Bush censors critics of Iran policy

A former senior Bush administration official who has been outspoken in his criticism of US foreign policy accused the White House on Dec. 18 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, and former Foreign Service officer Hillary Mann said the White House had threatened them with criminal prosecution if they went ahead and published an opinion piece prepared for the New York Times. 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. 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 already appeared in a dozen news articles and official government press briefings. "The White House inserted itself into the prepublication review process for an op-ed on the administration's bungling of the Iran portfolio," Leverett said. 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 to talk about a "grand bargain" that the Bush administration quickly rejected. The White House later confirmed it had suggested deletions to the 1,000-word article because it contained classified information, and then returned the piece to the CIA publications review board. Five of the article's 16 paragraphs came back with deletions, some of which were extensive. Leverett said he was being targeted because he was critical of the government's "disastrous policies." "The claim [that the article contains classified information] is false, if not fraudulent," said Leverett. "The people making this claim know it is not true.... This is an abuse of the pre-publication review policy to silence an opponent of their policies." CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said submissions by former employees are coordinated with other US government offices that may have concerns about classification. That includes the White House. "For former employees, the sole yardstick for prepublication review has been and remains the simple requirement that their writings contain no classified information," Mansfield said. Speaking at a news conference, 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. Analysts said 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. "In a democracy, transparency in government has to be honored and protected. To classify information for reasons other than the safety and security of the United States and its interests is a violation of these principles," Leverett and Mann wrote in a Dec. 22 piece, entitled "What We Wanted to Tell You About Iran." They said they will continue to work toward the release of the material.