Mr. Baquet sees a “full-bodied debate in the country right now” about how the U.S. government behaved after 9/11. The elements of this overarching story, he said, include the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Snowden revelations, the expansion of drone warfare and the role of the C.I.A.

The Times owes it to its readers to give them all the information they need to work through that debate. Yet the requests keep coming. Mr. Baquet told me that, even now, “certainly a month doesn’t go by” that there isn’t some government effort to persuade The Times not to publish something. How often are they successful? “Very rarely.”

And Ms. Abramson, according to a Huffington Post story by Michael Calderone, has said that what seemed reasonable “in real time,” shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, might no longer pass muster. “None of us had a notion of what the ‘war on terror’ would involve and that there would be so many aspects of civil liberties that would be called into question,” Ms. Abramson said. “We were naïve.”

The most well-known tale of The Times holding back information came in 2004. A blockbuster story on warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency, written by Mr. Risen and Eric Lichtblau, very nearly never made it into print. It was held for 13 months and published only when it became clear it would come out in Mr. Risen’s book “State of War.”

Ms. Abramson’s predecessor, Bill Keller, told me last year that the proximity to the Sept. 11 attacks had affected his decisions: “Three years after 9/11, we, as a country, were still under the influence of that trauma, and we, as a newspaper, were not immune. It was not a kind of patriotic rapture. It was an acute sense that the world was a dangerous place.”

These are difficult calls, particularly when top officials tell editors “you will have blood on your hands” if a story is published, as Ms. Abramson recalls happening.

It’s easy to second-guess decisions in hindsight. But if news organizations — with The Times foremost among them — had been less cooperative and less credulous in the wake of 9/11, the country might well be better off today.