My gut feel is that the disappearing documents–assuming their disappearance from a sensitive compartmented information facility was not just a remarkable accident–have more to do with the JPRA document than with the change in approach that day. But there’s the distinct possibility that those documents also would have explained more about the dropped mock burials and the written list of torture techniques.

The letter the National Archives wrote to the U.S. Dept. of Justice last week inquiring about John Yoo’s missing emails focused on USDOJ’s violation–as a Federal Agency–of the Federal Records Act.

Now, House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. John Conyers is taking the reverse approach–asking for email exchanges to which the White House was a party–which would be preserved pursuant to the Presidential Records Act.

Some days it appears that torture is a dead issue in America. But at other times, events occur that belie such pessimism. One such event was the admission by Daniel Levin, author of one of the Bush administration’s infamous torture memos, that criminal investigations of Bush officials for their role in the implementation of torture [...]

8 year 8 years 8 years. That’s the sum total of Dick Cheney’s defense for institutionalizing torture. But I wonder how our allies feel about that defense?

We have long known that John Ashcroft was not properly read into the illegal domestic surveillance program Senator Whitehouse suggested as much when Attorney General Gonzales testified in July 2007. And both Gonzales and Robert Mueller revealed that John Ashcroft–from his ICU bed–complained that his advisors had not been able to get read into the program and as a result he was ill-informed about the program.

The NYT got a handful of emails that made it clear that Jim Comey had attempted to dissuade the Bush Administration from torture. But instead, it reported that he had approved of torture. Here’s the other stuff the NYT doesn’t seem fit to tell you about Comey’s emails.