Here Come the Black Helicopters!: UN Global Governance and the Loss of Freedom (5 page)

We wrote briefly about these treaties in “Tricks or Treaties,” chapter 2 of our previous book,
Screwed!
. But since that book’s publication in early May 2012, these threats to our freedom have multiplied and gained momentum even as brand new threats—as that to Internet freedom—have come into public view. So we write this volume to explain the assault against our values and our nationhood so we can act to preserve our country from these threats while there is still time.

Here’s what Obama and Hillary are trying to do:

Law of the Sea Treaty

Signed by the president. Up for Senate ratification before the end of the year, it would:

• Give the UN control of the 71 percent of the earth’s surface covered by oceans and seas and all minerals and fish underneath.
  
• It would likely subject the US to international rules on carbon emissions such as the Kyoto Treaty (never ratified by the Senate) and might be used to force us into a global cap-and-trade system.
  
• It would curb the ability of the US Navy to perform its historic mission of protecting freedom of the seas and vest the power in a tribunal appointed by the UN secretary-general.
  
• Give the International Seabed Authority—a group of 193 nations in which we would have but one vote—the power to tax offshore oil and gas wells and pay the revenues, at their discretion, to any third world nation it chooses.
  
• Oblige our oil and gas companies to share, for free, all of our most modern offshore drilling technology.
  

UN Control of the Internet

A treaty giving the United Nations control over the Internet is now under negotiation (in secret). Responding to proposals by Russia, China, Brazil, and India, the negotiators hope to present a final treaty for signature by the nations of the world at a conference in Dubai in December 2012. It would:

• Give the UN power to regulate online content.
  
• Allow nations to inspect private email communications by their citizens.
  
• Permit nations to charge Internet traffic coming in from abroad a fee akin to that charged for long-distance phone calls. So Google, Facebook, Apple, etc., would have to pay tolls to send their content into these nations.
  
• Give the UN authority to allocate Internet addresses and require it to turn over to member nations (like China) the IP addresses (a unique set of numbers that indicate the geographic location of each and every computer) of each user.
  

The negotiations are ongoing. The US negotiators will probably succeed in diluting some of these provisions, but the chances for eventual passage of these destructive changes is such that Vinton Cerf, one of the two founders of the Internet, said that the free Internet is now under more threat than ever before.

Gun Control

At a global meeting in New York on July 27, 2012, the nations of the world—including the US—were scheduled sign an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which will empower an international body to regulate the international arms trade. Its goal is eventually to establish a system of worldwide gun control. While paying lip service to the right of private individuals to own, buy, sell, or transfer arms, the body will have a life of its own and the power to require of the signatory nations measures to effectuate the goal of the treaty. These could include gun confiscation and will almost certainly call for universal registration and licensing.

And the global governing body the treaty establishes can pass whatever rules it wants without having to come back to the Senate or to any national legislative body for approval.

The treaty signing was canceled after fifty-one senators said they would oppose its ratification. But it is likely to be approved and finalized by a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly of the UN. Then it would go into effect if ratified by sixty-five nations (easily done). At that point, the US could either sign it or not. If it signed the treaty, we would be bound, under the Vienna Convention, until it was rejected for Senate ratification or renounced by a future president.

The best bet is that Obama signs the treaty after election day and Harry Reid never submits it for ratification so it remains in force until it is either renounced by a President Romney or rejected by a Republican-controlled Senate.

Global Environmentalism

Under the terms of the recently negotiated Rio+20 Treaty, the United Nations Environment Programme, a UN body, will be granted increased power to act as a worldwide Environmental Protection Agency, promulgating global regulations.

The United States will be obliged to contribute to a fund to help third world nations cope with environmental change. At the Rio Conference in June 2012, Secretary of State Clinton pledged $2 billion for this fund, which is expected to reach $100 billion when fully implemented. The US would have only one vote out of 193 in deciding to which regimes these funds will be paid.

International Criminal Court

This treaty, signed by Clinton and then renounced by President George W. Bush, may be signed again by President Obama during his second term or before he leaves office following an election defeat.

It supersedes the US Supreme Court and makes our entire judicial system subject to the rulings of an international court. The court would have the power to establish the extent of its own jurisdiction and would have the power to adjudicate disputes between Americans on US soil even after the Supreme Court has ruled. Double jeopardy would not attach to its review of American court rulings. The court would not have trial by jury or any of the constitutional protections Americans now enjoy.

