April 2003
By Greg Palast, From The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Last week, we ran an excerpt from the recently-released U.S. edition of the book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, in which renowned investigative reporter Greg Palast detailed the shady—and extremely lucrative—connections between former president George H. W. (“Poppy”) Bush, a little-known Canadian gold mining company, and the political fortunes of Poppy’s son Dubya.
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This week, we give you another excerpt, which tells the story of how Barrick Gold Mining sought to silence Palast and human rights advocates, who were trying to expose the murder of Tanzanian miners by a Barrick subsidiary.
This damning story, and the one we ran last week, were both deleted from the British edition of Palast’s book for fear they would run afoul of that country’s draconian libel law—which makes it a crime even to print a true story if the facts could harm the reputation of a person or company.
—The Editors
Of the thousands of bless you and f___ you messages that arrived at the Guardian papers after we broke the Florida vote swindle story in November 2000, none ruffled my editors’ English reserve but one: a letter demanding we retract the article or else. It was from Carter-Ruck, a law firm with the reputation as the piranhas of England’s libel bar, a favorite of foreign millionaires unhappy about their press. Their letter stated they represented Barrick Corporation – a Canadian-American gold-mining operation that employed George Bush Sr.
Barrick particularly did not like my mention of the stomach-churning evidence that Sutton Resources, a Barrick subsidiary, had buried alive as many as fifty gold miners in Tanzania in August 1996, prior to Barrick’s purchase of Sutton in 1999.
What set their complaint apart from the scores of others we receive from corporations bitching and moaning about my exposes was Barrick’s extraordinary demand. They did not want their denial printed (I’d done that), nor their evidence the story was wrong (I would do that too, if they would provide it). They demanded my paper apologize and pay a tiny fortune for simply mentioning the allegations first reported by Amnesty International. And even that would not be enough. Barrick also demanded we print a statement vowing that my paper had confirmed that no one was killed at the Tanzanian site. Now, I would have been more than happy to confirm that – if I had evidence to that effect. The evidence was, in so many words, “We are billionaires–and you aren’t.”
Lacking a first amendment, Britain has become the libel-suit capital of the world. Stories accepted elsewhere draw steep judgments in London. The Guardian papers receive notice of legal action about three times a day–that’s one thousand libel notices a year. This creates a whole encyclopedia of off-limits topics, including an admonition from our legal department not to disparage the marriage of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman–sent the day after they announced their divorce. No paper can afford to defend against all these actions. The Guardian papers operate on a small budget from a not-for-profit foundation. No doubt about it, Barrick could break us in defense costs alone.
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