Hi Folks!
Again I'm doing some cut'n paste of material I personally do find important, even though this has nothing to do with the Jehovah's Witnesses. Just to warn people that don't want to spend time reading off topic material. This is, in my view, extremely important - and if we don't protest to such behavior, we can end up living in a dictator-ruled country!
4 July 2001
Source: http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=86&row=1
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Alert: British paper faces suit over Palast investigation
Friday, June 29, 2001
Gregory Palast [email protected]
In retaliation for the investigative story about the finances of the George W. Bush campaign, Barrick Gold Mining of Canada has sued my paper, the Observer of London, for libel. The company, which hired the elder Bush after his leaving the White House, is charging the newspaper with libel for quoting an Amnesty International report, which alleged that 50 miners might have been buried alive in Tanzania by a company now owned by Barrick.
The company has also demanded the Observer and its parent, Guardian Newspapers, force me to remove the article from my US website, a frightening extension of Britain’s punitive libel laws into the World Wide Web. The company has also issued legal threats against Tanzanian human rights lawyer Tundu Lissu, one of the Observer’s independent sources and an investigator of the mine-site allegations.
The attack by Barrick and its controversial Chairman, Peter Munk, one of the wealthiest men in Canada, who boasts of his propensity to sue, also aims to gag my reporting on his company’s purchase of rights to a gold mine in Nevada - containing $10 billion in gold - for a payment of under $10,000 to the US Treasury.
My Observer story, Best Democracy Money Can Buy, looked into the activities of several corporations linked to the Bushes. It was in that article I first disclosed that over 50,000 Florida voters, most of them Black, were wrongly tagged as ‘felons,’ and targeted for removal from the voter rolls. My follow-up reports in Salon.com, The Nation, and the Washington Post as well as on BBC-TV’s Newsnight provided the basis for the US Civil Rights Commission finding of massive, wrongful voter disenfranchisement in Florida.
My entire continuing investigation is in jeopardy. It is difficult to imagine how my paper, owned by the non-profit Scott Trust, myself and human rights lawyer Lissu can withstand the financial punishment of litigation by the centi-millionaire Munk and his corporation.
In its latest Annual report, Amnesty says it cannot verify the allegations of the mine killings because the government continues to resist an independent investigation. Yet Barrick wants our paper to state what we know to be untrue: that independent investigation found the charges completely baseless. Yet our quoting Amnesty is no defense. Americans cannot conceive of the medieval operation of British libel law. It does not permit the defense of “repetition” - straightforward reporting on the statements of human rights groups are banned, a gag nearly as effective as Burmese law.
Independently of Amnesty, attorney Lissu went to the mine site and provided our paper with witness statements. Tanzanians have offered their services to help defend against censorship in Britain, a poignant reversal for our paper which, with imperial pomp, has launched a ‘Press Freedom Campaign’ to excoriate developing nations over gagging journalists.
‘10 Little Piggies,’ Adnan Khashoggi, and The Greatest Gold Heist Since Butch Cassidy
Peter Munk’s reputation precedes him. Last year, Mother Jones named him one of America’s ‘Ten Little Piggies’ for his US gold mine’s literally ‘poisoning the water’ through what environmentalists consider polluting extraction practices.
How Barrick got the gold mine is something they would rather we not report.
First, Munk was set up in the gold business by funds from Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. We are being sued for discussing this connection although the information comes from Peter Munk himself, quoted in his biography.
Second, Barrick struck it rich when the company used (or misused, say many) an old Gold Rush law to claim rights on a Nevada mine containing $10 billion in gold by paying the US Treasury less than $10,000. They are suing my paper for publicizing this extraordinary transaction, which US Interior Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt called, “the biggest gold heist since the days of Butch Cassidy,” and “a form of legalized extortion.”
Barrick’s suit claims the Observer libeled them by failing to state that Barrick had to spend money to buy other rights and equipment to dig the gold out of the ground. What an odd misreading of our words. We never said the US government mailed the gold bars to Barrick in Canada. We only said that Barrick got the gold mine and the public got the shaft.
The company’s CEO has also demanded his lawyers slice a pound of our journalistic flesh for mentioning that he, “made his name in Canada in the 1960s as the figure in an infamous insider stock-trading scandal.” Yet, we read this in the Canadian magazine Macleans: “The failure of [Clairetone Corporation] cost Munk his business and his reputation. Most damning were allegations of insider trading that were made after it was discovered that he and [his partner] had sold shares in 1967 just before some of Clairetone’s most serious problems became known.”
