Computer scanner broken, government shuts down

This report from TPM Muckraker is truly mind-numbing. The House Intelligence Committee didn't get the National Intelligence Estimate (the one the NY Times finally revealed) because their scanning equipment was down for five months. Many other reports were lost in the shuffle as well:

For five months this year, the House intelligence committee had a crucial intelligence report on the increasing threat of terrorism in the wake of the Iraq War -- yet not a single member read it. That's including the panel's chairman, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-IL) and the ranking member Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA).

In fact, an untold number of classified documents were kept from the members of the vital oversight committee from at least April to September of this year, according to the chairman's spokesman. In an interview yesterday, he blamed the months-long delay on technical problems with the "equipment" which handles the reports. (Harman's office did not return our phone calls and emails requesting comment.)

Hoekstra's spokesman told the Washington Post last month that a computer problem had delayed for months the distribution of the now-infamous National Intelligence Estimate on terror and the Iraq war, which was eventually leaked to the New York Times.

"There was a bit of a snafu," the paper quoted the chairman's flack as saying.

I wanted more detail on this "snafu." So yesterday I called Hoekstra's spokesman on the committee, Jamal Ware.

The committee uses an internal, secure Web site to share classified documents, he said. "The equipment that would be used to scan [documents] into the system went down."