A Back Room U.N. Treaty, Critics Charge, Threatens Yet Another Attack On U.S. Sovereignty
The U.S. is poised to turn much of its authority on the high seas over to international arbiters by secretly ratifying a long-controversial United Nations sea treaty originally conceived over seventy years ago.
By de Andréa
U.S. scientists aboard the Coast Guard icebreaker Healy are mapping the ocean floor in an effort to claim territory that holds an estimated 400 billion barrels of untapped undersea oil and gas.
The US Government has for over seventy years stayed away from this Marxist document, that is… until now. In keeping with the globalistic one-world government plans of the liberal socialists in our congress, and in the White House, we may soon, among other things, be giving away our ability to defend this country’s independence, sovereignty and freedom.
Even though the Globalist Bush Family is backing this attack on our independence I cannot yet connect the dots to Bush’s new country called the North American Union created by a half dozen underground shadow governments including the Council on Foreign Relations, not to mention the U N.
Approval of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a 25-year-old international treaty regulating use of the world’s oceans that took approximately 50 years to hail anyone’s interest, is steaming full speed ahead in the U.S. Senate, where committee hearings are set to begin Sept. 27
.
The full Senate is likely to ratify the treaty -- which would link U.S. naval actions to those of 155 other member nations by year's end. For over seventy years, critics have derided the 182-page Law of the Sea pact as a threat to U.S. sovereignty and naval independence.
They add that it would create a massive new U.N. bureaucracy (the International Seabed Authority); this would give environmentalists a back door to greater regulation and a bigger and more powerful bureaucracy; moreover, it would hinder the U.S. military's efforts to capture terrorists on the high seas, something we did not have seventy years ago.
“This is nothing less than a raid on our sovereignty,” Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., warns. “I objected to it when it resurfaced in 2004, and I object to it now as I see it sneaking up on us again. What is this vile obsession we have for surrendering our jurisdiction to this international body? Nobody can give me a reasonable answer.”
Despite those concerns, however, support for the measure has never been stronger.
The treaty has garnered a letter of support from at least a dozen oil, gas, and environmental groups as well as President Bush, a Globalist and along time advocate of the new world order.
Originally conceived in the 1930s, UNCLOS was crafted to supersede largely unwritten rules that limited coastal nations’ rights to just three miles of ocean.
Although U.N. discussions continued for over four decades without much progress, President Truman in 1945 pioneered the extension of territorial waters to include the continental shelf extending from the coast.
As a result, a number of nations, including the United States, set 200-mile territorial-water limits -- some 30 years before UNLCOS was finalized with similar provisions in 1982.
The United States contributed heavily to UNCLOS, taking part in negotiations throughout the Nixon and Carter administrations. However, disagreements over technology sharing and deep-seabed mining provisions kept the United States from signing on under President Reagan.
The Clinton administration added an appendix in the 1990s that simplified the administration of seabed mining, after which it declared the treaty "fixed."
Frank Gaffney, the former Reagan defense official who now heads the Center for Security Policy in Washington, says that treaty advocates don't realize what UNCLOS really entails. “I doubt any of these new supporters have actually read the entire treaty," he says. "If they had read this Marxist document, the issue would be dead.”
Critics like Inhofe and Gaffney are up against a formidable alliance of treaty supporters: senior administration officials, environmentalists, and legislators from both sides of the aisle who all favor it.
Proponents say the Law of the Sea actually guarantees U.S. ships and planes the right to traverse certain regions where they currently need permission from other governments; protects U.S. fishing interests from foreign poachers; opens up new undersea mineral and energy resources; and adds thousands of miles of seabed to America's territory
.
UNCLOS comes up for ratification at a time when melting polar ice is opening new shipping lanes. Countries such as Russia, Canada, and Denmark are racing to lay claim to resource-rich areas under the Arctic Ocean.
Both Lugar and Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., have indicated they will try to move UNCLOS ratification out of committee and bring it to a floor vote as quickly as possible.
Opponents say the restrictions would jeopardize U.S. counterterrorism efforts by limiting the boarding of vessels to only those suspected of drug trafficking, piracy, slave trading, and illegal radio broadcasting. They fear provisions stating that “the high seas shall be reserved for peaceful purposes” and that signatories must refrain from “any threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state” could be used to thwart U.S. naval operations
.
“If we had info that some terrorist threat was heading our way on a ship, we would be restricted in what we could do in terms of search and seizure,” says Inhofe. “We would have to go through this international body to do that.”
David Ridenour, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy in Washington, D.C., says, “The treaty could complicate our efforts to apprehend terrorists or ships our intelligence believes are carrying WMDs by subjecting our actions to review by an international tribunal, a body that is unlikely to be favorable to the United States.”
George Mason University law professor Jeremy Rabkin, writing in The Weekly Standard, cites several historical examples of U.S. naval actions that he suggests would be compromised by the Law of the Sea treaty.
Among them: The October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when President Kennedy ordered the Navy to blockade vessels coming in and out of Cuba.
The U.S. response to the 1975 Cambodian seizure of the American vessel USS Mayaguez. President Ford declared the seizure an act of piracy and dispatched Marines to force the ship's release.
In the 1980s, Libya's Moammar Gadhafi demanded that foreign vessels obtain his permission before entering the 300-mile-wide Gulf of Sidra. Reagan directed that a carrier task force enter the waters in 1986. Two Libyan patrol boats tried to resist, and were destroyed.
"The Senate should think long and hard before making the U.S. Navy answer to the U.N. version of the Law of the Sea," Rabkin writes.
One reason for the differing perspectives on the treaty is the way disputes are determined. Disagreements among UNCLOS parties are decided by a tribunal based in Hamburg, Germany.
Rabkin concedes that "the treaty can be acceptable if interpreted as we want it to be interpreted.” But U.S. interpretations, he says, are up to the international tribunal, adding, "The treaty stipulates that decisions of international arbitration must be treated as 'final' and 'binding.'"
Bush has issued a statement urging the Senate to ratify UNCLOS, claiming the international pact “will serve national security interests [and] secure U.S. sovereign rights over extensive marine areas, including the valuable natural resources they contain. And it will give the United States a seat at the table when the rights that are vital to our interests are debated and interpreted.” What Bush does not mention however is that we already retain the right to protect our interests, we don’t need permission from the international community to protect this Nation.
“George W. Bush is no Ronald Reagan, choosing to follow rather than lead,” says Ridenour. “When Reagan assumed office, about 150 nations were backing the treaty.
"He instantly recognized that the treaty wasn’t in the U.S.’s interest and launched an intensive lobbying campaign to get other nations to follow his lead. As a result of these efforts, 46 nations rejected the treaty,” Ridenour says.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Why is this government so obsessed with destroying this country? It seems as though every time I look into what Congress or the administration is up to lately, they are passing yet another destructive law. In this case it seems as if they ran out of mischievous ideas so they have dredged up this seventy-year-old treaty that no body alive today has read. Moreover, if that is not enough reason to study it a little closer, every congress and president since its inception has turned it down. That is until now; think about it…
de Andréa
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment