Now, I’m not a lawyer, so all the legalese gives me a headache. But it sounds to me like Bush is essentially saying (via this order), “All of the oil in Iraq is ours, to do with as we wish, and anyone who disagrees can take a flying leap.” Am I correct, or is there another, more innocious interpretation that I’m missing? Can one of the resident SDMB legal beagles shed some light on this?
(Mods, I stuck this thread in Great Debates because I suspect it’d end up here soon enough. Please feel free to move the thread to a different forum as you see fit.)
What this document appears to be saying is that the Development Fund for Iraq and all petroleum products are not to be subject to any judicial processes.
These excerpts (note that I haven’t read full document) are not saying “all the oil is ours”, but just “US courts can’t do anything to prevent the bureaucrats now in control of Iraq from any action with respect to the Fund or petroleum products in general”. Whether the President is capable of making such an order under Constitutional separation of powers provisions is another issue entirely.
I git me a Law Degree, fwiw. Which isn’t a lot. But it’s pretty clear what it saying, as I’m sure you know.
Imho, the key real world feature/function of the doc (and it could achieve a number of things) is that it attempts to separates out sovereignty of oil so that when Bush says he’s transferring sovereignty to the puppet regime in June/July, it doesn’t include oil or oil revenues - well, of course it doesn’t; to do that would negate the whole purposes of the acquisition of Iraq.
Ditto if he can embroil the UN as an interim authority – the oil remains with the US.
On the extract I read, it’s also saying the President recognises no authority, legal or otherwise, in relation to Iraqi oil. I didn’t see that being restricted to US courts, though.
It’s wild, but if you believe the US has to hold onto the oil at almost any price (as the future lifeblood of this empire) then its perfectly reasonable and natural. In fact, it has to so be.
Of course, the Iraqi people don’t entirely concur.
If we wanted the oil, we would have paid for it rather than invade. Secondly, we would simply be taking it now rather than handing out cash like candy going out of style.
This document is actually aimed not at Iraq’s oil reserves, but at the UN OfF program (Oil for Food), which has turned out to be awesomely corrupt. The UN wants to keep running this program despite its complete lack of success in any way, shape, or form, in anything except supplying Saddam with a political weapon and themselves with bribes.
I don’t know that we could have paid for it–at least, not easily; wasn’t Saddam switching over to Euros rather than dollars as the basis for all transactions?
Besides, didn’t the OFF program limit how much oil they could move out of the country (how much food can you really buy?)? Seems that the taps are open now.
No offense, but I just waded through that thread and the analysis I saw of this executive order was, how to say this delicately, undeveloped. I would also be interested in any input on how this order actually changes things or if the authority to issue a binding decree of this type even rests in the President’s hands. I’m inclined to think not.
He can say what he wants, he can deny any court he wants but, in the end, it’s just a guy staking a claim to something on the other side of the world and saying no court can deny him.
The only thing that legitimises the proclamation, in my view, are the 130,000-ish troops on the ground. And they’ve barely in control of their own pants at the moment.
To be frank, it’s difficult to see how Bush would use the Decree in practice, but certainly part of it’s usefulness is that he can claim – somewhere down the line and without actually lying - that what he’s doing is legal, but without referencing what it is that makes it ‘legal’ (this Decree).
It’s rather like the invasion itself not being ‘illegal’ because Bush has always said he thought there was a direct threat to the US – that ‘belief’ <cough> makes what he did ‘legal (within the terms of what the UN permits on the international stage) and saves him, and Blair, from being de facto war criminals.
So, in part, I read it as an all-purpose reactive enabler - a document that could be indirectly referenced in a wide range of as yet unknown situations to garner propagandist advantage (without Bush being caught lying) and, in part, it’s a wise guy claiming possession of something as it’s passing between previous and next legit owners.
