Self-Censorship?

Speaking of memory holes: Declan McCullagh reports that The Onion has quietly removed an article from its site. It's a piece purportedly written by Pearl Harbor auteur Michael Bay, accusing the Chechen terrorists who seized that Moscow theater of stealing one of his movie ideas. What's worse, "Bay" complains, they went on to "change the most bankable elements." ("Where was the hero working on the inside? Where was the experimental Apache CX-150 helicopter that hadn't been fully tested? And where was the veteran cop trying to get through the ordeal while fighting off flashbacks of that eerily similar rescue raid back in 1986?")

Thanks to Google, you can still read the deleted story. It is, as McCullagh notes, "pretty tame by Onion standards." So why was it taken down? Did Bay threaten to sue?

As Drudge would say: Developing…