I'm not a big poster in any forum but reports like this do not surprise me. I've been on the receiving end of several journalism attacks and have found that each time the majority of the journalists do NOT do research. They simply interview individuals and take their word on the accuracy. Now to their defense they do have an editor who makes the final decision and they can make the story have a slant. However with this being a website I assume its an individual's side of the story.
Seeing questionable items in an auction is nothing new. As a collector of other items it is not all that uncommon to see items that have possible been stolen. The best defense against this is knowledge. Several times a year I see documents and letters on Ebay and other well know auctions houses that exhibit the same type of docketing and notations that I see regularly on documents found in the National Archives. If you visit these types of institutions you'll know how items are marked by the various archives and thus be armed with the knowledge to know if there is a possibility of the item being stolen.
I've never bid or won an auction from REA but I believe they performed the correct action by removing the item from the auction until the matter can be settled.
What I would be concerned about is how these items were stolen. Remember Sandy Berger a former national security advisor under President Clinton stole documents from the National Archives in College Park, MD. Knowledge is power and it your initial reaction is that an item is from a questionable origin then you are probably correct.
|