Open Seas Defended by U.S., Experts Say

By battering Libyan military targets in the Gulf of Sidra, the United States asserted a well-grounded--and well-rehearsed--right to sail in what virtually the whole world regards as free and open waters, legal experts in the Administration and elsewhere said Monday.

These specialists said the legality of the decision to knock out two gunboats and a Libyan missile base rested largely on three questions: whether the United States had a right to be in the gulf, whether it was acting in self-defense, and whether its military response was in proportion to any provocation.

On all three points, they said, the White House appears to be on firm legal ground.

Many countries regard territorial waters as extending 12 miles from shore, and the United States formally recognizes only a three-mile limit for its own shores. But Libya, asserting a 200-mile limit, claims as its own the entire Gulf of Sidra, the mouth of which is 150 miles from shore at its most distant point.

‘Outlandish Claims’

“It’s as if the United States claimed the Gulf of Mexico for itself,” said David Robinson, a Washington attorney. “Major maritime powers around the world don’t take lightly to countries making outlandish claims such as Libya makes here.”

Robinson was the State Department’s chief legal adviser during a similar U.S.-Libyan scrape in August, 1981, when Navy jets downed two Libyan fighters that challenged them over the same gulf waters. Now as then, Robinson said, “if there’s enemy fire, you’ve got the right to respond.”

Princeton University Mideast expert Manfred Halpern, a critic of White House policy toward Col. Moammar Kadafi’s regime, nevertheless concurred that Libya’s claim “is kindred to the United States’ claiming the Gulf of Mexico, and we are obviously not claiming the waters of the Gulf of Mexico as ours.”

Libya claims that everything south of its so-called “line of death”--at 32 degrees, 30 minutes north latitude--is inland water, accessible only with Kadafi’s blessing. “They treat the Gulf of Sidra essentially as we treat the Chesa peake Bay,” the State Department expert said.

Dozens of other nations claim some powers over stretches of waters beyond the three-mile boundary officially recognized by the United States. A number of nations claim exclusive fishing rights hundreds of miles from their coasts, and a few claim the power to exclude foreign military vessels as far as 200 miles out of sea.

None of those claims is so sweeping as that sought by the Libyans,however. Moreover, the United States rejects them all. The U.S. reaction also appears to meet the legal test of being in proportion to the Libyan attack, said Allan Gerson, a top Justice Department official who was legal adviser to U.N. Ambassadors Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and Vernon A. Walters.

“If the legitimate object is self-defense, you’re entitled to take all legitimate measures to achieve that objective,” he said.