Corsi, Tancredo on Liddy to Challenge WH unauthorized work on 'North American Union'

Author Jerome Corsi and Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., will be guests tomorrow on G. Gordon Liddy's radio show to discuss the White House's effort to implement a trilateral agreement with Mexico and Canada that could lead to a North American union, despite having no authorization from Congress.

Corsi and Tancredo will join Liddy for the entire 11 a.m. hour, Eastern time, and take calls from listeners.

Corsi reported this week that Bush administration working groups have not disclosed the results of their work despite two years of massive effort within the executive branches of the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

The groups, working under the North American Free Trade Agreement office in the Department of Commerce, are to implement the Security and Prosperity Partnership, or SPP, signed by President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Texas, March 23, 2005.

The trilateral agreement, signed as a joint declaration not submitted to Congress for review, led to the creation of the SPP office within the Department of Commerce.

Geri Word, who heads the SPP office, told WND the work had not been disclosed because, "We did not want to get the contact people of the working groups distracted by calls from the public."

WND can find no specific congressional legislation authorizing the SPP working groups nor any congressional committees taking charge of oversight.

Many SPP working groups appear to be working toward achieving specific objectives as defined by a May 2005 Council on Foreign Relations task force report, which presented a blueprint for expanding the SPP agreement into a North American union that would merge the U.S., Canada and Mexico into a new governmental form.

Washington Times?

Law of the Sea Treaty

By Doug Bandow

Concerned about America's unilateralistimage abroad, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has declared that the president wants to see the controversial Law of the Sea Treaty "pass as soon as possible." Americans would be better off if the administration allowed the treaty to sink beneath the waves, where it belongs.

One of President Reagan's notable achievements was derailing the omnibus convention. The treaty has been styled as a constitution of the oceans.

Although many of the treaty's provisions are uncontroversial, it was largely developed in the 1970s when Third World states were campaigning to mulct wealth and technology from the industrialized West. Mr. Reagan rejected the convention.

Unfortunately, bad treaties never seem to go away. The Clinton administration signed an agreement to revise the treaty in 1994. The Republican takeover of Congress ended ratification hopes, but now Republican members seem less likely to resist the Bush administration's importunings.

The Senate should stand firm against the treaty.

Covenants dealing with economic resources, the environment and navigation generally offer positive advances or reflect existing international law. In many cases, however, most of the benefits are achievable without the treaty.

Moreover, some treaty proponents see the convention as a "living" document. For instance, the U.N. Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea explained that the treaty "is not, however, a static instrument, but rather a dynamic and evolving body of law that must be vigorously safeguarded and its implementation aggressively advanced." Creative international jurists could wreak enormous havoc.

Of greatest importance in today's unsettled security environment is free transit.

The treaty purports to guarantee freedom of navigation, but many of its provisions reflect customary international law. Moreover, the treaty is neither unambiguous nor will it prevent other nations from challenging the United States whether America is in or out of the treaty.

For instance, several countries, including major players such as Brazil, China, and India, have made extensive ocean claims opposed by other states as excessive. In Senate testimony, Adm. Michael G. Mullen, vice chief of naval operations, warned that the United States should not expect that "countries' attempts to restrict navigation will cease once the United States becomes a party to the Law of the Sea Convention."

The Bush administration also has emphasized that it expects the United States to have exclusive authority over military operations. But there is no guarantee that other states, especially when American "unilateralism" is under widespread attack, will respect Washington's determination. The United States might face an adverse treaty tribunal decision asserting jurisdiction over American naval activities — such as the Proliferation Security Initiative. An adverse ruling, warned Adm. Mullen, could harm "operational planning and activities, and our security."

The treaty's navigation provisions are a classic example of Arthur Conan Doyle's famous dog that didn't bark. Two decades ago, treaty proponents forecast disorder on the seas after America's rejection of the agreement. U.S. vessels continue to freely transit the seas.

Friendly relations with the few states that sit astride important sea lanes are more likely than an abstract multilateral treaty to ensure U.S. passage. In any case, the only certain guarantee of free transit is the Navy.

At the same time, the treaty retains many of its original worst flaws.

Convention advocates routinely claim that seabed mining is no longer an issue. The Clinton administration did improve the treaty, assuming the "fix" is juridically sound — not all parties have ratified the amendments. But the changes do not address the essential character of treaty.

The treaty still establishes what looks like a second United Nations. The multinational authority is run by a comically complicated system of assembly, council and various commissions and committees. Private companies would not only have to run the authority's regulatory gamut to win mining approval but would also have to subsidize the authority-controlled enterprise.

