WikiLeaks Cable Redactions: "Qaddafi Son Bisexual & Other Things NYT & State Don't Want You To Know"

[Hissyspit]

http://gawker.com/5840809/qaddafis-son-is-bisexual-and-other-things-the-new-york-times-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about

Qaddafi’s Son Is Bisexual and Other Things the New York Times Doesn’t Want You to Know

Now that Wikileaks has been forced by circumstance to release the full, unredacted archive of its 250,000-plus classified diplomatic cables, we can see what the New York Times voluntarily redacted, at the request of the State Department, from the cables that it published. Among the things it hid: Muammar Qaddafi has a bisexual son, and a Reuters correspondent is a source for State Department intelligence.

As it was preparing its series of blockbuster stories based on the cables, the Times' reporters and editors engaged in what former executive editor Bill Keller described as "daily conference calls" with State Department officials to entertain the government's requests for redactions. In the end, 47 of the cables published by the Times (of the relative handful that it disclosed) included redactions of varying lengths "to protect diplomats' confidential sources, to keep from compromising American intelligence efforts or to protect the privacy of ordinary citizens," as the paper put it. The Times, Keller wrote, acted as a sort of liaison between State Department bureaucrats and Wikileaks (as well as the other newspapers that made up the cartel controlling the cables' release), relaying the government's concerns about publication of certain details as well as the paper's own judgments about those requests.

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Wait! What corporate sponsor? Why is the Times (though the cable above wasn't among those published on Times' site, the redaction request was presumably relayed by the paper pursuant to the system Keller described) protecting the identity of a corporation that subsidizes Saudi royalty's drug binges? The company, we now know, is Kizz-Me, a (contrary to the cable's reporting) Belgium-based energy-drink firm. It's not earth-shattering information (we would have preferred, say, Four Loko!), but it's hard to see whose interests aside from Kizz Me's were served by the rescission.

Using Radek Pilar's cable viewer, which offers side-by-side comparisons between the original redacted releases and the actual, naked cables, we examined the Times' redactions. Most of them made sense—the names of State Department sources in autocratic regimes, for instance, were routinely removed. But many of them seemed arbitrary and difficult to justify.

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