What do you Call This.....

According to this article the Vice President Dick Cheney's office is missing an entire weeks worth of email messages. And this not any ordinary week we are talking about. The week was Sept. 30, 2003, to Oct. 6, 2003, the opening days of the Justice Department's probe into whether anyone at the White House leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Now that itself should make you queasy. But lets leave that aside for now.
If your are working in the highest level of the government ,and the Vice President damn sure is, shouldn't there be safeguards set to archive all emails for such high government officials. I am certain that my office emails are archived in a server somewhere and my importance is minuscule compared to the Vice President. I would think no body would miss a heartbeat over my missing old emails unless I have done something wrong. But the emails to/from the Vice President of the United States office, that's something else.
Don't you think with all the taxes collected from us individuals they would have the state of the art technology in place to archive emails. Apparently this is not something which just happened out of the blue one day. Well that's government at its best for you. What else can you call it...