Executive order number 13303 [signed by George Bush, in May 2003] states ??any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void?, with respect to ??all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein.?
With this, Bush granted Iraqi oil a lifetime exemption provided US companies are involved in the oil's production, transport, or distribution. This order applies to Iraqi oil products that are ??in the United States, hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons.? (Under US law, corporations are ??persons.?)

??In other words, if ExxonMobil or ChevronTexaco touch Iraqi oil, anything they or anyone else does with it is immune from legal proceedings in the US,? explained Jim Vallette, an analyst with the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC.
??Anything that has happened before with oil companies around the world -- a massive tanker accident; an explosion at an oil refinery; the employment of slave labor to build a pipeline; murder of locals by corporate security; the release of billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; or lawsuits by Iraq's current creditors or the next true Iraqi government demanding compensation -- anything at all, is immune from judicial accountability,? he says.

??Effectively Bush has unilaterally declared Iraqi oil to be the unassailable province of US oil corporations,? Vallette added.

?? Pratap Chatterjee and Oula Al Farawati, To the Victors Go the Spoils of War; British Petroleum, Shell and Chevron Win Iraqi Oil Contracts, CorpWatch, August 8, 2003Into June 2004, IPS also also adds that lack of transparency in the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) is leading to unaccountability:

Groups critical of the lack of transparency in the CPA's spending have been particularly angry that the authority is using Iraqi money to pay for questionable contracts -- some awarded without a public tendering process -- with U.S. companies.

Washington has restricted the most lucrative reconstruction contracts in Iraq to gigantic U.S. companies that appear set to rack up profitable contracts, fuelling accusations that the Bush administration is seeking to benefit a select few U.S. companies rather than find the best, and possibly the cheapest, options to help the Iraqi people rebuild.

?? Emad Mekay, Charity Finds Billions Missing In Iraqi Oil Revenues, Inter Press Service, June 28, 2004
Missing Billions of Iraqi Money that U.S.-led Coalition Cannot Account For
At the end of June 2004, just when the new interim government was to be announced, the British charity and development organization, Christian Aid noted that:

The US-controlled coalition in Baghdad is handing over power to an Iraqi government without having properly accounted for what it has done with some $20 billion of Iraq's own money...

Christian Aid believes this situation is in flagrant breach of the UN Security Council resolution that gave control of Iraq's oil revenues and other Iraqi funds to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)....

Resolution 1483 of May 2003 said that Iraq's oil revenues should be paid into the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), that this money should be spent in the interests of the Iraqi people, and be independently audited. But it took until April 2004 to appoint an auditor - leaving only a matter of weeks to go through the books.

?? Fuelling suspicion: the coalition and Ira