Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Wednesday, March 24, 2004

At the same hearing Tuesday, a Defense Department official, speaking as a private citizen, argued against Senate ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which the Bush administration reluctantly supports.

Testifying before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Assistant Secretary of State John F. Turner was asked if the document legally prohibited the U.S. from protecting itself and interdicting vessels whose mission is suspected of endangering the lives of Americans.

When he couldn’t answer the question himself, Turner deferred to the department's legal adviser William Howard Taft IV, who likewise said he was not sure.

'Strange'

“Here we are in a war. It’s a little strange that you wouldn’t have an answer to that,” declared a startled committee Chairman James Inhofe, R-Okla. The senator had called the hearing because the treaty had been rushed through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he said “only examined one side of this issue.”

Now a third committee is set to hold a hearing on LOST, thanks to protests from outraged grassroots citizens.

The next panel to examine it apparently will be the Senate Armed Services Committee, to the apparent annoyance of that panel’s chairman, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., who has spoken in favor of LOST.

At Tuesday’s hearing by Environment and Public Works, Warner became a bit testy in accusing witness Frank Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy, of saying falsely that Armed Services would not deal with LOST.

Gaffney cited his prepared statement, which clearly quoted Warner’s staff as saying that committee planned its own hearing next week. Later, he said Warner’s staff originally had said there was no need for Armed Services to get involved because the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had approved the treaty 19-0.

Gaffney suggested Warner’s irritability might have stemmed from a resentment of public pressure (some from readers of NewsMax’s reports on LOST) to schedule a hearing he didn’t want to hold.

As some Virginia GOPers have often noted, the five-term, 77-year-old Warner usually saves his harshest indignation for fellow Republicans. Gaffney is a veteran official of the Reagan Pentagon.

U.N.'s 'License to Steal'

The U.N.’s scandal-plagued “oil for food” program prompted Gaffney to question whether LOST would create yet another new U.N. bureaucracy to “make decisions about and generate revenues from billions of dollars worth of ocean-related commerce” that could “amount, literally, to a license to steal on an unprecedented scale.”

Gaffney's concerns were shared by another witness, Dr. Peter M. Leitner, a senior strategic trade adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. But he emphasized that his views and statements “are my own and do not represent the views of the Department or the U.S. government.”

Sen. Warner gave him static over that and wanted to know “how it is you’re drawing a salary from the taxpayers when you don’t support the administration position,” an unsubtle hint that Armed Services Chairman Warner would be none too displeased if Leitner were to find work elsewhere. The senator is not on record as having spoken out against the Clinton holdovers in the Bush administration.

Leitner responded he was free to speak strictly as a private citizen and responded that his bona fides went back to his student days when he had presented not one master’s thesis on the subject, but three. In the 1980s, he also had been an official of the congressional watchdog agency GAO and in that capacity reported to Congress on the state of negotiations on the treaty.

“I was present in New York when the Reagan administration’s good-faith attempt to make the treaty acceptable was roundly rejected by a coalition of developing and communist nations,” Leitner added. He said President Ronald Reagan’s concerns were not rectified by amendments in 1994.

In the Bush administration, Leitner is not entirely alone. NewMax.com knows of a highly respected State Department official who previously was speaking against LOST, but is now on board as a “team player” in support.

'Direct Assault' on U.S. Sovereignty

Leitner described LOST as a “seriously flawed document” and “a direct assault on the sovereignty to the United States and the supremacy of the nation state as the primary actor in world affairs.”

The LOST-created International Seabed Authority, the critical witnesses argued, could grant permits for deep-sea oil or gas exploration just beyond our exclusive economic zone, “without regard to the views of this committee, the Congress or more generally the American people, who may consider such activities to be environmentally unsound,” as Gaffney phrased it. That would be a possible opening for ecoterrorism.

Committee Chairman Inhofe told those at the hearing he was “very troubled about the implications of this convention [LOST] on our national security,” a concern enhanced when the State Department's witnesses could not give the Oklahoma Republican an answer on the interdiction issue.

But now the issue is in the open, and other committees could respond to outraged citizens. Gaffney says, in effect, why stop with Foreign Relations, Environment and Public Works, and Armed Services? How about the Intelligence, Commerce, Energy, Governmental Affairs, and Finance committees? They have a legitimate interest in considering LOST before the full Senate acts in its capacity as “the world’s most deliberative body.”

They might even find out why the president himself is known to be less than wholeheartedly enthusiastic over LOST.

Editor's note: