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.