Dangerously, it establishes the new global crime of “aggression,” which it defines as going to war without UN Security Council approval. US presidents could be prosecuted criminally after they leave office for violating this new law. In practice, of course, this provision would give Russia and China jurisdiction over the use of the US military.

Missile Defense

Under the guise of a “code of conduct” to limit debris in outer space, the Obama administration is negotiating an agreement to limit what satellites or missiles can be put into orbit around the earth. This code is widely seen as a backdoor attempt to reimpose the constraints on defensive anti-missiles embodied in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) and renounced by President George W. Bush.

Each of these treaties creates a new global entity charged with its enforcement. Whether it is a gun control agency or a Seabed Authority or an International Criminal Court, these treaties empower such agencies. Long after the treaties have been signed and ratified and after the various disclaimers have been inserted by our diplomats protecting our rights and sovereignty, these agencies will remain, able to expand their jurisdiction, legislate new provisions, impose additional taxes and penalties, and require obedience by the signatories to the treaties that set them up—all without any input from us and all without any accountability to us.

These enforcement agencies will inevitably acquire a life of their own, expanding their powers and eroding our sovereignty at every turn. This trend will not be an unintended consequence of these treaties—the systematic erosion of America’s sovereignty and subjecting her wealth and power to global control is quite specifically the intention of these treaties and the people who wrote them.

Each one strips us of control over our own destiny and places our sovereignty under the political control of the United Nations, and not, it must be noted, the Security Council of the UN on which we have a veto. These powers would largely be vested in newly created global bodies in which all of the world’s nations—corrupt or not, democratic or not, free or not, tiny and large—would have an equal say.

And then there is the question of who would obey these treaties. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and other outlaw nations have shown no regard for their treaty obligations. They each routinely disregard the provisions of the treaties they have signed and feel in no respect bound by them.

By contrast, law-abiding nations like the United States take their treaty obligations very seriously and are scrupulous in carrying them out to the legalistic letter. Indeed, American courts would be obliged—under the Supremacy Clause—to enforce these treaties, honoring them all even as the other nations who sign them take them lightly.

AMERICA’S TREATY ADDICTION

What is it with our diplomats? Why do they constantly seek to ensnare us in treaties to regulate each aspect of our existence? Can’t our diplomats ever say no?

Our foreign policy is largely conducted by globalists who work within our State Department, and the National Security Council. Deeply committed to the one-world agenda, they have dedicated their lives and public service to bringing the UStates into the global fold. The goals of the Club of Rome have no greater allies than many of the men and women of our foreign service.

Our nation’s foreign affairs experts live in the shadow of the trauma of the United States’ rejection of the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I and establishing the League of Nations. Because of the United States’ refusal to enter the global body and the perpetuation of American isolationism, historians assign to the United States much of the blame for the failed peace that followed the First World War and led directly to the second.

These experts fear the resurgence of isolationism and are determined to ensure that the United States is a full participant in every global treaty that comes down the pike.

When President Woodrow Wilson led the United States into the war in 1917—until then a conflict of Britain, France, and Russia against Germany and Austro-Hungary—he promised that it would be “a war to end all wars.” When the American military began to weigh heavily into the scales of the conflict, eventually forcing a German surrender in 1918, the president amplified his idealistic motivation for fighting by issuing his “Fourteen Points,” which would be the basis for what he described as “a peace without victory.”

The document that set forth Wilson’s Fourteen Points was one of the most idealistic in diplomatic history. It pledged the nations of the world to postwar boundaries based on self-determination by each country’s people. Every ethnic or national group would be able to determine, democratically, to which country they wished to belong. Freedom of the seas, the rights of neutral nations, and free flow of commerce were guaranteed. And, to enforce and implement this program, a League of Nations was to be established.

When the Armistice ending the war was signed—largely based on German acceptance of the Fourteen Points—Wilson sailed to Europe to attend a peace conference at the French palace of Versailles, where the nations of the world gathered. While all the Allied powers, who dictated the peace to Germany and its defeated allies, paid lip service to the Fourteen Points, they disregarded it when it came to thrashing out the details of the peace settlement.

When the final document emerged, nobody was happy. The ideal of self-determination was breached more than it was honored. The treaty reflected the same mad scramble for territory and reparations that had always accompanied the end of wars. This was far from a war to end all wars. In fact, it was the beginning of the onset of World War II!

