Can deleted comments be recovered?

There are some weird things with comments that I don't quite understand.

It seems that there is an edit link shown for all comments, which gets my test user a red box about only post owners being able to edit. Why do I see this link if it won't do anything? It seems to just add clutter.

But then, I discovered that by default, users with rep of 200+ can just _delete_ other people's comments. If we can't trust people to edit, why do we trust them to delete?

So that's confusing to me, but maybe I just don't understand something.

The real question is: are deleted comments saved somewhere, and can they be recovered if a) a user goes rogue and deletes a bunch of them, or b) one is just deleted by accident?