Quietly, State Dept. Turns Over American Islands to Russia, Others

In recent years several U.S. islands have been ceded to Russia and other countries, without congressional approval or public debate.

These islands, many uninhabited, are significant because they hold potential mineral, gas, oil and fishing rights – not to mention potential strategic military value.

So where exactly are these disputed islands?

The Arctic islands, which lie west of Alaska and north of Siberia, include the islands of Wrangell, Herald, Bennett, Jeannette and Henrietta.

The islands in the Bering Sea make up the westernmost point in Alaska’s Aleutian chain and include Copper Island, Sea Otter Rock and Sea Lion Rock. These islands together have more square mileage than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

Though the United States had staked claim to these islands for more than a century, the State Department has been anxious to turn them back to Russia.

The tranfer would have gone unnoticed were it not for State Department Watch, a Washington-based group that monitors State Department acitivities.

Retired U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Carl Olson, who heads State Department Watch, recently checked with the Census Bureau, asking if it had plans to count the inhabitants of these disputed islands in the current census.

Olson was stunned by the response he received from the Census Bureau.

"Census Bureau officials were informed by the U.S. Department of State that these islands remain under the jurisdiction of Russia," wrote Kenneth Prewitt, director of the Census Bureau in a letter to Olson.

"Without confirmation and appropriate documentation from the Department of State to the contrary, the Census Bureau cannot include these islands as part of the State of Alaska," Prewitt concluded.

Americans Become Russians

Olson notes that the Census Bureau, with the approval of the State Dept., has just stripped Americans of their citizenship.

Consider the inhabitants of Wrangell Island, the largest of eight disputed islands – five lying in the Arctic Ocean and three in the Bering Sea.

Geographically speaking, the island’s inhabitants would also be citizens of the state of Alaska since no other American state comes even close to the proximity of the islands.

But if anyone desired to visit Wrangell Island, they would be greeted not by the Stars and Stripes waving proudly in the brisk air but by a Russian military tower.

According to Olson, the islands including Wrangell have 18 Russian soldiers and one officer and 50 to 100 inhabitants.

Olson insists these people have been made to endure foreign occupation by the Russian military and believes the U.S. government should do something about taking the islands back.

NewsMax.com contacted Mark Seidenberg, a former senior traffic management specialist within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and asked him if he believed the United States should pursue its sovereignty on the islands. Seidenberg, without hesitation, said "yes."

U.S. Territory for Long Time

U.S. claims for these islands are strong.

When the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, the impending treaty included all of the Aleutian Islands, including Copper Island, Sea Otter Rock and Sea Lion Rock.

A number of years later, in 1881, U.S. Captain Calvin L. Hooper landed on Wrangell Island and claimed it for the United States. One of the landing party was famed explorer John Muir.

Also in 1881, the U.S. Navy claimed Bennett, Jeannette and Henrietta islands for the United States. Later that century, the British gave up their claim to Herald Island, allowing the Americans to take it over.

Claims of these islands, however, didn’t become an important issue between the former Soviet Union and the United States until the 1970s, when the concept of international fishing zones 200 miles from national coastlines went into affect.

With both the Soviet Union and Alaska having coastlines within a much closer proximity than the needed 400-mile buffer zone, a maritime boundary had to be established.

Secret Transfer

The resulting U.S.-U.S.S.R. Maritime Boundary Treaty was passed by the Senate and ratified by former President George Bush in 1991. Russia, however, never ratified the treaty because its leaders complained that the U.S.S.R. didn’t benefit enough from it.

Nevertheless, former U.S. Secretary of State Jim Baker and the Soviet Union’s Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze signed a secretive executive agreement the year before that bound both governments to the treaty.

Currently, Russia is demanding hundreds of millions of pounds more fishing rights from the United States that would undermine the Alaskan fish industry and, subsequently, the state’s economy.

A wealth of petroleum and natural gas hang in the balance as well.

When NewsMax.com contacted the State Department for an explanation, a spokesman said he wasn’t aware of any issue involving the Wrangell Islands and the U.S. government and that it was his belief that the islands have been recognized as a part of Russia since the 1800s. During the course of the interview, the State Department official asked if he was being "put on."

Even though now recognizing Russian jurisdiction over the islands, the State Department had testified at the June 13, 1991, treaty hearing that the maritime boundary agreement "does not recognize Soviet sovereignty over these [five Arctic] islands."

Enraged by the turnover of Alaska’s sovereign land, Rep. John Coghill Jr. of that state’s legislature sponsored House Joint Resolution 27, which beseeches the Department of State to inform the Alaska Legislature of any decisions regarding the maritime agreement.

The resolution further points out that setting a maritime boundary between Alaska and Russia is a "constitutional issue of states’ rights."

One of the issues over these islands and the surrounding waters are the fishing rights of Alaskan fishermen. Oil, of which Alaska has the largest national reserves, may also be abundant in the disputed territory.

Military Value

Olson notes the area's strategic value as well.

Beneath the icy waters around the islands, submarine warfare has taken place in the past between the former Soviet Union and the United States. The ice is now one of the last places for submarines to hide. The islands could also be hosts to vital facilities tracking hostile government movements.

"Everybody knows that the shortest distance between the U.S. mainland and Asia is the polar route, giving easy access to aircraft and whatever else," Olson explained. "And the Asian mainland doesn’t just consist of Russia. It includes China."

More American Islands Lost

Olson adds that the Arctic islands are not the only American islands the State Dept. has been giving away without congressional approval or treaty.

In recent years four American Pacific Islands – Washington, Fanning, Makin and Little Makin – have been ceded to the island nation of Kiribati without a treaty.

