Countdown included a discussion of the White House micromanaging CIA torture.
Two aspects of this situation I haven’t seen commented upon earlier.
1) This torture was conducted by psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, as Katherine Eban, Jane Mayer and Mark Benjamin have reported. Mitchell and/or Jessen attended two invitation-only conferences that the American Psychological Association co-sponsored with the FBI and CIA respectively. These conferences covered such areas as the use of drugs in interrogations, the best way to overload the senses to break people down, and turning psychologists into informers on terrorist-related information.
2) If the specific interrogations plans were decided by the Principals Committee in the White House, it means that these strategies were decided upon by people with no experience or detailed knowledge of interrogations. In other words, these torture plans were the work of amateurs. As is stated in the title of the report of a conference between psychologists and veteran interrogators, “Torture is for amateurs.” I have heard from several sources in the press and among interrogators that, when the CIA and White House was developing their “enhanced interrogations” program, they did not consult anyone with experience in actual interrogations. Instead they turned to SERE psychologists and politicians. The results speak for the value of their strategy.
This is what “Democratic” politics has stooped to. The blame lies not just with H. Clinton, but with every American and member of the “Democratic” Party (I am not one), who does not express revulsion at this scoundrel attack.
The kitchen sink must be just about empty, because now Hillary Clinton is using an argument that would make Karl Rove blush: she’s making the case that she’s more authentically American than Barack Obama.
I’ve edited together the essence of her message. Even if you’ve seen her statement before, watch this clip — it’s short, and I promise it’ll be worth your while:
There was no subtlety to her point: in her four minute long attack on Obama, Hillary Clinton used America (or one of its forms) 18 separate times. Compare that to primary night in New Hampshire, when in a twelve minute victory speech she used it just ten times.Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with using the word America in a political speech. But there is something wrong with using it as a political weapon. And that’s exactly what Hillary Clinton was doing today.
I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Sen. Obama made about people in small town America. Sen. Obama’s remarks are elitist, and they are out of touch. They are not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans. Certainly not the Americans that I know — not the Americans I grew up with, not the Americans I lived with in Arkansas or represent in New York.
Hillary Clinton’s meaning is clear: I’m more American than Barack Obama. In case there’s any doubt, consider this statement in light of the fact that Barack Obama’s father was a Kenyan citizen (the elder Obama was in the United States on a student visa):
When my dad grew up it was in a working class family
About six weeks ago, Hillary Clinton accused Barack Obama of employing the worst quality of politics, reminiscent of Karl Rove. “Shame on you,” she said.
Amy Goodman, in her weekly column, writes of the Reisner campaign for the American Psychological Association presidency. In the nomination stage, Steven got 32% of the votes, topping the field of five nominees by a wide margin. While certainly an uphill battle against the entrenched forces in the APA, Steven’s victory in the final round of voting is certainly possible. The only way we can win is to create a massive grass-roots campaign that, like the Obama Presidential campaign, brings in many of those who usually don’t vote in what seems to many to be an irrelevant election. In order to make this possibility a reality we need every APA member, and even non-members to organize, reaching out to friends and colleagues and explain the critical importance of this election in righting the ills of our profession, which has played its assigned role designing and implementing Bush’s torture policies with the active or tacit help of the top APA leadership.
That leadership appointed an “ethics” task force composed largely of members of the military-intelligence establishment. Many of those members came from precisely those chains of command accused of committing abuses against detainees. The APA leadership still cites the report produced by this thoroughly compromised and corrupt task force as a sign of the “ethical” thinking of the Association. To learn about all thse sordid details read our comments on the APA’s FAQ on its policies.
Here is Amy Goodman’s article:
A Torture Debate Among Healers
By Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate
Imagine, a candidate for president who, a year or so ago, no one would have considered electable. Now the person is the front-runner, with a groundswell of grass-roots support, threatening the sense of inevitability of the Establishment candidates. No, I’m not talking about the U.S. presidential race, but the race for president of the largest association of psychologists in the world, the American Psychological Association (APA). At the heart of the election is a raging debate over torture and interrogations. While the other healing professions, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, bar their members from participating in interrogations, the APA leadership has fought against such a restriction.
