Two breaking stories on Wednesday once again highlighted the Bush administration's unprecedented cloak of secrecy and its perpetual quest for plausible deniability. First, the White House acknowledged that it haphazardly recycled computer backup tapes, likely ensuring that crucial emails before October 2003 are lost forever. Then, Americans learned that the retiring CIA station chief in Thailand asked for and received permission in 2005 to destroy videotapes of Al Qaeda detainee interrogations. Together, these latest episodes of disappearing data might be called the Tales of the Tape.

The White House email revelations arose from a lawsuit brought by the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). The issue of missing emails, estimated to be as many as 5 million, first arose in January 2006 during U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame three years earlier. (It is worth recalling that then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales waited at least 12 hours and perhaps as long as four days "to officially notify the White House about the investigation and tell them to preserve any and all materials related to" the Plame affair.)

The issue Fitzgerald raised regarding the missing emails from the offices of the President and Vice President surfaced again during Congressional probes of the Bush administration's prosecutor purge. In April 2007, White House press secretary Dana Perino acknowledged that she "wouldn't rule out that there were a potential five million e-mails lost."

Now, as it turns out, the White House is offering "the dog ate my homework" defense. While a Bush administration aide previously had declared the White House recycled its backup tapes "consistent with industry best practices," its CIO now claims otherwise. As the AP reported:

The White House "does not know if any e-mails were not properly preserved in the archiving process," said the statement by Theresa Payton, chief information officer for the White House Office of Administration. "We are continuing our efforts," said Payton, whose staff is responsible for the White House e-mail system.

If the e-mails were not saved, the White House might have violated two laws requiring preservation of documents that fall into the categories of federal records or presidential records.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said that "there is no basis to say that the White House has destroyed any evidence or engaged in any misconduct."

Of course not.

Meanwhile, the CIA tapes imbroglio took another abrupt turn this morning. The Washington Post revealed that the CIA station chief in Bangkok got the green light in late 2005 from clandestine services chief Jose Rodriguez to destroy the videotapes of potentially illegal detainee interrogation techniques used in secret agency sites, tapes previously stored in a U.S. embassy safe. As the Post described the events:

The CIA had a new director and an acting general counsel, neither of whom sought to block the destruction of the tapes, according to agency officials. The station chief was insistent because he was retiring and wanted to resolve the matter before he left, the officials said. And in November 2005, a published report that detailed a secret CIA prison system provoked an international outcry.

Those three circumstances pushed the CIA's then-director of clandestine operations, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., to act against the earlier advice of at least five senior CIA and White House officials, who had counseled the agency since 2003 that the tapes should be preserved. Rodriguez consulted CIA lawyers and officials, who told him that he had the legal right to order the destruction. In his view, he received their implicit support to do so, according to his attorney, Robert S. Bennett.

Rodriguez may have felt it was his legal right to order the destruction of tapes. But just to be on the safe side, of course, he is demanding immunity from prosecution in exchange for his Congressional testimony.

In the meantime, CIA chief Michael Hayden is providing air cover to the Bush administration with the "Las Vegas" defense. In essence, President Bush and the White House knew nothing about the destruction of the tapes because what happens in the CIA stays in the CIA. Again, from the Washington Post:

Congressional investigators have turned up no evidence that anyone in the Bush administration openly advocated the tapes' destruction, according to officials familiar with a set of classified documents forwarded to Capitol Hill. "It was an agency decision -- you can take it to the bank," CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in an interview on Friday. "Other speculations that it may have been made in other compounds, in other parts of the capital region, are simply wrong."

And so it goes. The Bush administration is implicated in wrong-doing or outright criminality. Critical electronic records documenting the acts in question then mysteriously go missing or are inadvertently (and innocently) destroyed. In such circumstances, it would be helpful to follow the admonition of sportscaster Warner Wolf, "let's go to the videotape."

If only we could.

UPDATE: In the wake of closed-door testimony today by acting CIA general counsel John Rizzo, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), the ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee, unsurprisingly claimed Rodriquez "hadn't gotten authority from anyone." Hoekstra added, "It appears he got direction to make sure the tapes were not destroyed."