Sea treaty resurfaces.(Correction, Please!)(Law of the Sea Treaty)(Correction notice)

ITEM: "Earlier this month," commented USA Today on August 14, "Russia audaciously planted its national flag, encased in titanium, on the seabed below the North Pole.... Russia is laying claim to the area under the Arctic.... The 'new world' beneath the Arctic, along with the rest of the sea and the seabed, are governed by the 1982 U.N. Law of the Sea Convention."

President Bush, editorialized the paper, "who has opposed other international accords, rightly supports this one. He is urging the Senate to ratify the treaty so that the United States would have a 'seat at the table' in the case of deciding this and other sea disputes. It's not a moment too soon." USA Today concluded: "Ratifying the treaty will help the United States assert its stake to Arctic riches and curb Russia's appetite for them."

CORRECTION: "Not a moment too soon"? In actuality, the specter of the Law of the Sea Treaty has haunted us for far too long. Worse than the star of a bad vampire movie, it refuses to die regardless of how many stakes are driven through its heart. Adopted in 1982 as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and more commonly called the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), it was negotiated during the previous decade as part of what was then being called the New International Economic Order--a grandiose plan for a socialist world order long promoted by the Council on Foreign Relations and other one-worlders.

The Reagan administration refused to sign the bureaucratic nightmare, though more than 150 other nations have done so. The treaty took effect in 1994 without the United States on board. The Clinton administration applied a bit of makeup to the treaty's language and signed it, but the Senate again wouldn't bite. In 2004, the Bush administration tried again to get the upper chamber to ratify it. Conservative groups resisted, and it was buried. Or so it seemed. Though unchanged, the treaty was revived this past summer by the administration, which sensed less resistance in the current Senate.

Proponents of the treaty must think we are all born suckers. Were the United States to ratify LOST, we would be buying into a bad deal that would compromise the sovereignty of our nation and effectively place more than two-thirds of the Earth's surface under the control of the anti-American UN. A United Nations outgrowth called the International Seabed Authority (ISA) would be given authorization over all the oceans of the world and everything in and under them, as well as the power to collect taxes, disguised as royalty fees, to be paid directly to the ISA by companies that wanted to mine in the oceans.

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During her testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 18, 2004, former United Nations Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick explained, in part, why the LOST deserved to be rejected. The treaty, she noted, "establishes a sweeping claim of jurisdiction over the seabed and all its mineral wealth. It creates an International Seabed Authority in which it vests control of two-thirds of the Earth's surface. Under the LOS Treaty, the power of the Seabed Authority would be vested in an Assembly made up of all participating states and an Executive Council of 36 members elected by the Assembly to represent investors, consumers, exporters of affected minerals, ...