Redaction

In response to Glenn Greenwald's coverage of the Wikileaks-Guardian-Tsvangirai controversy and the Guardian's recent retraction, The Atlantic's Max Fisher tweeted an interesting point, which throws into confusion the issue of exactly what time Wikileaks released the 09HARARE1004 cable:

Max Fisher:

@ggreenwald Not trying to start a fight, but WL time stamp looks to be older than Guardian's? http://bit.ly/ghUUKc http://bit.ly/hHtH2u

4:39PM Jan 12th 2011

and:

Max Fisher:

@ggreenwald Correct me if I'm wrong, but from these, it looks like WikiLeaks published 21 minutes before the Guardian.

4:40PM Jan 12th 2011

Fisher is pointing out that the timestamp in the header of the 09HARARE1004 cable released on the Wikileaks website reads "2010-12-08 21:09"

The publication date of The Guardian's version of the cable reads "Wednesday 8 December 2010 21.30 GMT."

This would appear to indicate that Wikileaks published the cable on their website 21 minutes before The Guardian did.

This is an important point, and it raises an issue I have been contacted about recently.