From Secrecy News:
EXECUTIVE ORDER ON ASSET SEIZURE CASTS A WIDE NET
Last July, President Bush issued a broadly-worded executive order
authorizing the government to seize the assets of "any person" who
threatens the stability of Iraq and, more controversially, any person
who provides assistance to such a person.
The scope, objectives and precedents of the order -- Executive Order
13,438, "Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten
Stabilization Efforts in Iraq" -- were examined in a new report from
the Congressional Research Service.
"The broad language of this executive order has been the subject of a
degree of criticism as potentially reaching beyond insurgents in Iraq
to third parties, such as U.S. citizens, who may unknowingly be
providing support for the insurgency," the CRS report noted, citing
prior accounts in the Washington Post, TPM Muckraker, and elsewhere.
In fact, the potential application of the order appears to be
technically unlimited since it includes a recursive clause that has no
defined endpoint.
Thus, section 1(b) of the Order states that any person who provides
goods or services to a person whose actions are proscribed under
section 1(a) is himself subject to section 1(a). But then, anyone who
provides similar support to that person could likewise be swept up in
the expansive terms of the order. And so on, without end.
In practice, the application of the order will be defined by
implementing regulations to be issued by the Treasury Department's
Office of Foreign Assets Control, which will also prepare an initial
list of blocked individuals and organizations. Those have still not
been published.
A copy of the new CRS report was obtained by Secrecy News.
See "Executive Order 13,438: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who
Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq," November 16, 2007:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL34254.pdf
The text of executive order 13,438 is here:
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo/eo-13438.htm
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