Sierra Magazine Story Reveals U.S. Mining Company's Support of Terrorists Linked to Al-Qaeda
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=177-04152004The Sierra Club announced today that an expose will appear in the May/June issue of Sierra, the official magazine of the Sierra Club, revealing how a Denver-based mining company secretly paid off Al-Qaeda- linked terrorists under the auspices of "international security."
The story also shows how the Bush administration's Homeland Security and Justice Departments turned a blind eye when first informed that Denver-based Echo Bay Mining Co. paid millions of dollars to the international terrorist group Abu Sayaff and other terror groups in the Philippines in exchange for protection of its gold-mining operations.
However, shortly before the Sierra magazine investigation was reported on tonight's edition of ABC's World News Tonight, the Justice Department reversed course and announced that it would open an investigation into Echo Bay's operations. Tipped off by the Sierra story, U.S. Reps. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., and Mark Udall, D-Co, also issued letters calling for a congressional investigation into Echo Bay and the general practice of U.S. corporate support for international terrorism.
The Sierra magazine investigation, titled "The Cost of Doing Business," is the result of a two-month investigation by Marilyn Berlin Snell, a writer/editor at Sierra. Allan Laird, a project manager for an Echo Bay project located on the southern Philippine island of Mindano, brought the story to the Sierra Club because of its well-known opposition to mining operations.
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The Sierra Club is calling for immediate congressional investigations to determine whether this was an isolated incident confined to the operations of one company, or a standard practice for extractive industries. There are many other U.S. multinationals involved in natural resource extraction operations in politically unstable countries around the world.
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