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Sen. Inhofe Fights U.N. Pirates on Sea Treaty Wes Vernon, NewsMax.comWASHINGTON – Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., has just thrown sand in the gears of the effort to ram through a treaty that could make America more vulnerable to terrorists. His Senate Committee of Environment and Public Works will hold a hearing March 23 on the Law of the Sea Treaty.
Chairman Inhofe clearly intends to see to it that the “world’s most deliberative body” does what it’s supposed to do: deliberate. Up until now, the controversial treaty has been quietly slipping through. Americans were looking the other way, but Sen. Inhofe’s hearings will likely focus their attention.
The Law of the Sea Treaty, appropriately known as LOST, has been quietly slipped through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind. Supporters were hoping to get it through the Senate without a recorded vote.
The Bush administration’s support is both puzzling and lukewarm at best. Puzzling because the president who has focused on America’s right to defend itself and its best interests without consulting “world opinion” apparently has given the green light for midlevel appointees to speak for his administration in favor of this badly flawed document.
Columnist Phyllis Schlafly has noted that this is strangely out of character for a president who pulled us out of the ABM treaty because it would prevent us from defending ourselves against a missile attack. Bush also refused to sign onto the sovereignty-destroying International Criminal Court and “unsigned” the Clinton administration’s approval of the job-killing Kyoto treaty on “global warming.”
However, two things are worthy of note:
But beyond the all-important issue of security and defending this country against terrorists who want to kill Americans, there are threats to national sovereignty embedded in LOST.
Global Tax
The document would set up an International Seabed Authority, a bureaucracy that columnist Douglas Bandow says “sounds like an excerpt from George Orwell’s ‘1984.’”
One must plough through multiple bureaus and agencies supervised by ISA to unearth the reality that this agency would advance toward a longtime dream of the globalist one-worlders: an international tax to feed U.N. coffers.
The agency would have the authority to require a permit for activities affecting the seabed. That includes mining or oil drilling.
In the Clinton administration, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright negotiated the beginning fee of $500,000 to $250,000. Regardless, the foot would remain firmly in the door.
Frank Gaffney, a veteran Pentagon official in the Reagan administration, who talked to NewsMax about LOST, laments that “for narrow, parochial, and shortsighted reasons,” the American oil industry currently supports the treaty. He compares this to Chemical Manufacturers Association’s support in 1997 to the Chemical Weapons Convention. Only later did members of CMA discover they would have to live with “onerous international inspections, risking among other things, the loss of proprietary information to foreign spies masquerading as international inspectors.”
“Now, too late,” says Gaffney, “they wish the U.S. had not ratified the CWC.”
The Lenin prophecy that “when it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will be bidding against each other to supply the rope” has been recalled so often as to become trite but nonetheless accurate.
What’s more, Gaffney warns the oil industry’s later regrets “will pale beside those the rest of the world will feel.”
Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s tried to revive LOST, originally nixed by President Ronald Reagan in 1982. But the media-reviled “Gingrich Congress” elected in 1994 made it clear that LOST was a lost cause and that it would be a waste of Clinton’s time to go there.
Now the treaty's backers were hoping to slip it through without a fight. Sen. Inhofe says you can forget that. The American people have a right to consider this document carefully.
Some watchdog organizations have alerted their members among grassroots America. They in turn have alerted their senators, reminding them that Lugar’s panel is not the only Senate committee that has a legitimate interest. Accordingly, Chairman Inhofe has blown the whistle on the “midnight raid.”
NewsMax.com will continue to keep you informed.
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