That only a small set of them could be viewed that way, all originating in one office in a US territory, documents redacted by the territorial government and which displayed on screen and printed properly but which didn't have the PDF layers merged, so that they were still separable.
Now, the general reaction to that was this was an obvious lie--but for all the wanting to see under the black boxes of redactorial death, you know, it's only that small set of documents that's made the rounds in unredacted form.
Given the jonesing to see them and the simple fact that others haven't escaped into the wild, I'm willing to grant that the counter claim might, just might, not be wrong. Lack of evidence can, in rare occasions, be evidence. (Just like you can't logically prove a negative, but there are circumstances where lack of evidence when there's overwhelming pressure and opportunity to locate evidence doesn't leave much other choice.)
I also have no problem with the claim that of the many 10s of thousands of document already released more than that small number might be crappily edited, but evidence would be nice (because claims just aren't evidence in the real world). I figure somebody somewhere has the programming chops to scrape a document archive and batch process them to check if this is the case. That would be a good thing (for the 'right to know') but a horrible thing (for the 'right to privacy' and even 'due process'), but I haven't heard that this has been done. I also haven't been obsessing over it, so if it were done and not tossed into the public consciousness I probably wouldn't have noticed.
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