President Bush's Toilet Bowl Treaty(LOST coming up for senate vote on Wednesday)

When State Department Legal Adviser John B. Bellinger III gave a controversial June 6 speech on the subject of "The United States and International Law," he mentioned that the Bush Administration had "put forward a priority list of over 35 treaty packages that we have urged the Senate to approve soon, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea."

The latter is now up for Senate ratification, with a vote scheduled on Wednesday, and one of its many controversial provisions is the regulation of land-based sources of pollution. This treaty covers the water and the land. But now we have discovered that the Bush Administration has asked the Senate to ratify a treaty that defines one of those land-based sources of pollution as toilet flushing. No kidding.

It is amazing but true. The Bush Administration wants the Senate to ratify a treaty that will invite international inspections of what you flush down your toilet.

We are talking about Annex III of the “Protocol Concerning Pollution from Land-Based Sources and Activities to the Convention for the Protection and Development of the Marine Environment of the Wider Caribbean Region, with Annexes.” You can read it for yourself here.

Annex III is titled, “Domestic Wastewater,” which is defined as including “all discharges from households, commercial facilities, hotels, septage and any other entity…” These discharges are defined as encompassing (1) toilet flushing, (2) discharges from showers, wash basins, kitchens and laundries, or discharges from small industries, provided their composition and quantity are compatible with treatment in a domestic wastewater system.

Lawrence A. Kogan of the Institute for Trade, Standards, and Sustainable Development uncovered the dangerous details of this agreement and has termed it the “Toilet bowl treaty,” noting that it constitutes a sort of mini-Law of the Sea Treaty. The protocol, he says, is one of 11 “regional seas” agreements. It is on an October 1 State Department list of “Treaties Pending in the Senate.” (Not all of these treaties are currently being pushed by the Bush Administration).

Our major media were, as usual, asleep at the switch. It turns out that the White House issued a press release about submitting this treaty to the Senate for ratification. President Bush's statement was quite specific. He noted that “It is estimated that 70 to 90 percent of pollution entering the marine environment emanates from land-based sources and activities,” and that parties to the treaty “are required to ensure that domestic wastewater discharges meet specific effluent limitations, and to develop plans for the prevention and reduction of agricultural nonpoint source pollution.”

Bush claimed that “The United States would be able to implement its obligations under the Protocol under existing statutory and regulatory authority.” In other words, he thinks this is supposed to affect others, not us. But this may not be the way some activist judges and international lawyers see it.

Bush's admission that 70 to 90 percent of pollution entering the marine environment emanates from land-based sources and activities is directly relevant to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which has provisions relating to prohibiting pollution from such sources. That is why many observers have concluded that the Law of the Sea Treaty can serve as a back-door way to implement the (unratified) global warming treaty. Foreign judges and lawyers could easily interpret greenhouse gas emissions as contributing to pollution of the oceans. As a result, under UNCLOS they could order cuts in energy use.

Since the State Department submitted the protocol for ratification, along with the Law of the Sea Treaty, it's a certainty that Legal Adviser John B. Bellinger III knew all about the potential for regulating land-based pollution sources and activities, including toilet bowls, when he testified before the Senate about UNCLOS on September 27. But not only did he deny that UNCLOS had any such potential, he said it had no such provisions. When pressed, he claimed the provisions were “hortatory” and had no practical legal impact. This is why Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch and I have asked for a formal review (PDF) of his testimony. He clearly misled the Senate.

But now we find out that it's worse than we thought. The State Department had previously submitted another treaty that specifically and explicitly defined a land-based source of pollution as being a toilet bowl. Ratification of this treaty, in conjunction with ratification of UNCLOS, would literally invite U.N. inspectors to review and manage discharge from your toilet bowl. Why didn't Bellinger tell the Senate about that during his UNCLOS testimony?

Bellinger seems to be far more open and honest with international audiences that he is trying to appease and impress. In his June 6 speech to a group at The Hague, for example, Bellinger boasted about using his own staff of 171 lawyers to “integrate” international law “into the decision-making process” of the U.S. Government. He defended the President's order to Texas to comply with a ruling by the U.N.'s International Court of Justice on giving convicted Mexican killers another hearing. Bellinger called this compliance with “an international obligation.”

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is scheduled to vote on UNCLOS on Wednesday. UNCLOS is the first order of business and if it passes, as seems likely, Majority Leader Senator Harry Reid could call it up for a quick Senate floor vote.

Before the committee votes, it should recall Bellinger as a witness and determine why he has been less than open and honest about the “obligations” of the U.S. under UNCLOS. Then he should be asked to explain why we need a treaty targeting toilet bowls and showers. If he claims the need to adhere to “international obligations,” he should be laughed out of the hearing room, along with his treaties.

Would you be willing to provide a brief overview of what that is all about for the edification of our readers?

LOL, if you went to the link I posted, you'd know that I published a rather extensive account over six years ago. Here is an excerpt:

The consensus decision-making process goes under various other names, including “collaborative,” “stakeholder,” and “facilitated.” It is a variant on a decision model first developed at the Rand Corporation in 1963, as the Delphi Technique. It was originally designed as a way to arrive at group decisions, among people with strong and divergent opinions, rendered necessarily subjective due to incomplete information and a limited time-frame; i.e., immediately after a nuclear attack.

