from http://www.progressive.org/webex03/wx080803.html
August 8, 2003
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Get-out-of-Jail-Free Card for Oil Companies
Take a gander at Executive Order 13303, which President Bush signed on May 22.
It is innocuously entitled, "Protecting the Development Fund for Iraq and Certain Other Property in Which Iraq Has an Interest."
But that "other property" refers directly to-surprise, surprise--oil. And the purpose of the Executive Order seems to be to shield U.S. companies and oil execs from prosecution.
Unilaterally declaring "a national emergency," Bush wrote: Any "judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void with respect to . . . all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein . . . in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons."
Included in the definition of "United States persons" is any "entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches)." That means ExxonMobil.
Leaving aside the legalese--you know, all those "thereofs" and "hereafters"--what we have here is a get-out-of-jail-free card for all of Bush's and Cheney's buddies in the oil industry. They can bribe officials, they can underpay their foreign workers, they can recklessly spill oil all over the lands and waters of Iraq--and still they will be untouchable by any arm of the law, at least that's how it reads to me.
On top of that, if they're unloading Iraqi oil at some U.S. port, say Baltimore, and they spill it there, they may still be immune, because the order covers "any petroleum, petroleum products or natural gas originating in Iraq, including any Iraqi-origin oil inventories wherever located."
Not to worry. "The Bush Administration said Wednesday that the immunity wouldn't be nearly so broad," the Los Angeles Times reported on August 7. But legal scholars interviewed by the LA Times said the order essentially gives oil companies blanket protection.
In the lead-up to the war, peace activists were ridiculed for having the temerity to suggest that this war had anything to do with oil.
But here it is, in black and white, in Executive Order 13303.
-- Matthew Rothschild
