We know that the CIA destroyed critical evidence of Bush-authorized torture of prisoners. We also know that critical evidence in the Padilla trial went missing – tapes of his final torture session. Now we discover, as Marcy Wheeler first noticed, that documents previously cited by the Bush administration no longer exist:
After President Obama took office, he issued a new FOIA policy, instructing executive branch agencies to "adopt a presumption in favor" of releasing information. The Obama Justice Department reprocessed the ACLU's earlier request under the new guidelines. But when they did so, department officials discovered that 10 documents listed on the index compiled by the Bush administration were nowhere to be found. The Justice Department noted this in a filing [PDF] by David Barron, an acting assistant attorney general, which was submitted last week as part of the ongoing ACLU case and first highlighted by Firedoglake blogger Marcy Wheeler. Barron acknowledged in the filing that even more documents could be missing, because "many" of the documents the Obama team did find were "not certain matches" to the ones on the Bush administration's list.
The Dish 