In 2011, the Department of Justice conducted raids on the Tennessee facilities of the famed Gibson Guitar company and confiscated large quantities of tonewood that had been imported from India and Madagascar.
Wrong. The Madascar ebony was seized in a 2009 raid. The East Indian rosewood and ebony were seized in 2011, the 'large quantities' at the Dallas airport.
Fourth sentence:
The issue at hand was not that the wood was endangered or illegally harvested, but that it was not of the proper thickness that would have meant that some labor had been performed on it by workers in India and Madagascar.Wrong. The issue at hand with the Madagascar ebony was precisely that it had been illegally harvested by Roger Thunam and was under government seizure.
One issue at hand with the Indian wood was existing U.S. Customs law about whether raw fingerboard blanks were considered finished or unfinished. The existing U.S. law said they were unfinished, based upon a customs ruling Gibson itself sought in 60/61 to avoid paying a tariff on finished products.
With so many errors in the first four sentences, I hated to read on, but I can tell you the author is repeating blog posts and Gibson's press releases, and has not done his research.
I agree. A lot of the “article” didn’t fit with some of the earlier info. Regardless, I like to see that Gibson is poking them in the eye a little bit with the (supposedly) sold out run of Govt. “models”.