Critic accuses Bush of silencing dissent
By Guy Dinmore in Washington
Published: December 18 2006 23:41 | Last updated: December 18 2006 23:41
A former senior Bush administration official who has been outspoken in his criticism of US foreign policy accused the White House on Monday of trying to silence him by censoring an article he co-authored that advocated broad engagement with Iran.
Flynt Leverett, a former CIA analyst and director in the national security council, said the White House had threatened him with criminal prosecution if he went ahead and published an opinion piece prepared for the New York Times.
Mr Leverett, an analyst at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, accused the White House of using the pretext of protecting classified information to limit dissent from someone highly critical of its Iran policy.
His allegations come at a particularly sensitive time for the White House, which is under intense pressure to change its whole Middle East strategy following publication of the report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.
Mr Leverett told a news conference that the CIA had already cleared the piece in question, which he was required to submit as a former analyst. He said the White House then intervened and excised material that he had already ¬published in a recent paper for the Century Foundation, a New York think-tank, and had either been stated in public by US officials or reported by the media.
The offending segments, he said, dealt with Iran’s assistance to the US in ousting the Taliban in 2001 and then helping set up a new Afghan government, and an offer Iran made to the US in 2003 – first reported by the Financial Times – to talk about a “grand bargain” that the Bush administration quickly rejected.
Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said he knew nothing about the case but denied the administration would “falsely silence critics on national security claims”.
The White House later confirmed it had suggested deletions to the article because it contained classified information, and then returned the piece to the CIA publications review board.
Speaking at a news conference, Mr Leverett accused his former CIA colleagues of being “spineless” in the face of political pressure. He said the CIA review board told him there was nothing of a classified nature in the article but that they had to bow to the White House.
“This is the state of our intelligence community six years into the Bush administration,” he said. He co-authored the piece with his wife, Hillary Mann, also a former official.
Analysts said Mr Leverett was not the only critic to have attracted the administration’s disapproval and that the CIA had tightened up its pre-publication review procedures and threatened other former officials with punishment for stating what was already on public record.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
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