Wikileaks Impact On Numismatics

I have a feeling this title will catch your attention You may be saying to yourself, what in the heck could Wikileaks have to do with coins? This topic is definitely pertinent in light of some of the diplomatic cables that have been released.

Flashback to 2007 when Odyssey Marine Exploration announced their find of a shipwreck in the Atlantic that held hundreds of millions of dollars in gold and silver. Within weeks the Spanish Government began filing legal challenges and claimed the ship wreck is theirs and is being illegally looted. Spain even went to far as to illegally detain an Odyssey vessel in international waters and force it into a Gibraltar port for inspection and interrogation of the crew. Spain has filed legal briefing in Florida US District Courts and Odyssey has been getting pummeled there legally despite the lack of positive identification of the ship.

Now we know why Odyssey has had so many difficulties keeping the treasure they spent millions of dollars to find. Wikileaks diplomatic cables have revealed that the US Government and the State Department have been actively working against Odyssey and providing assistance to Spain. To me, this is an incredibly shocking turn of events and scary action by our own supposed "government". A very dangerous pattern is emerging now in light of this and the continued revision of numismatic import restrictions in the name of "cultural patrimony".

One of the more disturbing "leaks" exposed recently by WikiLeaks involves the United States government's clandestine assistance to Spain regarding a dispute involving treasure coins, which in turn could hint at the U.S. government's willingness to trade favors with other countries using the repatriation of antiquities, including coins, to their country of origin as leverage.

The Guardian newspaper in London was the first to announce Dec. 9 that WikiLeaks had posted U.S. diplomatic cables online that impact coins in dispute. The cables describe how a U.S. ambassador has been assisting Spain since 2007 in Spain's efforts to acquire more than 17 tons of gold and silver coins the treasure hunting company Odyssey Marine in Tampa, Fla., discovered and recovered from Atlantic Ocean shipwrecks in exchange for assistance in repatriating a single painting to a private U.S. citizen.

An Odyssey Marine spokesman reacted to the news, telling The Tribune newspaper, "The cables seem to indicate that someone in the U.S. State Department has literally offered to sacrifice Odyssey and its thousands of shareholders along with the many jobs created by the company in exchange for the return of one painting to one U.S. citizen. It is hard to believe that this really happened. It sounds like something out of a Hollywood script."

Reading between the lines, if a U.S. ambassador is willing to trade coins worth millions of dollars impacting many US citizens for a single oil painting impacting a single person, what will happen when a country demands repatriation of coins in museums and private collections because that nation insists these coins are part of their cultural patrimony?

http://www.numismaster.com/ta/numis...icleId=17093

Injecting a little personal opinion here on the matter, anyone familiar with Spanish history would have a hard time believing that Spain has any legitimate claim to anything. If the ship was Spanish and loaded with gold and silver, those precious metals did not belong to Spain- they were looted from South and Central America where the Spaniards were brutal slave masters to the indigenous population, forcing them to work in mines and foundries. I am not saying America has been perfect in its dealings with Native Americans(it certainly has not) but Spain essentially waged genocide to enrich the Royal Treasury to fund their endless wars with the rest of Europe and continued conquests in the New World. If anyone has a legitimate claim to it, it would be the native populations who died for it.