Of all Wilson’s Fourteen Points only the provision for a League of Nations emerged in the final draft of the Treaty of Versailles. But when the document came up for ratification in the Republican-dominated US Senate, it was harshly criticized and ultimately rejected. So Wilson’s League began operations without the United States in attendance. The US never joined and played almost no role in trying to keep the peace between the world wars. With isolationists firmly in control of our foreign policy throughout the twenties, the United States turned inward and let the world hurdle toward another ghastly war.

When finally war came, first to Asia in 1934, to Europe in 1939 and to the US in 1941, it was a global catastrophe. More than fifty million lay dead by its end.

Determined to avoid the isolationism that had engulfed the United States at the end of World War I, Presidents Roosevelt and Truman firmly steered the US into the UN and raised great hopes for its effectiveness. Our diplomats, chastened by our former isolationism, determined that they would never again sit on the sidelines. Having “a seat at the table” became a mantra on Capitol Hill and in the State and Defense departments. Never again would we shut ourselves out.

The legacy of this harsh lesson still carries over. American diplomats instinctively rally to the negotiating table wherever it is, whatever it is about. The rest of the world understands that without American participation, no agreement is worth the paper on which it is written. And the other nations use the treaty-making process primarily as a way to cut the United States down to size. But the addiction of our foreign policy establishment to international conventions, forums, negotiations, and debates ensures our presence at the table and, most likely, our ascension to the global consensus.

But now the time has come for us to be left out; more precisely, to opt out of negotiations that can only lead to a loss of our sovereignty and to the undermining of our democratic system of government. From all sides, we face the pressures of a global community terrified by our power, humbled by our success, and determined to rein us in by ensnaring us in treaties and limitations of all sorts and sizes. What they could never hope to accomplish by military force or by economic power, these nations hope to accomplish by negotiation and treaty. Bluntly, they want to inveigle our gullible diplomats into signing away our country’s rights. As the old saying goes: Uncle Sam has never lost a war nor won a conference.

Now let’s look at each of these treaties in depth. Let’s see how they chip, chip, chip away at our national sovereignty and our democratic self-government.

PART TWO

UN FORCES GUN CONTROL ON AMERICA

The Second Amendment to the US Constitution, granting our citizens the right to bear arms, may be facing de facto repeal in the Arms Trade Treaty now being pushed by the UN.

Have you noticed that President Obama has used his term in office to push every item on the liberal agenda except for gun control? During the 2008 campaign, he spoke of embittered Americans who “cling to their guns,”
¹
but hasn’t spoken of the issue much since.

Now it’s clear why he hasn’t. He plans to accomplish the liberal agenda of registering, banning, and ultimately confiscating guns through an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT).

At this writing, the treaty’s precise terms have not been unveiled, but its intent is crystal clear: to repeal our Second Amendment and limit or eliminate the right to bear arms in the United States.

(Remember what we said earlier. All international treaties, under the Supremacy Clause of our Constitution, have the force of constitutional law and may not be contradicted by state or federal legislation. The ATT would effectively repeal the Second Amendment as clearly as the Twenty-First Amendment repealed the Prohibition amendment—the Eighteenth.)

As with so many of the UN treaties, it advances under false pretenses. The nominal purpose of the ATT is to regulate the international arms trade, limiting the flow of deadly weapons across national borders to drug cartels, criminal gangs, guerillas, and organized crime (just the crowd US Attorney General Eric Holder ran guns to in the Fast and Furious operation). But the catch is that the treaty establishes an international body to promote gun control. It requires that each nation adopt regulations to limit and control export of small arms. It is easy to see how this provision would require registration and inventory of all guns in the United States and could lead to confiscation.

The
Independent Sentinel
, a publication dedicated to Second Amendment rights, notes that President Obama told Mrs. James Brady—a strong gun control advocate after her husband was shot in the Reagan assassination attempt in 1981—that the administration had not forgotten its commitment to gun control. He told her in May 2011, “I just want you to know that we are working on it. We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”
²

He was likely referring to the ATT.

In October 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “reversed the policies of previous presidents and stated that she would enter into talks with the international community about signing a small arms treaty.”
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And in May 2010, President Obama signaled America’s willingness to negotiate such a treaty.