Lynching by Libel Law
The clear purpose of the suit is, as Barrick says, to force the Observer to say the investigation “should never have been published” – an inquiry into those who purchase the favor and influence of the Bush family, not just Barrick. The article was about the blizzard of money whirling around a family of Presidents and their associations. Among other paid favors for Barrick, the former President wrote the dictator Suharto to convince him, successfully, to grant another gold concession to Barrick.
And more than Barrick came into our investigative cross hairs. There was Chevron Corporation, and ChoicePoint, the firm at the center of the racially charged voter purge in Florida. This suit with malicious tone attempts to besmirch our entire investigation and to undermine ours and others further investigations into Bush and Barrick.
The Observer’s official history quotes a media critic’s statement that the papers new editor, “... is expected to continue the paper’s tradition of crusading reporting as in the Lobbygate investigate investigation.”
In that ‘Lobbygate’ story, well known in the UK, I went undercover with my partner Antony Barnett to expose corruption at the heart of the Blair cabinet.
But the wrath of a Prime Minister is easy to dismiss - and our awards were a pleasant salve. The withering, costly pounding of an enraged corporate power with too much money to spend has chilled reporters’ and British newspapers’ will to take on the tougher investigative matters. Amnesty is, “silent on the advice of lawyers.” And so, the witness statements of those who watched the bodies exhumed, and one who dug his way from the mass grave, will now also remain entombed in legal silence.
How much longer I can hold the line if abandoned by the Guardian’s Scott Trust - which is cracking under the weight of legal bills - I cannot say. And the consequences of capitulation to our source and defender, Tundu Lissu and his Tanzanian human rights organization, we cannot imagine.
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Source: http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=15&row=1
Bush family finances: Best democracy money can buy
The London Observer, Sunday, November 26, 2000
Gregory Palast
Last week, I mailed my overseas ballot for the US presidency - and you can wipe that smug little grin off your face. I won't put up with condescending comments about America's democratic rituals from a nation with an unelected House of Lords occupied by genetic fossils and, soon, Chris Woodhead.
In fact, you could think of the $3 billion spent in the US campaign in positive, New Labour terms. Call it 'the efficient privatisation of the democracy' - though an outright auction for the presidency would be more efficient still.
If the guy who lost the vote, George W Bush, nevertheless wins the White House, he'll have surfed in on a crushing wave of nearly half a billion dollars ($447 million), my calculation of the suffocating plurality of cash from corporate America, a good 25 per cent more than Al Gore's take.
George W could not have amassed this pile if his surname were Jones or Smith. The key to Dubya's money empire is Daddy Bush's post-White House work which, incidentally, raised the family's net worth by several hundred per cent.
Take two packets of payments to the Republican Party, totalling $148,000, from an outfit called Barrick Goldstrike. That's quite a patriotic contribution from a Canadian company. They can afford it. In 1992, in the final hours of the Bush presidency, Barrick took control of US government-owned property containing an estimated $10bn in gold. For the whole shooting match, Barrick paid the US Treasury only $10,000.
Barrick made deft use of an 1872 gold rush law meant to allow pan-and-bucket prospectors to gain title to their tiny claims. In 1992, Clinton's newly elected administration was ready to prevent Barrick's stunning grab. But Barrick is a lucky outfit. Bush's Interior Department expedited procedures to ram through Barrick's claim stake before Clinton's inauguration.
Ex-Pres George Bush was lucky, too. When the electorate booted him from the White House, he landed softly - on the Barrick Goldstrike payroll, where he comfortably nested until last year.
Who is Barrick? Its founder, Peter Munk, made his name in Canada in the 1950s as the figure in an infamous insider stock-trading scandal. Munk headed a small speaker manufacturer that went belly-up, just after he sold his stock. This is not quite the expected pedigree for an international minerals mogul.
If we look in the shadows behind Munk we can see the more accomplished player who provided the capital to set up Barrick - Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.
During Bush's presidency, Khashoggi was identified as conduit in the Iran-Contra conspiracy. He had already run into trouble with US lawmen when, in 1986, he was arrested and charged - but not convicted - of fraud. He was bailed out of the New York prison by Munk, who provided the $4m bond. Bush performed an even bigger favour for Khashoggi: as his last act in office, the president pardoned Khashoggi's alleged co-conspirators, key members of Bush's own cabinet. As a result, no case could be made against Khashoggi.
In 1996, a geologist prospecting in Indonesia, Mike de Guzman, announced his discovery of the world's richest gold field. Munk rapidly deployed his president. Bush, on behalf of Barrick, contacted officials of the former dictator Suharto who were in control of mining concessions. Thereafter, De Guzman's company was told it would have to turn over 68 per cent of its claim to Barrick.