Frustrated with the APA, a New York psychoanalyst, Dr. Steven Reisner, has thrown his hat into the ring. Last year, Reisner and other dissident psychologists formed the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology in an attempt to force a moratorium against participation by APA members in harsh interrogations. During the initial phase of this year’s selection process, Reisner received the most nominating votes. He is running on a platform opposing the use of psychologists to oversee abusive and coercive interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo, secret CIA black sites or anywhere else international law or the Geneva Conventions are said not to apply.
The issue came to a head at the 2007 APA annual convention. After days of late-night negotiations, the moratorium came up for a climactic vote. We saw a surreal scene on the convention floor: Uniformed military were out in force. Men and women in desert camo and Navy whites worked the APA Council of Representatives, and officers in crisp dress uniforms stepped to the microphones.
Military psychologists insisted that they help make interrogations safe, ethical and legal, and cited instances where psychologists allegedly intervened to stop abuse. “If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die!” boomed Col. Larry James of the U.S. Army, chief psychologist at Guantanamo Bay and a member of the APA governing body. Dr. Laurie Wagner, a Dallas psychologist, shot back, “If psychologists have to be there in order to keep detainees from being killed, then those conditions are so horrendous that the only moral and ethical thing to do is to protest by leaving.”
The moratorium failed, and instead a watered-down resolution passed, outlining 19 harsh interrogation techniques that were banned, but only if “used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm.” In other words, this loophole allowed, you can rough people up, just don’t do permanent harm.
Immediately after the vote, Reisner spoke out at a packed town hall meeting: “If we cannot say, ‘No, we will not participate in enhanced interrogations at CIA black sites,’ I think we have to seriously question what we are as an organization and, for me, what my allegiance is to this organization, or whether we might have to criticize it from outside the organization at this point.”
Reisner and others began withholding dues. Prominent APA members resigned, and the best-selling author of Reviving Ophelia Mary Pipher, returned her APA Presidential Citation award. After several months of bad publicity and internal negotiations, an emergency committee redrafted that resolution, removing the loopholes and affirming the outright prohibition of 19 techniques, like mock executions and waterboarding.
When I asked Dr. Reisner, the son of Holocaust survivors, why he would want to head the organization that he has battled for several years, he told me: “If I have this opportunity to make a change, I have a responsibility to do it. I never had the intention of being involved, but the only way to ensure this be changed was by claiming the democratic process in the name of human rights and social-justice issues. I was hoping that mass withholding of dues and mass resignations would shame the APA to come to its senses. It made them take a big step but didn’t go far enough.”
He expanded: “American people are sick of the reputation of the United States as torturers, as people who abuse prisoners. American people want to see a restoration of values from war to health care. I think what happens in the APA should point to a direction for the whole country.”
The APA’s annual meeting is this summer, in Boston. Expect interrogation to be the major issue confronting the members gathered there. Final voting for the APA president starts in October. The APA and the United States will determine their next presidents at about the same time. In both elections, a thorough debate on torture should be central.
Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!
I’ve been away for a few days at a conference, so I’m behind in postings. Among the most important stories I’ve not posted on are the ABC News blockbuster revelations, later confirmed by the Associated Press, that a group of the most senior leaders in our government –Vice President Richard Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Alberto Gonzales, George Tenet, and John Ashcroft — met regularly in the White House to decide which torture techniques would be applied, and how often, to detainees.
One colleague I was with at the conference kept on searching the media for the huge headlines he expected for this story of horrible war crimes designed and managed straight out of the White House. Instead, he could find very few mentions, and little outrage. Apparently the New York Times has so far not deigned to mention it, much less to call for the requisite war crimes trials. We in this country are so inured to having criminals as leaders that such a story is hardly news.
Even the blogosphere gave this story little attention, compared, say, to Obama’s startling truth-telling regarding small town America and H. Clinton’s demagogic response. As a nation, it seems, torture is just too routine for any sense of outrage. These are truly terrifying times.
