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Of course, other reasons to refuse to publicly show the legitimacy of specimens is (a) that the purported documentation doesn't exist, and (b) there are holes in it that could be uncovered with enough eyes on it (e.g. the person who the paperwork actually belongs to could speak up).
The notion that this information is being withheld for concerns of promoting trafficking isn't credible, since these sales themselves are promoting trafficking; everyone who digs at all is aware that even animals claimed to be CB are virtually certainly WC when coming out of certain countries (Indonesia, for example).
People who are honestly skeptical of the legitimacy of these animals aren't going to be fooled by this sort of hand waving, and the people who don't care about the legal and (more importantly) conservation issues aren't going to care about the permit one way or another anyway.
Besides, there's more to a paper trail than having a permit in hand; to show that the animals for sale are the ones on the permit, there are financial documents to be considered -- payments made to the importer/exporter listed on the permit, FedEx tracking numbers to show the movement of animals from the importer to the seller, an accounting of numbers of animals on the permit vs how many are alleged to be covered under that permit. The import permit itself is just one small part of showing that animals that can be very reasonably assumed to be trafficked or descended from smuggled stock are legitimate. The fact that this little bit of the paper trail isn't shared with those who request it strongly implies that there is a lot more being hidden.
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