McCain, Kissinger & Rio Tinto Mining Connections
 
 
   
 
 
 
 
SUHARTO, KISSINGER and RIO TINTO
 
Freeport ⁄ Rio Tinto operates the largest copper and gold mining enterprise in the world in the subdistrict of Timika. The company signed its contract to operate with the Indonesian government in 1967, two years before the discredited "Act of 'Free' Choice". Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has sat on its board of directors for decades until recently, his firm Kissinger Associates has long advised the company, and Kissinger remains a Director Emeritus and consultant to the company. Freeport⁄Rio Tinto have been regularly accused of complicity in human rights abuses and environmental destruction in the area in which they operate.
 
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the local human rights organization, Els-ham have been attempting to alert the world community to ongoing and systematic abuses in West Papua, including arbitrary detention, rape, torture, beatings in custody and extra-judicial killing.
 
An estimated 100,000 people have been killed since 1963, although some observers say the figure may be much higher. The killings and physical and sexual abuse continue.   [31]
 
 
"Henry Kissinger has one sweet deal in the Freeport-McMoran Copper and Gold Co (FCX on the NYSE). Not only does he make well over $500,000 a year just for sitting on the board of directors, his "consulting firm" Kissinger Associates, Inc. rakes in $300,000 – 500,000 per year as the company corporate advisors, making sure no pesky environmental regulations can ever be enforced and no poor native group can ever win a settlement for having their land poisoned."
 
 
Under Suharto’s odious Contract of Work, slapped together in 1967, Suharto handed 100,000 hectares of land in the southern area of West Papua, also called Irian Jaya, to FCX for its gold mine. Neither FCX nor Suharto cared that this was not their land to carve up, but belonged to the Amaungme and Komoro people, whose lineages go back as much as one million years, according to some anthropologists. The corporation simply seized the land and booted off the natives.
 
Freeport-McMoran, which derives its name from its relationship with Rio Tinto, a British⁄Australian mining conglomerate that owns a 12% share in the operation, is outrageously wasteful by American standards
 
There have been numerous human rights reports of atrocities by FCX’s "security forces." Natives have been shot along the road as if they were objects for target practice, pulled off buses and murdered, others have been tortured, some have had their villages torched, yet others report being kidnapped and held prisoner in FCX packing crates. In one particularly horrendous instance, when natives blew up a slurry pipe carrying contaminated mine wastes, the military retaliated and slaughtered an estimated 900 people.
 
There is no doubt at all that Kissinger is completely aware of these atrocities. But then, according to a growing body of evidence, he was also aware of the atrocities in Chile, Cambodia, Argentina, and elsewhere – not only aware but, in some cases, was actively involved in helping to orchestrate them. 
 
Freeport-McMoran’s labor practices systematically exclude natives, despite what their rosy little brochure would have you believe. Of over 17,000 workers (in 2000), just 100 or so were local natives, who were paid 70 cents per hour.   [30]
 
Henry Kissinger takes advantage of his status as ex US Secretary of State to push the President of the Republic of Indonesia to respect the Contract of Work (COW) of PT. Freeport Indonesia Company. Henry Kissinger even threatens Indonesia by saying that if the government does not respect COW, there will be no investors come to this country.
 
Henry Kissinger unethically uses the unreasonable and unnecessary excuses to protect the company, from which he has got a lot of advantages.  [33]
 
 
 
Lord Peter Carrington left the board of Kissinger Associates when he became Secretary General of NATO, in 1984. An Irish baron, Carrington serves as Chancellor of the Order of St. Michael and St. George ... being the Queen’s foreign service and espionage order. First Lord of the Admiralty 1959-1963, Carrington was British secretary of state for defense 1970-1974, British secretary of state for energy in 1974 ...and, British secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs 1979-1982. From 1983 to 1984 Carrington was Chairman of General Electric of the United Kingdom. Carrington’s other financial interests include ...Australia & New Zealand Bank, a family concern he chaired ...and, directorships of Barclays Bank, Rio Tinto Zinc, Hambros Bank, and British Metal.
 
 
 
 

NOTE:  Sarah Palin met privately with Henry Kissinger in New York on September 23, 2008. No journalists were allowed to attend the meeting.  [34] 

Rio Tinto is also involved in the Pebble Mine project in Alaska - 20% of a $300 billion proposed mining district
 
 
 
 
 
 
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