Redacting entries in documents that are released publicly is a fairly counter-productive measure. Either give the document out un-edited, or simply find a way to not give it at all. If you're redacting entries, you may as well be going over the documents with a highlighter and circling things with "LOOK HERE!!" written in the margin.
More than any other aspect of its handling of Wikileaks, that the US Government releases redacted versions (adding the additional info about what was deemed worthy of redacting) offers a glimpse at the low level of sophistication of policymakers.
International politics is a mess of formal declarations, informal implication, private direct negotiation, and informal private channels.
There are rules about when it's polite for a diplomat to move information into and out of each of these categories. The fact is that a diplomat likely has to record the actual truth in order to communicate home, store information for his successor(s), etc.
So the ACLU makes a big fuss over the redacting publicly known information. It's not that it's not publicly known, it's that _someone official said it._ Admitting that its diplomats know Washington isn't responding to allegations of CIA plane flyovers is embarrassing or at least more complicated.
Either the government can pretend that its boring diplomatic cables are top secret, or they can cover the parts of the game they're pretending not to play.
The absurd thing is that _everyone_ is playing this bullshit game and everyone knows that everyone is playing it. The rules for when it's acceptable to bluff are so well defined that lies become just as telling as truth.