Hillary was quick to add that the US will insist on safeguards to protect the individual’s right to bear arms, but other nations are intent on using the treaty to erode them. Debbie Hillier, Oxfam International’s policy adviser (who is working on the treaty), said that “governments must resist US demands to give any single state the power to veto the treaty as this could hold the process hostage during the course of negotiations. We all on all governments to reject such a veto clause.”
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The ATT would “tighten regulation of, and set international standards for, the import, export, and transfer of conventional weapons,” according to the
Independent Sentinel
. “The treaty they are talking about,” the magazine warns, “basically bans all privately-held semi-automatic weapons.” Semiautomatic weapons should not be confused with machine guns. Machine guns, which are illegal in the United States, permit the rapid firing of bullets with the single pull of a trigger. A semiautomatic weapon features rapid and automatic reloading after each shot, but requires a trigger pull each time the gun is fired. One pull. One shot.

The UN gun control advocates passionately argue that “light weapons and ammunition wreaks havoc everywhere. Mobs terrorizing a neighborhood. Rebels attacking civilians or peacekeepers. Drug lords randomly killing law enforcers or anyone else interfering with their illegal businesses. Bandits hijacking humanitarian aid convoys. In all continents, uncontrolled small arms form a persisting problem.”

The UN continues:

[S]mall arms are cheap, light, and easy to handle, transport and conceal. A build-up of small arms alone may not create the conflicts in which they are used, but their excessive accumulation and wide availability aggravates the tension. The violence becomes more lethal and lasts longer, and a sense of insecurity grows, which in turn lead to a greater demand for weapons.

Most present-day conflicts are fought mainly with small arms, which are broadly used in inter-State conflict. They are the weapons of choice in civil wars and for terrorism, organized crime and gang warfare.
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Of course, why this international trend should empower a UN agency to ban or limit US privately owned weaponry is not clear. Most nations have no right to bear arms and have made private possession illegal. As the horrific toll of international violence makes abundantly clear, these laws are not well enforced.

But, in the United States, murder is a decreasing problem. In 1993, there were 24,530 homicides in the United States.
⁶
Today, despite an increase in population from 250 million to 310 million, the number of homicides has dropped almost in half, to 13,756. Of these, 9,203 involved the use of a firearm.
⁷

With gun violence decreasing sharply, why would we be interested in signing a global gun control treaty? The answer is clear: globalist and left-wing pressure. The liberals say that they want us to be bound by the treaty because the US is the source of 40 percent of the global arms trade.
⁸
But most of that is sold by the government, not by private individuals. The US, Russia, China, Israel, and Germany are the world’s leading arms exporters. But the treaty is aimed at individuals, who account for a small minority of the arms traffic.

Thomas Countryman, a US assistant secretary of state, made it clear in April 2012 that the treaty is not aimed at governments. Least of all, ours. “We do not want something that would make legitimate international arms trade more cumbersome than the hurdles United States exporters already face.”
⁹

Those who die at the hands of such legitimate arms sales will doubtless be comforted.

GUN REGULATIONS ON THE WAY

The Treaty includes, according to the
Independent Sentinel
, “the creation of a new UN agency to regulate international weapon sales, and require countries that host firearms manufacturers to set up a compensation fund for victims of gun violence worldwide.”
¹⁰

Gun control opponents, writing in the
Independent Sentinel
, predict that,

disguised as . . . a treaty to fight against “terrorism,” “insurgency,” and “international crime syndicates,” the treaty would undoubtedly:

1. Enact tougher licensing requirements, making law-abiding Americans cut through even more bureaucratic red tape just to own a firearm legally;

2. Confiscate and destroy all “unauthorized” civilian firearms (all firearms owned by the government are excluded, of course);

3. Ban the trade, sale and private ownership of all semi-automatic weapons;

4. Create an international gun registry, setting the stage for full-scale gun confiscation.
¹¹

While the treaty will doubtless be filled with reassuring disclaimers, former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton has seen this kind of thing before. “After the treaty is approved and it comes into force, you will find out that it has this implication or that implication and it requires the Congress to adopt some measure that restricts ownership of firearms,” he warns. “The [Obama] administration knows it cannot obtain this kind of legislation purely in a domestic context. . . . They will use an international agreement as an excuse to get domestically what they couldn’t otherwise.”
¹²

Tom Mason, who represented the World Forum on the Future of Sports Shooting at the UN conference, said, “The treaty is a significant threat to gun owners. I think the biggest threat may be the body that would administer the treaty.”
¹³

The ATT sets up an Implementation Support Unit to administer its provisions. Defenders of the treaty counter that it will clearly recognize the right of individual and national self-defense and say that it will be administered by the individual nations themselves, not by the UN.

