Tuesday 7 December 2010

Coineyleaks: US State Department Transparency and Coin Dealers

.The no-questions asked coin collectors and dealers' lobby group the ACCG together with the PNG and IAPN are currently engaged in a court case with the US government to force the US State Department to be more "transparent" about its dealings with foreign governments in policy matters concerning cultural property.

Wikileaks also has begun making State Department transparency a reality by releasing documents about its dealings with foreign governments in a whole series of matters. Suddenly the Constitutional right to free speech becomes a double-edged sword. Calls have reportedly been made by US politicians for one of the people who created wikileaks to be assassinated.

Citizens of foreign countries are learning what has been going on behind their backs, what US diplomats are reporting back to Washington and what directions they are receiving, some of which involve deceitsignificant matters.

The Polish missile affair is a case in point. I think there are some things we, and the people these officials claim to represent, do have a right to know despite the efforts now being made to shut Wikileaks down by fair means or foul. (Are the US government really involved in the DDoS attacks on the site? - what implications does that have for the computer owners whose machines are involved?)

I hope the US collectors now hounding the State Department to reveal the ins and outs of what China and Cyprus actually asked for and what was done with that request are seen in the context of that other fight for State Department transparency.

It seems to me that whether the phrase "and coins" is or is not in a document and whether it matters pales into insignificance compared with certain other doings of the US government in the wider world. Are those now clamouring for the State Department to show the world what foreign governments sent them in trust any better than Mr Assange?

In the light of the severe difficulties ahead of the US to retain its credibility on the international diplomatic scene now, we may look differently at the erosive and destructive efforts of the international antiquity dealing community to expose the activities of the State Department even further and bog it down in a time-consuming court case when it has other more pressing matters to deal with - matters which some argue concern national security. Are these activities in the long term interests of the American people or are the dealers' and coin collectors' activities anti-American?

Coineyleaks began here.
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