The highly controversial United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty, which was on a fast track toward ratification by the U.S. Senate, has been temporarily checked though not derailed.
In response to a groundswell of well-informed opposition both on Capitol Hill and from the grass roots, a hearing on the LOST (Treaty Doc. 103-39) is scheduled for today before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Chairman Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who heads the 19-member committee, says there’s an obligation to ensure the treaty “does not adversely affect the sovereignty of the United States,” and advises taking time to “slow down and take a critical evaluation of this Convention that deals with the Outer Continental Shelf, which is in the jurisdiction of this Committee.”
The LOST is no ordinary agreement between nations. It is “one of many treaties that seek to bind the United States in a web of entanglements that threatens to transform our ‘republican government,’ into a homogenous world governed by the United Nations,” writes Henry Lamb, chairman of Sovereignty International, who has examined the treaty in depth in WorldNetDaily.
Under the treaty, a U.N. agency – the International Seabed Authority – would be empowered to regulate the usage of seven-tenths of the earth’s surface. It would also have authority to tax by requiring a permit to engage in any activity affecting the seabed, such as oil drilling or mining. The permit would cost $250,000. The Seabed Authority could also require royalty payments for minerals extracted.
“Even more important, the permit process can require detailed information about the technology to be used, which can then be shared with member nations without regard for intellectual-property rights or security concerns,” says Lamb.
Lamb is by no means alone in his opposition to the treaty or concerns about its ramifications.
Says long-time opponent Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, “This accord would constitute the most egregious transfer of American sovereignty, wealth and power to the U.N. since the founding of that ‘world body.’ In fact, never before in the history of the world has any nation voluntarily engaged in such a sweeping transfer to anyone.”
It isn’t the first time around for the treaty. Paul Weyrich of Free Congress Foundation has likened its history to a movie with “endless sequels,” the episode currently playing being “The Battle over the Law of the Sea Treaty III.”
The first “Battle over the LOST” was in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan flatly rejected the treaty because it undercut American sovereignty. LOST II was in the mid-1990s. In 1994, then-U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright signed a supposedly amended version of the treaty and President Clinton sent it to the Senate for the constitutionally mandated advise and consent. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., who headed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was able to keep the treaty in a state of suspension.
But Helms is gone, and his place has been taken by Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, like Helms a Republican, but one who strongly favors the treaty.
Battle of the LOST III
On Oct. 14 and 21, 2003, the treaty was heard by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Only supporters were allowed or invited to testify; there was, therefore, no registered opposition. On Feb. 25, a quiet vote was taken and the committee gave its unanimous consent.
A committee spokesperson said the hearings, despite their one-sided testimony, were “very comprehensive.” He explained that although only 10 or 11 senators were present for the vote, those absent took the trouble to “vote by proxy.”
“This is because the treaty has overwhelming support from the administration, the oil industry, environmentalists,” he said.
However, knowing word about the LOST would ignite a firestorm of public outrage, proponents in the Senate hoped to keep the matter under wraps, bypassing the usual committee process as much as possible and bringing the treaty – without debate – to the floor for a voice vote, not a roll call.
At that point, the cat jumped out of the bag. Columnists like Lamb, Weyrich and Gaffney and talk show hosts Jane Chastain and Rush Limbaugh and others sounded the alarm. Together they pounded the treaty on the air, in print and via the Internet. E-mail lists – like that sponsored by The Liberty Committee – were activated. Tens of thousands of messages poured into Senate offices.
“It didn’t take many senators long to realize that there was indeed opposition to the treaty and they started to withdraw their support for it,” says Liberty Committee Executive Director Kent Snyder.
It became very clear that despite administration support, this treaty was anything but non-controversial. Critics called for additional hearings, asking why the Finance Committee and the Armed Services Committee were not holding any.
The hearing today in Environment and Public Works may be the start of such a process.
Testifying will be Dr. Peter Leitner, a long-time leading critic of the LOST, who was denied the opportunity at the hearings in November. A senior strategic trade adviser to the Department of Defense, he’ll be speaking as a private citizen – not as a spokesperson for the department.
Contacted at his home in Virginia, he answered questions and discussed its ramifications with WorldNetDaily, a preview of today’s remarks.
Leitner said his involvement with the LOST goes back 30 years to his college days during the early 1970s when he wrote two Master’s theses on the then-fledgling treaty. During the Reagan administration he was the in-house expert on it at the Government Accounting Office.
In 1996, when the Clinton administration was trying to secure ratification, Leitner authored “Reforming the Law of the Sea Treaty: Opportunities Missed, Precedents Set, and U.S. Sovereignty Threatened,” a book which highlighted concerns about the high technology transfers mandated by the treaty.