The referenced Executive Order authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury “to employ all powers granted to the President by IEEPA and the UNPA as may be necessary to carry out the purposes of this Order.” IEEPA apparently refers to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, U.S. Code Title 50, Chapter 35, Section 1701-1707 (http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/50/ch35.html), which generally authorizes the president to confiscate the property of persons or parties engaged in hostilities against the United States. (In the EO, Bush is careful to “declare a national emergency” with respect to the “threat” of judicial process regarding Iraq’s oil – such a declaration being necessary to invoke IEEPA’s provisions.) But since Iraq has been defeated and is no longer in a hostile relationship with the U.S., I cannot see how this act applies to authorize the president to make any decisions regarding Iraq’s oil. UNPA would be the United Nations Participation Act of 1945, U.S. Code Tile 22, Chapter 7, Sec. 287 (http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/22/287.html), which governs the manner in which U.S. representatives to the U.N. are appointed. I cannot see how this applies at all.
I also note that the language of the Executive Order prohibits “any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process” (emphasis added) – which implies that neither U.S. nor Iraqi courts would have any jurisdiction with respect to the Development Fund for Iraq or any Iraqi petroleum products which in any way come into the United States or under the control of United States persons (e.g., oil being pumped out of Iraqi oilfields by Halliburton or other U.S. corporations). I think this rather undermines Bush’s contention that he intends to hand over all authority to the interim Iraqi government at the end of June. What authority will that government have, if its courts have no jurisdiction over Iraq’s most important natural resource?
The executive orders it modifies are ones prohibiting trade or monetary transactions with Iraq. So, is it possible that all the executive order says is that it’s once again legal for Americans to buy Iraqi oil, and that the government will no longer punish American companies that do? (no “attachment, judgement, decree…”)
I agree that the language of the order does not specifically restrict it to US courts, but they’re the only courts that the President of the United States could have any power over (if indeed he can have any power over them due to Consitutional restrictions - IANA American or a constitutional lawyer).
Well . . . after the scheduled handover of power at the end of June, Iraq will once again be (at least in theory) an independent sovereign state (with foreign troops all over it, but that’s a detail). Until then, it is a conquered and occupied territory under the administration of the “Coalition of the Willing” (a phrase which, for some reason, sounds to me like the title of an extraordinarily highbrow porn flick, but I digress).
I am a lawyer. I never specialized in constitutional law, but we all had to study it. As a matter of constitutional law, I do not believe the president has any authority to limit the jurisdiction or powers of any American court by executive order.
I’m not going to attempt to interpret the EO without a bit of further study, but at first glance this appears to be related to a provision that was proposed by the Administration as part of the first appropriations bill that funded the war in Iraq. That legislation basically exempted Iraq from a list of state sponsors of terrorism that could be sued by the victims of terrorist acts originating with state sponsorship.
The general idea for the proposed legislation was that Saddam was on his way out, and that a “new” Iraq should not be dragged into court to answer for the abuses of the former regime. This became a rather important provision when a group of a dozen or two American former POWs from the first Gulf War tried to collect on a summary judgment of several hundred million dollars that was entered against seized Iraqi assets. The Administration fought that judgment in court, and pretty much won on the basis that Iraqi assets should be used first to rebuild Iraq, not to compensate those with claims against the former regime.
My stab in the dark is that preventing lawsuits against the assets of Iraqi oil in this EO is a companion to that legislation. (The bill was not enacted until sometime later on in April – so an EO dated just days after the war began would seem to be an interim measure pending legislative relief.)
No. The OFF program as initially created did have such limits, but they were removed around 1997 or so. The removal of the caps was pretty much just a PR stunt – Saddam was making hay that sanctions were causing starvation, so the UN responded by saying, “Oh yeah? Well, you can sell as much oil as your dark little heart desires, and the proceeds will buy billions upon billions of dollars of food and medicine. That means that the UN sanctions can’t possibly be responsible for the starvation, it’s your tyrannical rule, you big bully.”
For numerous reasons, the humanitarian situation remained poor despite the elimination of OFF caps.