I don't have a horse in this race, but the Nature article has some spin to it:

  A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the 
  denialists' conspiracy theories. In one of the more controversial 
  exchanges, UEA scientists sharply criticized the quality of two 
  papers that question the uniqueness of recent global warming 
  (S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick Energy Environ. 14, 751–771; 2003 
  and W. Soon and S. Baliunas Clim. Res. 23, 89–110; 2003) 
  and vowed to keep at least the first paper out of the upcoming 
  Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 
  Change (IPCC). Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one 
  another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they 
  acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the 
  IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published 
  in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.

If you conspire to do something with someone else and don't act, it's still a conspiracy. It's the planning that makes it a conspiracy, not the actual act.