Here is the original ABC News story. Below it is the follow-up story in which President Bush confirms the original story:
Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved ‘Enhanced Interrogation’
Detailed Discussions Were Held About Techniques to Use on al Qaeda Suspects
By Jan Crawford Greeenburg, Howard L. Rosenberg, and Ariane de Vogue
In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.
The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.
Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.
The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.
At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.
Contacted by ABC News today, spokesmen for Tenet, Rumsfeld and Powell declined to comment about the interrogation program or their private discussions in Principals Meetings. Powell said through an assistant there were “hundreds of [Principals] meetings” on a wide variety of topics and that he was “not at liberty to discuss private meetings.”
The White House also declined comment on behalf of Rice and Cheney. Ashcroft could not be reached for comment today.
Critics at home and abroad have harshly criticized the interrogation program, which pushed the limits of international law and, they say, condoned torture. Bush and his top aides have consistently defended the program. They say it is legal and did not constitute torture.
“I can say that questioning the detainees in this program has given us the information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks here in the United States and across the world,” Bush said in a speech in September 2006.
In interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson last year, Tenet said: “It was authorized. It was legal, according to the Attorney General of the United States.”
But this is the first time sources have disclosed that a handful of the most senior advisers in the White House explicitly approved the details of the program. According to multiple sources, it was members of the Principals Committee that not only discussed specific plans and specific interrogation methods, but approved them.
The discussions and meetings occurred in an atmosphere of great concern that another terror attack on the nation was imminent. Sources said the extraordinary involvement of the senior advisers in the grim details of exactly how individual interrogations would be conducted showed how seriously officials took the al Qaeda threat.
It started after the CIA captured top al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in spring 2002 in Faisalabad, Pakistan. When his safe house was raided by Pakistani security forces along with FBI and CIA agents, Zubaydah was shot three times during the gun battle.
At a time when virtually all counterterrorist professionals viewed another attack as imminent — and with information on al Qaeda scarce — the detention of Zubaydah was seen as a potentially critical breakthrough.
Zubaydah was taken to the local hospital, where CIA agent John Kiriakou, who helped coordinate Zubaydah’s capture, was ordered to remain at the wounded captive’s side at all times. “I ripped up a sheet and tied him to the bed,” Kiriakou said.
But after Zubaydah recovered from his wounds at a secret CIA prison in Thailand, he was uncooperative.
“I told him I had heard he was being a jerk,” Kiriakou recalled. “I said, ‘These guys can make it easy on you or they can make it hard.’ It was after that he became defiant.”
The CIA wanted to use more aggressive — and physical — methods to get information.
The agency briefed high-level officials in the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, led by then-National Security Advisor Rice and including then-Attorney General Ashcroft, which then signed off on the plan, sources said. It is unclear whether anyone on the committee objected to the CIA’s plans for Zubaydah.
The CIA has confirmed Zubaydah was one of three al Qaeda suspects subjected to waterboarding.
After he was waterboarded, officials say Zubaydah gave up valuable information that led to the capture of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammad and fellow 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh.
Mohammad was also subjected to waterboarding by the CIA. At a hearing before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay on March 10, 2007, KSM, as he is known, said he broke under the harsh interrogation.
COURT:Were any statements you made as the result of any of the treatment that you received during that time frame from 2003 to 2006? Did you make those statements because of the treatment you receive from these people?
KSM:Statement for whom?
COURT:To any of these interrogators.
KSM:CIA peoples. Yes. At the beginning, when they transferred me…
Lawyers in the Justice Department had written a classified memo, which was extensively reviewed, that gave formal legal authority to government interrogators to use the “enhanced” questioning tactics on suspected terrorist prisoners. The August 2002 memo, signed by then head of the Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee, was referred to as the so-called “Golden Shield” for CIA agents, who worried they would be held liable if the harsh interrogations became public.
Old hands in the intelligence community remembered vividly how past covert operations, from the Vietnam War-era “Phoenix Program” of assassinations of Viet Cong to the Iran-Contra arms sales of the 1980s were painted as the work of a “rogue agency” out of control.
