1. Backlink adalah link/alamat website/blog anda yang terletak pada website/blog lain. Backlink ini berguna banget buat menaikkan ranking anda di search engine kayak google misalnya. Ranking ini maksudnya adalah supaya kalo ada orang mencari suatu keyword yang berhubungan dengan isi website anda, website anda akan tampil lebih dahulu daripada website lain yang memiliki ranking di bawah anda, artinya bakal banyak pengunjung yang melihat website kita di search engine terus datang ke website anda.
2. BackLink yang anda dapat berasal dari situs yang berisi link lain tentang hacking, spamming, porno, judi dan gudang link tanpa isi (linkfarm) tidak akan memberi efek untuk ranking situs anda dan bernilai 0 (nol)
3. Backlink yang berasal dari hasil membeli link di suatu website yang memiliki ranking tinggi juga tidak akan berpengaruh untuk jumlah backlink anda. Karena itu lebih baik anda tidak membeli link untuk backlink anda
> Tautan Link
RENCANA KEJAGUNG UNTUK JEMPUT PAKSA MANTAN DIRUT PT TELKOM
saco-indonesia.com, Pengusutan dalam kasus dugaan korupsi proyek pengadaan Mobil Pusat Layanan Internet Kecamatan (MPLIK) masih akan terus ditelusuri oleh Kejaksaan Agung (Kejagung).
Namun, hingga kini mantan Direktur Enterprise PT Telkom Indonesia Tbk, Arief Yahya selaku perusahaan BUMN, pemenang tender tak kunjung memenuhi pemeriksaaan Kejagung.
Padahal, ia diduga telah mengetahui mengenai dugaan korupsi dalam proyek senilai Rp1,4 triliun di Kementerian Komunikasi dan Informatika (Kemenkominfo) tahun 2010-2012 itu.
Atas hal itu, Jaksa Agung Basrief Arief telah menegaskan, kalau pihaknya akan menjemput paksa bila yang bersangkutan kembali mangkir dari pemanggilan yang telah dilakukan.
"Pemanggilan dilakukanlah secara formal. Kita panggil 1, 2 kali tidak hadir, kita panggil lagi tetap tidak hadir kita lakukan penjemputan paksa. Kan ada aturan itu kenapa tidak," katanya usai memaparkan hasil kinerja akhir tahun Kejagung di Gedung Kejagung, Jakarta Selatan.
Sejauh ini, sambung Basrief, jajarannya masih akan terus melakukan pengembangan atas kasus tersebut dan akan dituntaskan.
Basrief juga menambahkan, bukan hanya Arief Yahya yang saja akan diperiksa, siapapun yang diduga terlibat atau mengetahui kasus ini juga akan diperiksa tak terkecuali Menteri Kominfo, Tifatul Sembiring.
"Siapapun nanti kalau bagian dari itu akan dimintai keterangan, dari pemeriksaan sampai saat ini belum sampai ke sana (Tifatul), tidak ada hambatan apapun, kita belum ada laporan," pungkasnya.
Editor : Dian Sukmawati
> RENCANA KEJAGUNG UNTUK JEMPUT PAKSA MANTAN DIRUT PT TELKOM
BARU DITINGGAL MASUK RUMAH, MAHASISWI HILANG MOTOR
saco-indonesia.com, Baru ditinggal masuk ke dalam rumah untuk menaruh makanan, seorang mahasiswi telah kehilangan motor yang baru terparkir di pelataran teras rumah di Jalan Adikarya, RT 3/15, No.11, Pancoran Mas Kota Depok, Rabu (29/1) kemarin malam.
Peristiwa tersebut telah terjadi pukul 20:30 malam , tepatnya saat Puput yang berusia 20 tahun , Mahasiswi BSI Margonda semester 3 jurusan Komputerisasi Akutansi, telah mengetahui bahwa motor Honda Revo hitam lis biru, B 6973 ZCN, yang telah terpakir dalam teras rumah sudah hilang.
“Saya berdua sama teman kuliah Gani Lienardo yang berusia 23 tahun , baru menaruh makanan yang baru dibeli dari minimarket ke dalam rumah. Tidak ada dua menit motor yang terkunci sudah hilang dibawa pelaku,”ujar Puput kepada Pos Kota yang telah didampingi oleh teman prianya tersebut kepada Pos Kota saat membuat laporan di SPKT Polsek Pancoran Mas, Kamis (29/1) sekitar pukul 21:00.
Saat kejadian tersebut korban juga sempat meneriaki pelaku yang mengambil motornya. Pelaku yang berjumlah dua orang, seorang pelaku telah membawa motor korban dan seorang lagi dengan menggunakan motor suzuki Satria F150 kabur ke arah jalan jembatan Siliwangi.
