New York Times Not Respecting Bush’s Ah-thor-i-tay

In a post at The Washington Note, headlined with the name Flynt Leverett, Steve Clemons says For those up at 3 am when the morning newspapers are uploaded to the web, rush to the Washington Post and the New York Times. Unless lawyers or other news get in the way, some very important pieces will be up. The first in the New York Times will be a very cool op-ed that I can't say more about right now. Clemons then proceeds to discuss a Robin Wright story in WaPo, about palace intrigues at the House of Saud. The only other reference to Leverett is when Steve writes: Representative Louise Slaughter has written to the President to ask why specifically Flynt Leverett's oped for the New York Times was censored. Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker spells it out a bit less cryptically: Over at the Washington Note, we see that the New York Times is set to reject a White House-led effort to block publication of an essay critical of its foreign policy. Last week the paper was set to publish an op-ed piece by Flynt Leverett, a former Bush Administration official who worked at the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of State, and on the National Security Council, which criticized the White House for its disastrous diplomatic approach towards Iran. The CIA reviewed the article and cleared it for publication, but the White House put the brakes on it, saying it contained classified information that the CIA missed. Leverett cried foul: "All of my publications on Iran -- and, indeed, on any other policy matter on which I have written since leaving government -- were cleared beforehand by the CIA's Publication Review Board to confirm that I would not be disclosing classified information."