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They are not laws. Okay? That's rule #1.
Executive orders are just that: orders by the leader of the executive branch - the President - to the executive branch, i.e. public employees of the government of the United States of America not part of the other two branches. They are binding on executive branch employees but the bottom line is that they fill in the detail for the implementation of laws passed by Congress, room that Congress often leaves presidents so that the executive branch can collectively enforce the law in an intelligent manner. At least that's the idea.
Therefore, every order with "force of law" has that "force of law" because of a law passed previously by Congress. Not necessarily wisely, but passed by Congress.
In this case the president is also drawing on "emergency powers" considered inherent in the Constitution but, since presidents are prone to having multiple, effectively permanent states of emergencies at any one time, this can theoretically be called upon to create and enforce some sort of partial martial law applicable only to those the president designates as the enemy of the country or his national security policies, like "enemy combatants" for instance. This is a president's fall-back position when real laws fail to suffice.
In this case, I imagine there's a law that allows Bush to seize the assets of non-Americans interfering with the US' stabilization efforts in Iraq. The executive order was written with such broad language, however, that it can be used to apply to American citizens without benefit of warrants, trials or anything like that. In the highly unlikely event that Congress foolishly passed a law with a loophole allowing this, that law would likely, in and of itself, be blatantly unconstitutional. However, Bush can try to use his emergency powers excuse to say that even if there's no legal law justifying it, the survival of the nation justifies it anyway.
So, we have a blatantly extra-constitutional provision piggybacking on a legitimate implementation of congressional disapproval of enemies of the United States employing the US' financial system to damage the US' interests. We have a mix of the legal and illegal, the constitutional and unconstitutional, the right and the wrong.
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