Of particular concern is the integrity of American technology, some of which might have military applications. The treaty still requires member governments to facilitate technology transfers to Third World miners as well as the enterprise if they are "unable to obtain" the necessary equipment commercially, whatever that ends up meaning.

Nor is there any reason to believe that the authority, to which America would be the largest contributor, would escape the numerous perverse incentives which afflict the United Nations. The United States possesses an uncertain ability to block bad initiatives and would be forced to make concessions to win support from developing states, which also possess effective veto power.

Some treaty advocates point out that seabed mining remains a distant prospect and ask: Who cares if this aspect of the convention remains flawed? But someday seabed resources might be worth recovering. Moreover, the undesirable precedents set by the treaty could have long-lasting impacts in other areas.

The Bush administration should withdraw the treaty from the Senate. If the administration fails to fulfill its responsibility, the Senate should reject the treaty.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A special assistant to President Reagan, he served on the U.S. delegation to the Third U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea.

Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick?

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

Testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee

April 8, 2004

Mr. Chairman,

Thank you for inviting me to testify today on this important issue which I believe has broad and important implications. Some of these implications—especially those concerning deep seabed mining and technology transfer—have been the most widely discussed. But I believe the Treaty also raises some constitutional and political issues with broad ramifications and implications, and I continue to think it raises security issues as well.

I hold no position in the United States government today and have no responsibilities in relation to the Treaty. However, I had prolonged and serious dealings with the Law of the Sea Treaty during my years as Ronald Reagan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations and a member of his Cabinet and National Security Council. I might add that I was also a member of his Commission on Space.

I have been a professor of Government at Georgetown University for most of my professional life. I am now a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. I have sought to remain abreast of developments concerning the United Nations. Last year I served as head of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

Those of us concerned with foreign affairs in the Reagan Administration became deeply involved in the Law of the Sea Treaty which had been under discussion since 1958 and had nearly been completed by the time Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in January 1981.

It is accurate to say that the Reagan Administration believed that the issues raised by the Treaty were basic and important and that both the political and economic stakes were high. I will share some of our experiences and perspectives because I believe they are also relevant today.

The Treaty begins from the assumption that the seabed and its wealth are part of the “common heritage of mankind” and its benefits should be shared by all, protected against exploitation by any country or group, and administered by the United Nations.

In 1968, Resolution 2467 was passed and vested jurisdiction over the Treaty in the “Standing Committee on the Peaceful Uses of the Seabed and the Ocean Floor Beyond the Limits of National Jurisdiction.”

In 1970, the General Assembly voted by an overwhelming majority to convene a conference on the Law of the Sea. Negotiations took shape when all parties agreed to the notion of a “common heritage,” although disagreements soon emerged between developed and developing countries on technology, sovereignty, and the extent and kind of regulation that should and could be imposed on seabed mining.

Negotiations continued for more than a decade—during which the Treaty came to be viewed as the cornerstone of the New International Economic Order (N.I.E.O.) and of the associated efforts to use U.N. regulatory power as an instrument for restructuring international economic relations and redistributing wealth and power.

The General Assembly is the institution through which the N.I.E.O. operates. It operates on the principle of one country, one vote.

During the decade that the Law of the Sea Treaty took shape, the basic assumptions of the N.I.E.O. concerning the obligations of the “North” to the “South” gained wider acceptance and expanded their influence and scope. The regulatory functions of the U.N. grew and the resistance of the industrialized countries was eroded.

*snip*

National Review - Frank Gaffney:

February 26, 2004, 1:56 p.m.
John Kerry’s Treaty
Outsourcing sovereignty.

John Kerry wants a world in which the United Nations calls the shots and U.S. freedom of action, in the absence of the U.N.'s permission, is sharply circumscribed. Most Americans recognize that this would be a formula for disaster — a world in which the lowest-common-multilateral-denominator would routinely trump, and often jeopardize, our security interests.

President George W. Bush's supporters believe that he rejects this Kerry-Clinton worldview. They look forward to a national election in which voters get to choose between his Reaganesque philosophy of peace through American strength and Kerry's U.N. uber alles.

So why would the Bush administration be pushing for the ratification of a treaty that will make a giant leap towards John Kerry's world?

On Wednesday, Sen. Kerry voted by proxy (since he can't take time off from running for president to do his day job in person) for a resolution of ratification that would make the U.S. a party to the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST). He was able to do so, however, only because the Bush team decided to eschew President Reagan's 1982 judgment that LOST was irremediably defective, in favor of President Clinton's 1994 assessment that the accord was in America's interests. With the support of the Bush administration, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar brought the treaty to a unanimous favorable vote and promises to try to get the Senate to act on it "as soon as possible."