“Pelaku juga sempat ditendang sama tukang ojek namun hanya oleng. Setelah itu langsung berhasil kabur dan tidak diketahui lagi jejaknya,”ungkap wanita berhijab ini.
Ciri-ciri pelaku yang telah diketahui korban adalah berbadan kurus. “Kejadiannya begitu sangat cepat sehingga tidak begitu memperhatikan ciri-ciri pelaku karena gelap. Yang telah diketahui hanya berbadan kurus saja,”demikian.
Sementara itu Kapolsek Pancoran Mas, Kompol Purwadi juga mengatakan anggotanya telah memintai keterangan korban dan melakukan olah TKP.
“Masih kita dalami, sejumlah keterangan saksi sudah kita mintai keterangan,”ungkapnya.
Editor : Dian Sukmawati
> BARU DITINGGAL MASUK RUMAH, MAHASISWI HILANG MOTOR
ANAS IKUT BERKICAU SOAL BEBAS BERSYARAT "RATU GANJA" CORBY
saco-indonesia.com, Ratu Mariyuana Schapelle Leigh Corby telah mendapat pembebasan bersyarat dari Kementerian Hukum dan Hak Asasi Manusia (Kemenkumham).
Pemberian bebas bersyarat terhadap Ratu Mariyuana Corby itu telah menuai pro-kontra.
Bahkan, mantan Ketua Umum Partai Demokrat Anas Urbaningrum, yang juga sudah mendekam di rumah tahanan KPK sebagai tersangka kasus korupsi pembangunan sport center Hambalang itu ikut berkicau melalui akun twitternya.
Anas telah menilai pemberian bebas bersyarat itu juga merupakan bentuk kemurahan hati Presiden Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Tentu kata dia, dalam pemberian tersebut pasti juga ada imbal baliknya.
"Sang Putri Corby siap-siap akan menikmati kemurahan hati. Gerangan apa di baliknya?#bukankuis.*abah," tulis Anas dalam akun twitternya yang beralamatkan @anasurbaningrum, beberapa jam yang lalu, Senin (10/2/2014).
Ia telah kembali melontarkan pernyataan bahwa pemberian tersebut tak ubahnya tukar guling perkara tak bisa ditolak SBY.
"Apakah Sang Putri Corby hampir mirip dengan "tawaran yang hampir mustahil ditolak?"#bukankuis.*abah," tulisnya lagi.
"Mungkinkah Sang Putri Corby harus segera pergi agar tidak menjadi "ganjalan hati"?#bukankuis.*abah," kicaunya.
Editor : Dian Sukmawati
> ANAS IKUT BERKICAU SOAL BEBAS BERSYARAT "RATU GANJA" CORBY
3 PEMUDA BABAK BELUR DIHAJAR MASSA
saco-indonesia.com, 3 Pemuda yaitu Rio M Saragi (22), Tedi Wibowo (26) dan Messakh George (22) telah diamuk massa. Ketiga ttelah dihajar usai melakukan pengeroyokan terhadap Yulianto yang berusia (26) tahun .
Kejadian tersebut bermula saat korban Yulianto, pengendara motor telah terlibat kecelakaan dengan kakak Rio. Rio yang tidak terima kemudian mendatangi Yulianto. Namun Rio tidak datang sendiri, dia datang bersama Tedi Wibowo dan Messakh George.
Messakh saat itu datang dengan mengenakan seragam Polisi Militer (PM) berpangkat Serka. Yulianto dan Rio Cs akhirnya telah terlibat cekcok. Ketiga pelaku lalu memukuli Yulianto.
Kalah jumlah, Yulianto lalu berteriak meminta pertolongan warga sekitar di Gang Keramat, Jagakarsa, Jakarta Selatan, Selasa (4/2) dinihari pukul 01.30 WIB.
"Para pelaku telah menuntut ganti rugi, tetapi korban ngotot sehingga telah terjadi cekcok mulut hingga pengeroyokan," ujar Kapolsek Jagakarsa, Kompol Herawaty, Selasa (4/2).
Warga yang telah mendengar teriakan Yulianto tersebut langsung mendatangi lokasi. Warga yang telah melihat 3 orang salah satunya berpakaian militer akhirnya menolong Yulianto.
Warga pun beramai-ramai memukuli ketiganya hingga babak belur. Dari hasil penyelidikan tersebut , seragam PM yang dipakai Messakh ternyata milik kakeknya, dengan kata lain Messakh adalah PM gadungan.
"Menurut pengakuannya pelaku seragam memakai baju dinas PM juga merupakan punya kakeknya yang pensiunan anggota TNI," tandasnya.
Editor : Dian Sukmawati
> 3 PEMUDA BABAK BELUR DIHAJAR MASSA
Jack Ely, Who Sang the Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’, Dies at 71
A 2-minute-42-second demo recording captured in one take turned out to be a one-hit wonder for Mr. Ely, who was 19 when he sang the garage-band classic.
