In today's increasingly international world, I suppose we should not be surprised to hear about an American journalist working for a British paper being sued by a Canadian mining company for an article about Tanzania.

All the same, it is a fascinating story with frightening possibilities for the future of the freedom of speech.

In November of 2000, the UK Observer printed a story by one of their investigative reporters, an American named Greg Palast. "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" traced the connections between former president George Bush, the Barrick Gold mining company, and the 2000 US presidential election.

This story was one of the first to uncover the large numbers of African American voters in Florida who had been turned away at the polls by being erroneously listed as ex-felons.

In part of the article, Palast refers to a Barrick mine in Tanzania, and repeats allegations originally made by Amnesty International in 1996: that a company later purchased by Barrick murdered more than 50 miners by using a bulldozer to bury them alive inside a mineshaft. The article does not state whether or not the allegations are true; it simply states Amnesty's allegations and Barrick's denials.

This article led to a result that most of us Americans can't even fathom: essentially, Barrick sued the Observer because one of their articles accurately quoted a source. As anyone familiar with the "McLibel" case of the 1990s will remember, the UK has virtually no protections for freedom of speech or freedom of the press. You can print a story that is 100% true, and if that truth is found to be defamatory, you can still lose in court.

So it's easy enough for Barrick to claim that the Observer and Palast have defamed them, and then let the threat of the lawsuit scare the paper into submission. But Barrick takes it one step further. It's not enough that they are abusing British libel law to suppress the story in the UK, they are also abusing British libel law to attack Palast here in the US. Claiming that people in the UK can read articles on Palast's US-based website, they have threatened to sue him under UK law.

In early August, Palast and the Observer gave up, fearing that the lawsuit could destroy their news outlet. They apologized to Barrick, paid the company a cash settlement, and removed the story from the Observer website and Palast's US website.

Why is Barrick fighting so hard to bury (no pun intended) this story? The answer seems to be "money." Barrick's mining operations in Tanzania are funded partially via large loans from the World Bank, the largest guaranteed loans in the Bank's history. These World Bank loans cannot legally be made to projects which involve human rights violations. In other words, if these allegations of murder are true, Barrick could lose their loan, and that wouldn't please the shareholders.

On one hand, this is the most common type of news story, one in which someone screws over someone else for a buck. But Barrick has unveiled a dangerous new tool for those who do the screwing: find a country whose laws fit your repressive purposes and file your suit there. Using this logic, if ETS! posts this very article onto the ETS! website, Barrick could sue ETS! in the UK, or any nation unfriendly to the press. Just in case, anyone out there familiar with free speech law in Cameroon? We might need to ask you a favor. You can read the original Palast story at http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Palast120100/palast120100.html.