It is going to be in tomorrow’s newspaper (if the rumor is correct).

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*NYT to Ignore White House, Run “Classified” Op-Ed*

by Paul Kiel
Talking Points Memo
December 21, 2006, 3:58 PM

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.”

Now Steve Clemons, a friend of Leverett’s, reports on his blog that
tomorrow the Times will run the op-ed “with redacted lines ‘blacked
out.’” Clemons told me by phone that the Times will instruct readers
where they can find the omitted information in other (unclassified)
publications — like, for instance, in Leverett’s paper on the same
topic called “Dealing with Tehran,” published through the Century
Foundation.

The information the White House had redacted, according to Leverett,
“include Iran’s dialogue and cooperation with the United States
concerning Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and Iran’s
offer to negotiate a comprehensive “grand bargain” with the United
States in the spring of 2003.”

Read this WITH LINKS to sources at:
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002214.php

READ Flynt Leverett’s long paper on the same topic called “Dealing with
Tehran,” published through the Century Foundation, at:
http://www.tcf.org/publications/internationalaffairs/leverett_diplomatic.pdf

In a new report for The Century Foundation, Flynt Leverett, a senior
fellow and director of the Geopolitics of Energy Initiative in the
American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, lays out a
comprehensive strategy for diplomatic engagement with Iran. Leverett
says that a successful resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue requires
a “grand bargain” between the United States and Iran — that is, an
overarching framework in which outstanding bilateral differences are
resolved as a package.