Blue Hulls
Asked about the possible development of a squad of “Blue Hulls” to police the world’s oceans as a marine equivalent of U.N. “blue helmets,” Leitner said while not specifically spelled out in the LOST, it’s very likely.
The problem is “there’s nothing limiting the International Seabed Authority from going out and attempting to raise a navy or have contributing member states contribute vessels or act on behalf of the Authority to enforce its rules,” he explained.
Leitner said the “blue hull” concept came from a report written by the Center for Naval Analysis in 1993, at the time of the earlier negotiations. The Center is a “gold-plated think-tank,” funded by tax dollars, but is not a government agency.
“One of the things the Center recommended was that in the post-Cold War era – when we had a relatively large Navy before Clinton dismantled most of it – was an operational mission for the Navy.” The idea was for the Navy to donate vessels and crew to the Seabed Authority “to assist them in enforcing their judgments and rules.”
“So there were these two things. The think-tank for the Center for Naval Analysis writes a report suggesting this, and you look in the treaty and there’s absolutely nothing prohibiting that from happening. And in fact if they ever got the U.S. into the treaty, I think there’s a very good chance that they would actually do something like this. So it’s not required or specifically spelled out, but it’s possible and people have been thinking about it and actually suggesting it.”
Taxing matters
While not having specific authority to send American citizens a tax bill, a very large revenue stream will be generated by American companies for the International Seabed Authority.
The Enterprise is the operating arm of the Authority and would be the part “that will actually go out and do something active to generate additional capital,” Leitner explained. The revenue flow would come from the fees “just for a simple permit,” for activities on the continental shelf beyond national jurisdiction, beyond the 200-mile limit. A company would also have to pay royalties on the sale of extracted resources, and the royalties and all payments would go to the International Seabed Authority.
As a by-the-way, Leitner added that the annual capitalization of the International Seabed Authority is required from all signatories of the treaty, and it’s based on the U.N. formula of 25 percent for the U.S.
“So basically the United States will pay at least 25 percent of the cost of the Seabed Authority – that’s required as part of the price of admission to the treaty,” he observed.
Both the Authority and the Enterprise are authorized to borrow, but details about collateralizing and guaranteeing any debt are vague.
The Authority’s double whammy
The Authority has the authority to set production quotas and limits. Companies wanting to do ocean mining would have to apply for permits and licenses from the ISA. Here’s the kicker – a mining company would have to develop two mine sites and turn one over to the Authority.
As Leitner put it: “You pay whatever they’re going to extort from you in order to go into high seas and do some exploration. But as part of the rule-making thing here, you have to basically explore the equivalent of two mine sites. Then you have to turn over all of the documents, assays, mapping information, characteristics of the water column, anything that has to do with that exploration of those mine sites. You have to turn all that data over to the International Seabed Authority, and then they will decide which mine site they want to keep in reserve and give you the other one – if they agree to give you anything. They might turn you down after you’ve turned all that information in, and you get nothing.”
Leitner stressed that these are very expensive operations, with ships out to sea for months, and all kinds of scientific studies being done – sonar mapping, chemistry studies, “a whole bunch of things – with no guarantee that you’ll be awarded either of the mine sites. But in any event the International Seabed Authority will keep one of them, whichever one it feels it wants to keep. Then, out of all these explorations or potential mine sites that now it monopolizes, it’s supposed to be provided with sufficient capital to then undertake operations of one type or another in whatever mine site it chooses to go after.
“The whole time it has all these other mine sites that are reserved, which it can do with whatever it wants. It can give them away to Third World countries; it can do whatever it wants with them.”
Christmas tree ornaments for special interests
One curious clause in the LOST requires some 38,000 metric tons of nickel to be reserved to the Enterprise “from the available production ceiling. …”
Leitner laughed as he recalled it was put in by Canadian and French negotiators to protect their own nickel producers.
“They figured that the Enterprise would not be one of the early producers of anything on the seabed,” he explained. “Basically they put a number of like that in to eat up a huge part of the quota of the amount of nickel that could be withdrawn from the seabed, in order to protect the two principal nickel producers in the world, which were Canada, and their International Nickel Corporation, and the French because of their interests in New Caledonia, which is basically one huge nickel mine; the whole island is a nickel mine.
“Basically, what they’re doing is taking a huge chunk of the potential mining of nickel off the market to keep the prices of their land-based nickel artificially high, by limiting competition on the seabed.
“The treaty is full of things like that,” he said. “The more you look, the more you’ll find things like that that are very difficult to justify. You know how you think of pork barrels and Christmas trees in terms of how legislation goes through our Congress in the Appropriations bills?
“This is the same. It’s got all kinds of Christmas tree ornaments for special interests, to buy them off in different areas. It’s not a clean treaty by any means.”
Related columns:
Sovereignty-sapping treaty getting scrutiny
Global Nightmare: Saving the LOST