Unfortunately, as usual, Ronald Reagan was right and Bill Clinton was wrong. Here's why:

U.S. adherence to this treaty would entail history's biggest and most unwarranted voluntary transfer of wealth and surrender of sovereignty. A product of the Left/Soviet-Non-Aligned Movement-agenda of the 1960s and '70s, LOST creates the International Seabed Authority (ISA) — a supranational organization with unprecedented powers.

These include the power to: regulate seven-tenths of the world's surface area, levy international taxes, impose production quotas (for deep-sea mining, oil production, etc.), govern ocean research and exploration, and create a multinational court to render and enforce its judgments. Some even aspire to giving the U.N. some of our warships so it can have "blue hulls" — to go along with its "blue helmets" — to ensure that the ISA's edicts are obeyed.

LOST was drafted before — and without regard to — the war on terror, and what the U.S. must do to wage it successfully. As a result, U.S. national-security interests will be severely undermined by several of the treaty's provisions. For example, the sorts of at-sea interdiction efforts central to President Bush's new Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) would be prohibited. Communist China has already taken to citing the treaty to object to PSI maritime interdiction and the boarding of suspect vessels.

The treaty effectively prohibits two functions vital to American security: collecting intelligence in, and submerged transit of, territorial waters. Mandatory information sharing will afford U.S. enemies data that could be used to facilitate attacks on this country (e.g., detailed imagery of underwater access routes and offshore hiding places). Obligatory technology transfers will equip actual or potential adversaries with sensitive and militarily useful equipment and know-how (such as anti-submarine warfare technology).

The treaty fails to address, let alone offer solutions to, the most dangerous flashpoints for military conflict facing the world. In fact, Communist China is using its own unique interpretation of the treaty to justify its inexorably increasing control over the strategic South China Sea. The PRC creates and fortifies man-made islands near that sea's rich oil and mineral deposits, then asserts that LOST entitles it to exclusive economic control of the waters within a 200 nautical-mile radius — including waters transited by the vast majority of Japanese and American oil tankers en route to and from the Persian Gulf.

The truth of the matter is that the Law of the Sea Treaty is so defective, so contrary to U.S. interests that the only way it could possibly be ratified is for it to be blown through the Senate when no one is looking. That is precisely what Sen. Lugar is trying to do. He has: prevented critics from testifying before his own committee; kept other committees from being briefed on the treaty; and is seeking to get it to the Senate floor before effective opposition can be organized and expressed. This abuse of traditional Senate practice and good governance must not be allowed to stand.

Alas, in addition to the wealth redistributors, one-worlders, environmentalists, international lawyers, and the other usual suspects on the Left, the U.S. Navy, the American oil industry and Vice President Cheney currently support LOST. Such support appears to be motivated by narrow, parochial, and shortsighted reasons (e.g., the belief that having internationally agreed "rules of the road" for the world's oceans will be good for the respective businesses of the Navy and the deep-sea "oil patch.")

Such myopic support is even more grievously misplaced and foolish than that given in 1997 by a powerful trade association — the Chemical Manufacturers Association — to another defective treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention. Thanks to the CMA's lobbying at the time, its members are today (as was predicted) being subjected to onerous international inspections, thereby risking, among other things, the loss of proprietary information to foreign spies masquerading as international inspectors. Now, too late, they wish the U.S. had not ratified the CWC.

The U.S. cannot afford once again to ignore the real and grave costs of an ill-conceived and strategically ill-advised treaty at the behest of parochial and misguided special interests. Their later regrets will pale beside those the rest of us will feel.

The bottom line is that the Law of the Sea is a prime example of the way people like Sen. Kerry would like the world to be ordered and run. It is not consistent with Republican governing principles and values — or, more importantly, this country's vital interests. If President Bush's base is upset, and properly so, over his immigration and spending-policy errors, they will be furious when they learn that his administration is willing to cede unprecedented American sovereignty, power, and control over who taxes and regulates U.S. businesses to the U.N.

Given what is at stake, Richard Lugar's efforts to ram the Law of the Sea Treaty through the Senate are all the more objectionable. It is imperative that other Senate committees whose jurisdictions will be affected by LOST (including Armed Services, Intelligence, Commerce, Environment and Public Works, Governmental Affairs, and Finance — and for that matter their House counterparts, which may have to consider enacting legislation) should be able to hold their own, far-more-balanced hearings before the full Senate is asked to consider John Kerry's treaty.

— Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the president of the Center for Security Policy and an NRO contributing editor.

http://www.nationalreview.com/gaffney/gaffney200402261356.asp

2005-09-12

Center for Security Policy

Sovereignty levees breached?

