Sunday, September 16, 2007 8:35 PM

By: Chris Gonsalves Article Font Size


U.S. scientists aboard the Coast Guard icebreaker Healy are mapping the ocean floor in an effort to claim territory that holds an estimated 400 billion barrels of untapped undersea oil and gas.

The U.S. is poised to turn much of its authority on the high seas over to international arbiters by ratifying a long-controversial United Nations sea treaty.

Approval of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a 25-year-old international treaty regulating use of the world’s oceans, is steaming full speed ahead in the Senate, where committee hearings are set to begin Sept. 27.

The full Senate is likely to ratify the treaty -- which would link U.S. naval actions to those of 155 other member nations -- by year's end.

For decades, critics have derided the 182-page Law of the Sea pact as a threat to U.S. sovereignty and naval independence.

They add that it would create a massive new U.N. bureaucracy (the International Seabed Authority); would give environmentalists a back door to greater regulation; and would hinder the U.S. military's efforts to capture terrorists on the high seas.

“This is nothing less than a raid on our sovereignty,” Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., warns Newsmax. “I objected to it when it resurfaced in 2004, and I object to it now as I see it sneaking up on us again. What is this obsession we have for surrendering our jurisdiction to this international body? Nobody can give me a reasonable answer.”

For the rest of the article:
http://www.newsmax.com/headlines/law...mo_code=3A14-1

For more information about L.O.S.T.:
http://www.eagleforum.org/topics/LOST/