Washington, Jan 13: The Treasury Department has called for an investigation into whether former Treasury Secretary Paul O'neill improperly disclosed documents in a book in which he accuses US President George W Bush of planning to invade Iraq from his earliest days in office. Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols told reporters yesterday that the agency asked its internal investigative office to review whether any disclosure laws had been violated.

After O'neill's book and related documents were featured on Sunday on a CBS "60 minutes" segment, Nichols said: "We referred this today to the office of the Inspector General."

Nichols referred to a document marked "secret," and shown on the programme on Sunday. The network interviewed O'neill as part of a promotion for the book, "the price of loyalty," by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind.

Suskind said he conducted extensive interviews with a number of administration officials, including O'neill, whom Suskind said provided 19,000 documents to the author to describe the inner workings of the Bush White House.

O'neill's disclosures appeared to bite back at the White House a year after he was forced out of the top economic post in the Bush administration. Bureau Report