WASHINGTON, Jan 9: Former US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neilll likened President George Bush at cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people", according to excerpts on Friday from a CBS interview.

Paul O'Neilll, who was fired by Mr Bush in December 2002, also said the president did not ask him a single question during their first one-on-one meeting, which lasted an hour. "As I recall it was just a monologue," he told CBS' "60 Minutes", which will broadcast the entire interview on Sunday.

In making the blind man analogy, the former secretary told CBS his ex-boss did not encourage a free flow of ideas or open debate. "There is no discernible connection," CBS quoted O'Neilll as saying. The president's lack of engagement left his advisers with "little more than hunches about what the president might think," O'Neill said, according to the programme.-Reuters