In the latest attempt to sweep all those dots away from public and media scrutiny, Drummond lawyers moved "to place under seal the memorandum in support of defendants motion for summary judgment and exhibits" in a terse, one-page filing in U.S. District Court in Birmingham.

Drummond's latest brief in a salvo of legal parries and thrusts over the last few years - in a case which may not go to a jury until March, 2007, if at all - asks U.S. District Judge Karon O. Bowdre to consider all "highly confidential exhibits" to be "filed under seal."

This summary judgment motion presents the judge, the same judge who presided in the U.S. Justice Department's losing case against HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy, the opportunity to throw out the whole case in the coming months, according to Birmingham attorney Barry A. Ragsdale. He filed a First Amendment petition on behalf of Stephen Flanagan Jackson, a journalism professor at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa and editor with LatinAmericanPost.com, to unseal many of the documents in the case.

"I am the only gringo journalist to have a copy of many of these sealed documents," Jackson said, referring to a Colombian's deposition and also to the deposition of Garry Neil Drummond, CEO and head of Drummond Co.

Mr. Drummond, a University of Alabama trustee emeritus and a member of the UA Business School Hall of Fame, testified in a deposition about paying a half million dollars in "stipends" to the Colombia police and military for protection of the Drummond mines and port in areas of northeast Colombia. It is widely known there that the police and military are notorious for moonlighting as right-wing paramilitaries, which hire out for protection of the Drummond assets under threat from leftwing guerrillas, who are also designated as "terrorist actors" in Colombia's interminable civil war.

Jackson also is the only journalist to personally interview the controversial, star eye-witness in the case - the so-called "Colombia Canary" - in a prison cell in Bogota.

"Rafael Garcia looked me in the eye and swore up and down that he witnessed a payoff from Drummond's top man in Colombia, Augusta Jiminez, to 'Bloque Norte' paramilitary hitmen in order to kill trade union leaders at Drummonds La Loma coal mines," Jackson says.

The sealed documents also reveal the extent and details of Drummond's alleged influence on the U.S. State and Justice departments to have the Drummond civil murders case dropped due to the possibility of disclosing sensitive, secret relations between the U.S. and Colombian governments.

Other witness testimony comes from a Drummond worker who claims to have heard the same Jiminez utter the now infamous, implicating threat about the union workers: "The fish who opens his mouth dies."

Drummond has consistently stated that the allegations of its complicity in the murders are false.

"The charges are liesdamnable lies," said William Jeffress, Jr., a Drummond attorney, in 2004, previous to the judges first gag order.

The civil murders case is in court under the obscure Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789. Coca-Cola, Del Monte, UNOCAL and other multinationals are being called to task by international labor under the almost-forgotten law which permits foreigners to sue private U.S. citizens or corporations for alleged wrongdoings abroad.

Coca-Cola recently won a round in a similar case when a judge in Miami ruled that there was not enough evidence to proceed with charges against several Coke bottlers in Colombia.

"These Colombia murders are very similar to the civil rights violations which were perpetrated in the U.S. in the early 1960s," Jackson says. "Especially comparable to the murders of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and the killings of the four little girls in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham.

"All were victims of civil rights struggles and justice long denied - just like in these 2001 murders in Colombia in this case meandering turtle-slow in federal court," Jackson says. "And not only slow, but under a cloud of secrecy that is not warranted at all - and in fact, is a gross violation of the First Amendment rights of the press and the public."

"Judge Bowdre's constant sealing and gag orders have a chilling effect by cutting journalists off from sources, potential sources and information about this case," he said. "The judge is throwing a shroud over this case."

He says he and Mr. Ragsdale are not threatening Drummond's Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial.

"We are looking out for the right to monitor the administration of justice without any undue restrictions on the monitoring and without regards to the manner and style in which the information is communicated," he said.

Ragsdale said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has scheduled oral arguments on Jackson's appeal to have the documents made public for the week of Jan. 29, 2007 in Montgomery.

"I am not sure what is going to happen if the judge throws the case out on summary judgment before then," Ragsdale says.

Drummond ships coal from its profitable Colombia mine all over the world. Southern Company is one of Drummond's largest customers for its coal-fired nuclear power plants in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and Georgia.