But even after the “Golden Shield” was in place, briefings and meetings in the White House to discuss individual interrogations continued, sources said. Tenet, seeking to protect his agents, regularly sought confirmation from the NSC principals that specific interrogation plans were legal.
According to a former CIA official involved in the process, CIA headquarters would receive cables from operatives in the field asking for authorization for specific techniques. Agents, worried about overstepping their boundaries, would await guidance in particularly complicated cases dealing with high-value detainees, two CIA sources said.
Highly placed sources said CIA directors Tenet and later Porter Goss along with agency lawyers briefed senior advisers, including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, about detainees in CIA custody overseas.
“It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one every time,” said one high-ranking official who asked not to be identified. “They’d say, ‘We’ve got so and so. This is the plan.’”
Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present approved.
“These discussions weren’t adding value,” a source said. “Once you make a policy decision to go beyond what you used to do and conclude it’s legal, (you should) just tell them to implement it.”
Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.
According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”
The Principals also approved interrogations that combined different methods, pushing the limits of international law and even the Justice Department’s own legal approval in the 2002 memo, sources told ABC News.
At one meeting in the summer of 2003 — attended by Vice President Cheney, among others — Tenet made an elaborate presentation for approval to combine several different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time, according to a highly placed administration source.
A year later, amidst the outcry over unrelated abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the controversial 2002 legal memo, which gave formal legal authorization for the CIA interrogation program of the top al Qaeda suspects, leaked to the press. A new senior official in the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the legal memo — the Golden Shield — that authorized the program.
But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia. Sources said CIA officials that summer returned to the Principals Committee for approval to continue using certain “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns — shared by Powell — that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: “This is your baby. Go do it.”
Here is the even more ignored ABC Newsstory on President Bush confirming that the White house was Torture Central:
Bush Aware of Advisers’ Interrogation Talks
President Says He Knew His Senior Advisers Discussed Tough Interrogation Methods
By Jan Crawford Greeenburg, Howard L. Rosenberg, and Ariane de Vogue
April 11, 2008—
President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News Friday.
“Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people.” Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. “And yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”
As first reported by ABC News Wednesday, the most senior Bush administration officials repeatedly discussed and approved specific details of exactly how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA.
The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
These top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding, sources told ABC news.
The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.
At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Dick Cheney, former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.
The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.
Contacted by ABC News, spokesmen for Tenet and Rumsfeld declined to comment about the interrogation program or their private discussions in Principals meetings. The White House also declined comment on behalf of Rice and Cheney. Ashcroft could not be reached.
ABC News’ Diane Sawyer sat down with Powell this week for a previously scheduled interview and asked him about the ABC News report.
Powell said that he didn’t have “sufficient memory recall” about the meetings and that he had participated in “many meetings on how to deal with detainees.”
Powell said, “I’m not aware of anything that we discussed in any of those meetings that was not considered legal.”
In his interview with ABC News, Bush said the ABC report about the Principals’ involvement was not so “startling.” The president had earlier confirmed the existence of the interrogation program run by the CIA in a speech in 2006. But before Wednesday’s report, the extraordinary level of involvement by the most senior advisers in repeatedly approving specific interrogation plans — down to the number of times the CIA could use a certain tactic on a specific al Qaeda prisoner — had never been disclosed.
Critics at home and abroad have harshly criticized the interrogation program, which pushed the limits of international law and, they say, condoned torture. Bush and his top aides have consistently defended the program. They say it is legal and did not constitute torture.
In interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson last year, Tenet said: “It was authorized. It was legal, according to the Attorney General of the United States.”
The discussions and meetings occurred in an atmosphere of great concern that another terror attack on the nation was imminent. Sources said the extraordinary involvement of the senior advisers in the grim details of exactly how individual interrogations would be conducted showed how seriously officials took the al Qaeda threat.
It started after the CIA captured top al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in spring 2002 in Faisalabad, Pakistan. When his safe house was raided by Pakistani security forces along with FBI and CIA agents, Zubaydah was shot three times during the gun battle.
At a time when virtually all counterterrorist professionals viewed another attack as imminent — and with information on al Qaeda scarce — the detention of Zubaydah was seen as a potentially critical breakthrough.