(Washington, D.C.): Since it seems the only news that is fit to print (or air) these days has to do with Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, finding a related angle to call needed public and leadership attention to something else happening in the world requires a little ingenuity. Since the stakes associated with another, largely unremarked story - involving a drama that will reach its denouement at UN headquarters this week - may be nothing less than the future sovereignty and character of the United States, however, a way must be found.

LOST in New Orleans

As it happens, the answer lies in the toxic liquid now being pumped out of New Orleans into waterways that will, inexorably, contaminate the international reaches of Gulf of Mexico, and perhaps beyond. The United States has unilaterally determined that this potentially huge environmental damage is justified by the need to recover and restore a major American city, its population and economy.

Interestingly, shortly before Katrina precipitated this crisis, a gaggle of former senior government officials wrote Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist demanding that he swiftly effect the ratification of a controversial accord known as the Law of the Sea Treaty (or LOST). The authors dismissed concerns expressed by conservatives that LOST would impinge upon U.S. sovereignty and vital interests.

If the United States were a party to the Law of the Sea Treaty today though, it is very likely America would be enjoined from dumping New Orleans' toxic stew into Lake Ponchartrain and the Mississippi River. For one thing, this action would violate the Treaty's environmental obligations to protect marine life and its habitats, obligations whose sweep makes those of the Kyoto Treaty seem modest by comparison.

For another, the Law of the Sea Tribunal - the sort of multilateral legal institution whose tendency for politicization and anti-American actions has prompted the Bush Administration to reject the International Criminal Court - has already established a relevant precedent. In a case brought by Ireland against Great Britain, the Tribunal has established that its jurisdiction extends to activities on sovereign member states' soil that can arguably affect international waters. (An important question for Senators to put to Chief Justice nominee John Roberts would be whether, like some other justices, he would regard such an internationally dictated injunction to trump America's domestic jurisprudence?)

Unfortunately, since Ronald Reagan's day, American governments have tended to pay too little attention to sovereignty-sapping treaties and institutional power-grabs by the United Nations and other multilateral organizations. To his credit, Mr. Reagan recognized the Law of the Sea Treaty for what it was intended to be by the World Federalists and so-called non-aligned movement types who had a significant hand in shaping its supranational International Seabed Authority and related entities: a highly precedential, and undesirable, vehicle for establishing world-government mechanisms to control the "international commons" (in this case, the oceans) at the expense of sovereign states.

President Reagan refused to agree to LOST's ratification in part because he found anathema the idea of empowering an international organization to raise its own revenues through what amount to taxes on seabed mining and energy exploitation. Regrettably, the Bush Administration has to date chosen to overlook this and the Treaty's other adverse implications for U.S. sovereignty, and says it supports LOST's ratification.

Meanwhile, Back at the UN

The good news is that President Bush seems in no mood to go along with the logical extrapolation of the Law of the Sea Treaty - the so-called "Draft Outcome Document" for the UN General Assembly meeting on September 14th through 16th. The document has been the focus of intense negotiations ever since Mr. Bush succeeded in getting his representative, John Bolton, in place at Turtle Bay. Despite fresh evidence from former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker that the UN is scandal-ridden, corrupt, poorly organized and managed and incompetently led, Secretary General Kofi Anan wants the American and other world leaders to ratify this week what amounts to his wish-list.

As of this writing, however, Amb. Bolton has registered strong U.S. objections to language that would bind America to actions that, under this President, it has firmly opposed: ratification of the Kyoto Protocol and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; opening negotiations on space arms control; creating what amounts to a standing UN army; and foregoing systemic UN reforms, in favor of cosmetic ones.

Of arguably greatest importance is the U.S. refusal to empower the United Nations to levy taxes - a step that would, as with the Law of the Sea Treaty, advance the organization's ambitions to promote world government. Globotaxes would also eviscerate what remains in the way of American leverage to effect real reform of the UN and to punish its misbehavior. It is estimated that one proposed tax on international currency transactions alone would be able to generate a staggering $13 trillion in revenue.

The Bottom Line

Just as Hurricane Katrina ruptured the levees protecting New Orleans, the UN's concerted assault on the barriers to further erosion of American sovereignty threatens to swamp our freedom of action and our founding principle of "no taxation without representation." It behooves President Bush to reject any Outcome Document that leaves the door open to globotaxes, let alone one that endorses them outright. Rather than lend his authority to such an exercise, he should be willing to refuse to attend the UN summit meeting this week that Mr. Anan hoped would be the biggest fund-raiser in the history of the world.

http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=papers&code=05-D_46

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