"Lost” islands include Nassau Island in the Pacific Ocean and Bajo Nuevo and Serranilla Bank in the Caribbean Sea. The islands became American territory under the Guano Act in the late 1800s.

Regarding these three lost islands, the Census Bureau's Prewitt, in a letter dated March 15, stated, "With respect to Nassau Island, Bajo Nuevo, or Serranilla Bank, the Department of State has not informed the Census Bureau that claims to these islands have been certified."

In addition to the abandonment of the islands is the loss of all resources within a 200-mile economic zone of each island. As is the case with most of the Arctic islands, the economic zones around each of the islands may be more important than the islands themselves.

"Our claim is based on the fact that we landed there and claimed it before the Russians did. That's what counts."

No, that's not what counts. U.S. captains of ships and aircraft can't simply add land masses into voting U.S. states by writing a note into their log books.

Now, if our U.S. Congress has codified one of the land masses in question into U.S. jurisdiction, territory, or statehood, then by all means it is ours.

But a mere ship's log (your sum total of evidence) doesn't so make an island off of the coast of Siberia into a U.S. possession. Of course, if you've got something *binding* from our Congressional record, by all means show it. Heck, Worldnetdaily and Newsmax would owe you a research or reporter's job if you can do that because they certainly failed at it in the article for this thread.

Until then (which will never happen), you'll just have to get over yourself. You're wrong about this thread (e.g. see the OFFICIAL U.S. Government Press release on this matter that I posted above on this very thread), and you started out by being nasty towards me without even having either the courage or the dignity to first ping me.

What sophomoric rubbish!

First of all, you're still wrong. As I have pointed out, the only OFFICIAL U.S. Government announcement on Wrangel (with one "l") island says that we've never officially claimed them even though it was discovered or explored by Americans.

What you are MISSING is some form of OFFICIAL U.S. government documentation that would conflict with the State Department's announcement above, such as U.S. territorial records.

Instead, what you've got are some statements by a well-respected U.S. Senator who voted against the very treaty that his statements were attached to, as well as a sketch and a log book from a ship's captain. That's nice and all, but it's clearly NOT an official U.S. government position. One Senator does not make for full Senate approval, after all.

Second, it is the ARTICLE for this thread that misidentifies the island in question, not me. Your precious article names the Alaskan island of Wrangell (with two "l"s) and procedes to cite positively hilarious claims such as a Russian guard tower on it as well as Alaskan eskimoes losing their U.S. citizenship.

ALSO SEE:

The Obama administration’s conduct in the international community is once again under the critical scrutiny of the political right. This time, attacks on the president’s foreign policy have come from Alaskan attorney and former Republican senatorial candidate Joseph Miller.

On Friday, February 17, Miller reported on his blog at WND.com that the Obama administration, acting in compliance with the State Department, officially signed over several “strategic, resource-laden Alaskan islands” to the Russian government. Miller expressed concern over the loss of territory, in addition to - potentially - “billions of barrels of oil” in the seabeds surrounding these islands.

Several conservative blogs and online news outlets have reiterated Miller’s story, virtually all of them citing the entirety or substantial portions of the original blog post. In light of the backlash against the Obama administration this latest information has provoked and may continue to foment, it is necessary to investigate some of the claims made by Miller in order to determine the validity of his reporting.

Most of the islands in question belong to a large coastal chain called the De Long Archipelago. Geographically, the De Long islands all lie within closer proximity to Russia’s northeastern border than to the Alaskan mainland. Additionally, all of the islands cited by Miller are located on the western - or “Russian” - side of the US-Russia maritime boundary, a division established via a 1990 treaty between the US and former Soviet Union. While the Soviet Union was dissolved before its leaders could make the agreement official, the United States was quick to ratify the treaty.

Though both Russian and American explorers have visited the islands and claimed them for their respective governments, the primary occupants of the islands have historically been Russian/Soviet explorers, researchers, and fishermen. The US State Department does not officially recognize any US claim to these territories, and a 1994 ruling by the Alaskan Supreme Court determined that the De Long islands Wrangel, Bennett, Jeannette, and Henrietta (all of which Miller mentions), as well as several others, were not Alaskan territories.

Barring the possibility of a war with Russia or Canada (or between Alaska and the rest of the United States), Miller’s claim that the islands are strategically significant is dubious at best. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union found no militaristic purpose for the islands; instead, they devoted their energies to building meteorological and astronomical observatories on them. Regardless of the future potential for hostilities, occupying and constructing military outposts so close to non-US sovereign territories would do little to ease extant international tensions; indeed, such a foreign policy move would likely serve to exacerbate them.

As for the resource-richness of the islands and surrounding coast, Miller’s anxiousness over the possibility of losing out on oil reserves reflects a fundamentally narrow view of energy independence given that he also expresses his displeasure with Obama’s decision to strike down the Keystone oil pipline project. The abilities of Alaska’s politicians and economists might be better spent further developing the state’s hydroelectric power facilities, or exploring other alternative energy sources for which Alaska’s environment is uniquely suited.

Considering the dual effort between Russia and China which successfully struck down a US-backed Security Council resolution to intervene in Syria earlier this month, ending the dispute over these islands may gain the US another ally in its policy toward events in the Middle East. Ultimately, however, the Obama administration’s decision to formally cede geopolitical control of the De Long Archipelago and a few smaller islands to Russia represents but another shift away from international Cold War dynamics, a symbolic gesture intended to do away with a vestige from a period of history branded by threats, tension, violence, and fear. While the world still contends with the consequences of that ideological battle to this day, Miller’s assertion that America “won the Cold War and should start acting like it” is not new and ignores years of violent post-Cold War history marked by that very same attitude
..

http://www.examiner.com/foreign-policy-in-national/the-world-according-to-joe-miller-obama-island-giveaway-too-generous

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