But the draft treaty provides that “parties [to the ATT] shall take all necessary measures to control brokering activities taking place within its territories . . . to prevent the diversion of exported arms into the illicit market or to unintended end users.”
¹⁴

Opponents of the treaty warn that the Implementation Support United established by the ATT will increase its own powers to make sure that nations who sign the treaty “take all necessary measures” to enforce its ban on arms trafficking. They point out that UN treaties are subject to the kind of mission creep that Ambassador Bolton warns about.

One hundred and thirty members of Congress—organized by Pennsylvania Republican congressman Mike Kelly—wrote to President Obama on July 1, 2012, to express their opposition and concern about the ATT. “The UN’s actions to date indicate that the ATT is likely to pose significant threats to our national security, foreign policy, and economic interests as well as our constitutional rights,” reads the letter. “The US must establish firm red lines for the ATT and state unequivocally that it will oppose the ATT if it infringes on our rights or threatens our ability to defend our interests.”
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The congressmen demanded that the treaty exclude small arms and ammunition and recognize the right of individual self-defense.

The National Rifle Association attacked the treaty. “Any international Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) that in any way, shape or form affects the constitutional rights of American gun owners is unacceptable,”
¹⁶
Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, said in a statement. “International organizations and foreign governments do not have the right to restrict the fundamental freedoms handed down to us from our Founding Fathers.”

NRA President Wayne LaPierre testified before the U.N. that “on behalf of all NRA members and American gun owners, we are here to announce that we will not tolerate any attack—from any entity or organization whatsoever—on our Constitution or on the fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms.”
¹⁷

Ted R. Bromund, senior research fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, at the Heritage Foundation, warns that the ATT is what he calls an “aspirational” treaty, meaning that it sets goals and is less specific about how to achieve them.

He warns that “Americans should realize that many of the risks to US sovereignty posed by the ATT and other aspirational treaties cannot be fully addressed by legislative action, because these risks are inherent in any effort to negotiate vague, aspirational, and universal treaties in a world full of dictatorial states. The best defense against encroachments on US sovereignty—including the ability to conduct foreign policy—rests with oversight by elected officials and the vigilance of American citizens.”
¹⁸

The combination of the aspirations of the treaty signatories to curtail small arms throughout the world and the enforcement mechanisms built into the document spell bad news for our Second Amendment freedoms if we ratify the ATT.

HILLARY’S SECRET STRATEGY FOR IMPOSING GUN CONTROLS

NRA president Wayne LaPierre announced in July 2012 that his organization had secured the commitment of fifty-eight US Senators to oppose ratification of the Arms Trade Treaty if it contains any regulation of civilian firearms—far more than the thirty-four required to block Senate ratification. And, on July 26, 2012, fifty-one Senators said they would vote against ratification in its current form. Obama, knowing that if Hillary signed the treaty, as she had pledged to do on July 27, the day after the senatorial letter, the gun issue would become front and center in the presidential race. So the administration pulled back in a tactical retreat and the signing scheduled for that day was canceled. End of story? No way!

Here’s what the play is: The United Nations General Assembly will likely approve the treaty by a two-thirds vote before election day in the US. Then the requisite sixty-five nations will sign and ratify the treaty. That sets its provisions in stone. Obama and Hillary will keep silent until after the election. Then they will sign the treaty—and Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, will probably never bring it up for a vote. Knowing he would lose any ratification vote, Reid will just let the treaty take effect under the Vienna Convention—without any approval by the Senate. If President Obama is reelected, he will, of course, refuse to renounce the treaty and it will take effect without a vote of our elected representatives.

The only way to stop the treaty is to defeat Obama and/or elect a Republican Senate.

REPEAL THE REAGAN DOCTRINE

Bromund points out that the ATT is likely to mean one thing to the world’s democracies but something quite different for its tyrannical dictators. He points out that many of the nations that will sign the ATT are “dictatorships. Thus, the treaty will on the one hand recognize that states such as Syria have the right to buy and sell arms and on the other hand require them to establish effective systems of import and export control that, like the current US system, consider the human rights consequences of arms transfers.”

But he points out that “this is a fantasy: If a state like Syria genuinely wanted to establish such a system, the treaty would not be necessary. The ATT will effectively bind only the democracies that accept it.” And, he notes, “the failure of other states to live up to their commitments under the ATT will not cause its restrictions on the US to lapse.”
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