The plaintiffs in this case are Barrick Gold Mining, a huge firm based in Canada, and Barrick's chairman, Peter Munk, a Toronto multimillionaire with many powerful friends such as former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and former U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush. The defendants are Guardian Newspapers, London publisher of the Guardian (which I have occasionally written for), Britain's premier liberal daily, and the Observer, its Sunday paper.

On Nov. 26, 2000, the Observer published "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," a column by investigative reporter Gregory Palast (who has written for Salon) that outlined the cozy relationship enjoyed by the Bush family and the Barrick interests. Palast, who happens to be an American citizen, pointed out that Barrick's U.S. subsidiary, Barrick Goldstrike, had donated over $100,000 to Republican committees in recent years; that Goldstrike had previously obtained a very sweet deal to mine gold on public lands in Nevada, pushed through during the final days of George H.W. Bush's presidency; and that the former president had landed on Barrick's payroll after leaving office, to peddle his influence with foreign leaders in exchange for a salary and stock options.

Palast's column went on to discuss other Barrick ventures in Indonesia, Zaire and, most controversially, Tanzania, where he mentioned a report by Amnesty International alleging that in 1996, a company later bought by Barrick had participated in the "extrajudicial killing" of dozens of small-scale artisanal miners, in order to clear the Bulyanhulu gold pits, a rich site to which the company claimed title. The story behind that alleged incident is long and somewhat murky, but this much is clear: Several independent newspapers in Tanzania reported in August 1996 that as many as 52 miners were buried alive when bulldozers operated by Kahama Mining Co. Ltd., a firm later acquired by Barrick, filled in the pits, assisted by armed troops. The miners had until then successfully resisted KMCL's attempt to evict them from the land, a tract some 30 miles south of Lake Victoria.

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Those appalling stories, since buttressed by eyewitness accounts, were denied by the repressive Tanzanian government, which had sided with the company against the local miners in a legal dispute over the property, and later refused to mount an official inquest into the charges. Survivors and volunteers were reportedly prevented by the government from attempting to exhume bodies from the site.

While steadfastly repeating similar denials that anyone was killed when the miners were removed from Bulyanhulu, Barrick disowns any responsibility for the disputed events of 1996 because the Canadian company didn't acquire KMCL until three years later in 1999.

The company's own documents indicate, however, that its officials were well aware that its prospective subsidiary was using aggressive methods to rid the site of thousands of native miners. Those so-called artisanal prospectors had to be removed to facilitate extraction of what is now conservatively estimated to be $3 billion worth of gold ore.

In a speech to shareholders last May, Barrick's president and CEO boasted that "prior to our acquisition, we followed the progress at Buly for five years, remaining in close contact with the [KMCL] senior management team. We did our homework -- and when the opportunity presented itself, we moved quickly to acquire the property. But we did it with discipline: For an attractive price, and only after we became comfortable with Tanzania as a place to invest."

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