Senators hear how LOST will cripple national security

Advocates of a United Nations treaty that would severely erode US sovereignty and national security were stealthily trying to push the measure through the Senate – until Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma invited Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney and former treaty negotiator Peter Leitner to tear the treaty apart.

With the Bush Administration focused on fighting terrorism, arms-controllers within the bureaucracy have been working quietly with their allies in the Senate to ratify the UN Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) without the proper vetting from senior officials appointed by the president. In a recent meeting with conservative leaders, President Bush, when asked, said he new nothing about the treaty.

Gaffney testified before a Senate committee on March 24. Among his concerns:

(1) the treaty will hand control of seven-tenths of the Earth’s surface to an unelected supranational buracracy, (2) that supranational bureaucracy would have the power to levy taxes on US interests, (3) those taxes would finance the supranational organization, removing any leverage the US would have against it, (4) the new organization would control the world’s ocean research and exploration, (5) it would create a multinational court to render and enforce its judgments, (6) it would force the US to share billions of dollars’ worth of underwater mapping and other exploration crucial for the US Navy to dominate and control the seas, (7) it would gravely harm US intelligence collection at sea, and (8) it would establish precedents for weakening US control of space, where such control is vital to the nation’s economic and military well-being.

Gaffney joined Peter Leitner, a Pentagon official who was part of the LOST negotiating delegation, who told the Senate that the treaty appears to prohibit US at-sea interdiction efforts necessary to stopping seaborne terrorists.

Senator Inhofe, Chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, held the hearing in response to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s exclusion of treaty critics from testifying.

He asked two senior administration officials about what would happen under the treaty if the US Navy needed to board a ship on the high seas. The officials, Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and Environment John Turner and State Department Legal Counsel William Taft IV, didn’t know what to say.

Click here to watch the hearing via streaming video (RealPlayer).