Zubaydah was taken to the local hospital, where CIA agent John Kiriakou, who helped coordinate Zubaydah’s capture, was ordered to remain at the wounded captive’s side at all times. “I ripped up a sheet and tied him to the bed,” Kiriakou said.
But after Zubaydah recovered from his wounds at a secret CIA prison in Thailand, he was uncooperative. “I told him I had heard he was being a jerk,” Kiriakou recalled. “I said, ‘These guys can make it easy on you or they can make it hard.’ It was after that he became defiant.”
The CIA wanted to use more aggressive — and physical — methods to get information. The agency briefed high-level officials in the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, led by then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and including then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, which then signed off on the plan, sources said. It is unclear whether anyone on the committee objected to the CIA’s plans for Zubaydah.
The CIA has confirmed Zubaydah was one of three al Qaeda suspects subjected to waterboarding. After he was waterboarded, officials say Zubaydah gave up valuable information that led to the capture of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammad and fellow 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh.
Mohammad, who is known as KSM, was also subjected to waterboarding by the CIA.
In the interview with ABC News Friday, Bush defended the waterboarding technique used against KSM.
“We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it,” Bush said. “And no, I didn’t have any problem at all trying to find out what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knew.”
The president said, “I think it’s very important for the American people to understand who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was. He was the person who ordered the suicide attack — I mean, the 9/11 attacks.”
At a hearing before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay March 10, 2007, KSM, as he is known, said he broke under the harsh interrogation. COURT: Were any statements you made as the result of any of the treatment that you received during that time frame from 2003 to 2006? Did you make those statements because of the treatment you receive from these people?
KSM: Statement for whom??
COURT: To any of these interrogators. ?
KSM: CIA peoples. Yes. At the beginning, when they transferred me…?
Lawyers in the Justice Department had written a classified memo, which was extensively reviewed, that gave formal legal authority to government interrogators to use the “enhanced” questioning tactics on suspected terrorist prisoners. The August 2002 memo, signed by then head of the Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee, was referred to as the so-called “Golden Shield” for CIA agents, who worried they would be held liable if the harsh interrogations became public.
Old hands in the intelligence community remembered vividly how past covert operations, from the Vietnam War-era “Phoenix Program” of assassinations of Viet Cong to the Iran-Contra arms sales of the 1980s were painted as the work of a “rogue agency” out of control.
But even after the “Golden Shield” was in place, briefings and meetings in the White House to discuss individual interrogations continued, sources said. Tenet, seeking to protect his agents, regularly sought confirmation from the NSC principals that specific interrogation plans were legal.
According to a former CIA official involved in the process, CIA headquarters would receive cables from operatives in the field asking for authorization for specific techniques. Agents, worried about overstepping their boundaries, would await guidance in particularly complicated cases dealing with high-value detainees, two CIA sources said.
Highly placed sources said CIA directors Tenet and later Porter Goss along with agency lawyers briefed senior advisers, including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, about detainees in CIA custody overseas.
“It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one every time,” said one high-ranking official who asked not to be identified. “They’d say, ‘We’ve got so and so. This is the plan.’”
Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present approved. “These discussions weren’t adding value,” a source said. “Once you make a policy decision to go beyond what you used to do and conclude it’s legal, [you should] just tell them to implement it.”
Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.
According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”
The Principals also approved interrogations that combined different methods, pushing the limits of international law and even the Justice Department’s own legal approval in the 2002 memo, sources told ABC News.
At one meeting in the summer of 2003 — attended by Cheney, among others — Tenet made an elaborate presentation for approval to combine several different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time, according to a highly placed administration source.
A year later, amid the outcry over unrelated abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the controversial 2002 legal memo, which gave formal legal authorization for the CIA interrogation program of the top al Qaeda suspects that was leaked to the press. A new senior official in the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the legal memo — the Golden Shield — that authorized the program.
But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia. Sources said CIA officials that summer returned to the Principals Committee for approval to continue using certain “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns — shared by Powell — that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: “This is your baby. Go do it.”