out in the middle of a desert and "looked around" and — lo and behold — " couldn't find" opponents to testify.

Once the word got out, however — Mirable dictu! — opposition came from all directions, as if by magic wand, without any "looking around."

With the Democrat takeover, the new chairman of the committee is Senator Joe Biden (D-Del.), a presidential candidate, who — to this writer's knowledge — has never seen a binding entangling international treaty he didn't like.

Frank Gaffney — in an interview with me at the time — noted that the treaty was drafted before and without regard to the War on Islamofascism.

Just for starters, he said, President Bush's then-new Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) would be endangered. Already — even then — the Communist Chinese cited LOST to protest PSI maritime interdiction and boarding of suspect vessels. No wonder they want us to "sign up." Collecting intelligence in submerged transit of territorial waters would be prohibited under LOST.

Jeane Kirkpatrick weighed in

On April 8, 2004 — after opponents had become aware of the Lugar effort at what conservative icon Paul Weyrich labeled the equivalent of a "midnight raid," the Senate Armed Services Committee held a fair, two-sided, very public hearing.

Former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick (since deceased) testified that the Law of the Sea Treaty threatened America's sovereignty not only on the high seas, but in the air and outer space, as well. That could affect space exploration.

"Absolutely!" the Reagan administration official responded when the issue was raised by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a treaty opponent who noted that air travel involved motion above the seas and over most of earth's surface. State Department Counsel William Howard Taft IV confirmed Inhofe's interpretation.

BTW, a couple of weeks earlier, Inhofe — then chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works — had stumped Taft and Assistant Secretary of State John F. Turner when he asked them if the treaty legally prohibited the U.S. from protecting itself by interdicting vessels whose mission is suspected of endangering the lives of Americans.

Senator Inhofe's reaction to Taft and Turner was, "Here we are at war. It's a little strange that you wouldn't have an answer to that."

Why did Reagan oppose? Back to Kirkpatrick

Do you like the soaring gas prices that have crept back up in recent weeks? Then you will just love what LOST has in store for you. Kirkpatrick said at the April 2004 hearing that President Reagan's rejection of LOST was based in part on its potential to "encourage the proliferation of OPEC." That in turn would threaten even higher gas prices, and put a drag on the economy.

Window-dressing amendments

Kirkpatrick — a patriot to the end — told the senators she was unimpressed with the widely-hailed (by proponents) amendments to the treaty added by President Clinton in 1994. She said they "did not alter" the treaty's threat to America's rights to make decisions in its own interests without foreign interference. The Reagan-era ambassador noted other nations could easily put a different interpretation on the changes.

All of this contradicts Senator Lugar's assertion that those who now oppose the Law of the Sea Treaty were using 20-year-old information and that certain "understandings" or "side agreements" have met the serious concerns of the opposition.

But a "side agreement" has no standing, Gaffney reminded me then. The treaty is what it is, regardless of side agreements, reservations, or intentions.

These window dressing caveats had been sought by the Clinton administration in the mid-nineties in hopes of easing its task of selling the treaty. But when the Gingrich Republican Congress was elected in the midst of President Clinton's first term, LOST lost its congressional legs.

So who came up with this?

If you want to find out what inspires any questionable idea, it is necessary to go to the source.

For that, we are indebted to Cliff Kincaid whose America's Survival website has dug deep through a mountain of research on that specific question.

It turns out that one of the authors of LOST is one Elisabeth Mann Borgese, a socialist and key figure in the pro-world government World Federalists of Canada. Kincaid cites original source material for the first Peace in the Oceans Conference which the German-born Borgese (who died in 2002) organized. Out of the conference emerged the idea of an "Ocean Development Tax." Revenue derived from that source, according to Borgese, would help underwrite the United Nations.

In her book The Oceanic Circle: Governing the Seas as a Global Resource, Borgese openly proclaimed her admiration for Karl Marx.

While establishment figures such as John Temple Swing of the Council on foreign Relations (CFR) endorsed the effort to pass the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), Kincaid's ASI has come up with solid documentary evidence that "the treaty was viewed by many early supporters as part of a communist-supported New International Economic Order to undermine the U.S. Some key treaty backers were pacifists, proud members of the world government movement who opposed a strong national defense for the U.S. and feared that the U.S. would unilaterally exploit the resources of the ocean. They were outraged by opposition to the pact by President Reagan and his top advisers."

President Bush's better advisers should try to talk him out of this. Otherwise, conservatives need to treat it as a Harriet Miers moment and apply their shoes to the sand, and let the foot-dragging begin.

© Wes Vernon