Barrick didn't have long to gloat. Jim-Bob Moffett, the tough, old, Louisiana swamp dog who heads Freeport-McMoRan Mining, had a private meeting with his old benefactor Suharto. At the end of the meeting, Jim-Bob and the dictator stood on the steps of the presidential palace to announce that Freeport-McMoRan would replace Barrick. (Ironically, Barrick lucked it again. The gold find was a hoax. After Jim-Bob learnt he'd been suckered, his company invited geologist De Guzman to talk it over. Sadly, on way to the meeting, De Guzman fell out of a helicopter.)
While Mr Munk's president did not pay the cost of his rental in Indonesia, Bush could redeem himself in Africa. In 1996, as genocide in Rwanda fomented civil war in Zaire, Barrick smelt opportunity. We have learnt that, at that time, Bush spoke with his old golfing buddy, Mobutu Sese Seko (then dictator of Zaire) about diamond concessions.
I don't know what ex-CIA director Bush told the panicked dictator, but we do know that Mobutu granted Barrick exclusive rights to mine diamonds in north-west Zaire.
Maybe Bush talked about Barrick's mining experience in neighbouring Tanzania where, according to Amnesty International, Barrick's subsidiary carried out 'extra-judicial killings'. Amnesty reports that 50 independent miners who refused to move off the Barrick unit's concession were buried alive in the pits by company bulldozers. Barrick denies the allegations.
Beyond Barrick, Daddy Bush has many other friends who filled up his sonny-boy's campaign kitty while Bush performed certain lucrative favours for them. In 1998, Bush père created a storm in Argentina when he lobbied his close political ally President Carlos Menem to grant a gambling licence to Mirage Casino corporation.
Bush wrote that he had no personal interest in the deal. That's true. But Bush fils did not do badly. After the casino flap, Mirage dropped $449,000 into the Republican Party war chest.
The ex-president and famed Desert Strormtrooper-in-Chief, also wrote to the oil minister of Kuwait on behalf of Chevron Oil Corporation. Bush says honestly that he, 'had no stake in the Chevron operation'.
Following this selfless use of his influence, the oil company put $657,000 into Republican Party coffers. Most of that loot, reports the Center for Responsive Politics, came in the form of 'soft money' That's the squishy stuff corporations use to ooze around US law which, you may be surprised to learn, prohibits any donations to presidential campaigns in the general election.
Not all of the elder Bush's work is voluntary. His single talk to the board of Global Crossing, the telecoms start-up, earned him $13m in stock. The company also kicked in another million for his kid's run.
And while the Bush family steadfastly believes that ex-felons should not have the right to vote for president, they have no objection to ex-cons putting presidents on their payroll. In 1996, despite pleas of US church leaders, Daddy Bush gave several speeches (he charges $100,000 per talk) sponsored by organisations run by Rev Sun Myung Moon, cult leader, tax cheat - and formerly, the guest of the US federal prison system.
There are so many more tales of the Bush family daisy chain of favours, friendship and campaign funding. None of it is illegal - which I find troubling. But I don't want to seem ungrateful. After all, the Bushes helped make America the best democracy money can buy.
Blackout in Florida
Vice-President Al Gore would have strolled to victory in Florida if the state hadn't kicked up to 56,000 citizens off the voters' registers five month ago as former felons.
In fact, only a fraction were ex-cons. Most were simply guilty of being African-American.
A top-placed election official (not a Democrat) told me that the government had conducted a quiet review and found - surprise! - that the listing included far more African-Americans than would statistically have been expected, even accounting for the grievous gap between the conviction rates of blacks and whites in the US.
The source of this poisonous blacklist: Database Technologies, a division of ChoicePoint, and under the direction of Governor Jeb Bush's frothingly partisan Secretary of State, Katherine Harris. My thanks to investigator Solomon Hughes for informing me that DBT, a division of ChoicePoint, is under fire for mis-use of personal data in state computers. ChoicePoint's board is loaded with Republican sugar daddies, including Ken Langone, finance chief for Rudy Giuliani's aborted Senate run against Hillary
Clinton.
To see Greg Palast's follow-up of the investigation of the Theft of the Presidency, printed in The Nation, The Washington Post, The Observer, Salon.com and broadcast on PBS Television, go to www.GregPalast.Com
http://cryptome.org/palast.htm
Yakki Da
Kent
"The only difference between God and Adolf Hitler is that God is more proficient at genocide."
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