In an unintentional juxtaposition, yesterday two events occurred that highlight the need for preservation of government data: 1) Congress revealed that the National Archives lost a computer hard drive containing a large amount of sensitive data from the Clinton years and 2)a federal appeals court ruled that the White House does not have to make public inteneral documents examining the disappearance of millions of e-mails during the Bush administration.
Personally, I am more interested in documents related to the "lost" e-mails between 2001 and 2005, which cover the run-up to, and start of, the Iraq War. But in a lawsuit brought by Melanie Sloan of CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington), an appeals court upheld a decision by a lower court judge that the White House's Office of Administration (OA)--which provides a variety of administrrative services for the Executive Office of the President--does not exercise enough independent authority to be subject to open-records laws. For an interview with me and Melanie about the politicization of the Bush Justice Department and the need for torture prosecutions, go to: http://www.whistleblowertv.org/...
In contrast, the National Archives' loss of a properly backed-up computer hard drive containing sensitve Clinton-era data (ranging from Social Security numbers to White House operating procedures) is the subject of a criminal investigation by the FBI.
The National Archives loss appears to be an accident, disclosed by its own Inspector General, which occurred while converting the Clinton data to a digital records system. The Bush administration data loss appears to be, at best, sloppy record-keeping, and at worst, a deliberate attempt to hide information by sending it via a private Internet domain, called tellingly "gwb43.com", hosted on an e-mail server run by the Republican National Committee. Conducting governmental business in this manner is a violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, and the Hatch Act, but I'm not aware of any criminal investigation or prosecution even though over 5 million e-mails were lost or deleted.
Selective criminal investigation and prosecution over the "little things," like electronic data, paves the way for selective investigation and prosecution of the big things, like "torture."