Expedient objective decisions involving complex, multivariate criteria, with high associated risk have always been difficult. To get a group of intellectuals to agree quickly can be fruitless, unless there is an undisputed leader within, or supervising, the group. Leaders who are capable of sufficient expertise to claim unchallenged leadership, are extremely rare. The search for decision models, capable of integrating disparate interests and expertise, is a legitimate exercise in corporate management. In that respect, the Delphi Technique is no different from any other decision management model.

The Delphi Technique was originally designed to integrate subjective individual evaluations objectively. A disinterested “facilitator” collects an anonymous ballot from each participant with two numeric scores for each decision component: first, the importance of particular criteria, and second, the degree of confidence in a particular course of action. The facilitator then arithmetically compiles the scores and reports the results to the team. It is the report of that composite score that is intended to elicit concessions from the minority or engender further discussion.

The key to the integrity of the method is the manifest disinterest on the part of the facilitator and group acknowledgment of each member’s individual integrity. Unless the participants have confidence in the process, they will not report their opinions honestly. Unless they respect each other’s integrity, they will not concede on a point of disagreement. Concession will be difficult to obtain if there is any taint of prejudice on the part of the facilitator or bluster by one of the participants, which is why so many corporations defer this role to an outside consultant. The consultant is responsible only for conducting a productive committee meeting and not for the outcome.

Assigning choices to a committee isolates both management and committee members from accountability. Lack of individual accountability distorts the individual assessment of risk as an input to the group decision. On the other hand, if the committee members can be held at fault, they may not share valuable speculative ideas. The study committee system is therefore likely to produce flawed decisions no matter what the decision model. There is no substitute for true leadership nor is there a perfect decision system.

Accountability is unavoidable in business. If things are really fouled up the corporation will go bankrupt, be sold, and new management installed. Management is ultimately accountable to stockholders. There is however, a difference between stock¬holders and stakeholders. The degree of personal “stake” in an outcome is subjective. The amount of voting stock and its price performance are inherently objective and voting power is weighted according to ownership of the risk. When a group decision method is distorted by political manipulation and the job security of civil service, accountability on the part of manipulators, elected officials, and committee members disappears. It is the encroachment of government into what should rightly be civil matters that engenders the need for the unaccountable and technically incompetent to make so many choices. Lacking a technical understanding of the decision criteria, politicians go about looking for a way out.

A committee, manned by a majority of civil servants and advocacy groups, operates at a conflict of interest to the public. To defer a political decision to a consensus process, dominated by advocacy groups and bureaucrats and deliberately excluding those who would oppose them, is a complete corruption of the intent of the “consensus” process itself. There can be no real consensus under such circumstances and no way for the voting public to know what really happened or who is accountable. There is no check upon its propensity to metastasize because there is no controlling document that has the legitimacy of popular agreement. “Consensus” decision-making is a symptom of a much more serious structural problem in the composition of the civic enterprise. It has changed its fealty from one of Constitutional authority to one of authority itself.

It is Bureaucracy in its purest sense.

It is no surprise to see a decision making system peculiar to multinational corporations make its public appearance through that major global benefactor of corporate foundation largesse: the United Nations. The UN has adopted an objective decision making algorithm, the Delphi Technique, and corrupted it into a subjective, pre-determined output machine by tampering with the role of the facilitator. A system that was intended to be flexible and appears collaborative, is now a means to betray the trust of the participants and over-come opposition. It is no longer capable as an adaptive algorithm. What started as a fad in corporate decision-making has been twisted into a template for instituting a structurally unaccountable form of governance.

Perhaps that conclusion fails to portray sufficiently, the depth of duplicity behind such a process of governance. Perhaps you thought “consensus” meant unanimous agreement. Well, you clearly do not understand either “consensus” or the “collaborative” process as archetypes of the relief from cognitive dissonance that is the product of the Hegelian Dialectic. Perhaps you should ask your children, who are being taught in precisely this manner in the public schools through Outcome-Based Education; a programme that originated at the UN.

“Consensus” now means, ‘You didn’t object.’ Of course, that idea is a subjective interpretation of the concept of “objection,” as well. Those who vociferously disagree are removed as “uncooperative” or simply aren’t “invited” to participate in the first place unless they agree with the facilitator. In that case, they can assume the role of a protected minority, free to use any tactic or behavior to cower the opposition. Thus, a more appropriate definition of the term “consensus” is that, if the “facilitator” of the discussion is able to report it as a “consensus” or a “collaborative process,” then it is one.

Civic consensus-based decision making systems are fundamentally flawed because any in-house coordinator, “facilitator,” or activist representative of an advocacy group is necessarily an interested party to the decision. The situation is even worse if the facilitator is an individual who assumes the position with a covert agenda. Under either interested or duplicitous “leadership,” the integrity of the group dynamic collapses. It is an opportunity for those who are positioned to take advantage of the situation, a group with no understanding of or concern for risk: the civil servants themselves.

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