Advertisement Politics Obama Finds a Bolder Voice on Race Issues
As he reflected on the festering wounds deepened by race and grievance that have been on painful display in America’s cities lately, President Obama on Monday found himself thinking about a young man he had just met named Malachi.
A few minutes before, in a closed-door round-table discussion at Lehman College in the Bronx, Mr. Obama had asked a group of black and Hispanic students from disadvantaged backgrounds what could be done to help them reach their goals. Several talked about counseling and guidance programs.
“Malachi, he just talked about — we should talk about love,” Mr. Obama told a crowd afterward, drifting away from his prepared remarks. “Because Malachi and I shared the fact that our dad wasn’t around and that sometimes we wondered why he wasn’t around and what had happened. But really, that’s what this comes down to is: Do we love these kids?”
Many presidents have governed during times of racial tension, but Mr. Obama is the first to see in the mirror a face that looks like those on the other side of history’s ledger. While his first term was consumed with the economy, war and health care, his second keeps coming back to the societal divide that was not bridged by his election. A president who eschewed focusing on race now seems to have found his voice again as he thinks about how to use his remaining time in office and beyond.
At an event announcing the creation of a nonprofit focusing on young minority men, President Obama talked about the underlying reasons for recent protests in Baltimore and other cities.
By Associated Press on Publish Date May 4, 2015. Photo by Stephen Crowley/The New York Times.
In the aftermath of racially charged unrest in places like Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and New York, Mr. Obama came to the Bronx on Monday for the announcement of a new nonprofit organization that is being spun off from his White House initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. Staked by more than $80 million in commitments from corporations and other donors, the new group, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, will in effect provide the nucleus for Mr. Obama’s post-presidency, which will begin in January 2017.
“This will remain a mission for me and for Michelle not just for the rest of my presidency but for the rest of my life,” Mr. Obama said. “And the reason is simple,” he added. Referring to some of the youths he had just met, he said: “We see ourselves in these young men. I grew up without a dad. I grew up lost sometimes and adrift, not having a sense of a clear path. The only difference between me and a lot of other young men in this neighborhood and all across the country is that I grew up in an environment that was a little more forgiving.”
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Organizers said the new alliance already had financial pledges from companies like American Express, Deloitte, Discovery Communications and News Corporation. The money will be used to help companies address obstacles facing young black and Hispanic men, provide grants to programs for disadvantaged youths, and help communities aid their populations.
Joe Echevarria, a former chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, will lead the alliance, and among those on its leadership team or advisory group are executives at PepsiCo, News Corporation, Sprint, BET and Prudential Group Insurance; former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey; former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; the music star John Legend; the retired athletes Alonzo Mourning, Jerome Bettis and Shaquille O’Neal; and the mayors of Indianapolis, Sacramento and Philadelphia.
The alliance, while nominally independent of the White House, may face some of the same questions confronting former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins another presidential campaign. Some of those donating to the alliance may have interests in government action, and skeptics may wonder whether they are trying to curry favor with the president by contributing.
“The Obama administration will have no role in deciding how donations are screened and what criteria they’ll set at the alliance for donor policies, because it’s an entirely separate entity,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One en route to New York. But he added, “I’m confident that the members of the board are well aware of the president’s commitment to transparency.”
The alliance was in the works before the disturbances last week after the death of Freddie Gray, the black man who suffered fatal injuries while in police custody in Baltimore, but it reflected the evolution of Mr. Obama’s presidency. For him, in a way, it is coming back to issues that animated him as a young community organizer and politician. It was his own struggle with race and identity, captured in his youthful memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” that stood him apart from other presidential aspirants.
But that was a side of him that he kept largely to himself through the first years of his presidency while he focused on other priorities like turning the economy around, expanding government-subsidized health care and avoiding electoral land mines en route to re-election.
After securing a second term, Mr. Obama appeared more emboldened. Just a month after his 2013 inauguration, he talked passionately about opportunity and race with a group of teenage boys in Chicago, a moment aides point to as perhaps the first time he had spoken about these issues in such a personal, powerful way as president. A few months later, he publicly lamented the death of Trayvon Martin, a black Florida teenager, saying that “could have been me 35 years ago.”
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President Obama on Monday with Darinel Montero, a student at Bronx International High School who introduced him before remarks at Lehman College in the Bronx.Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
That case, along with public ruptures of anger over police shootings in Ferguson and elsewhere, have pushed the issue of race and law enforcement onto the public agenda. Aides said they imagined that with his presidency in its final stages, Mr. Obama might be thinking more about what comes next and causes he can advance as a private citizen.
That is not to say that his public discussion of these issues has been universally welcomed. Some conservatives said he had made matters worse by seeming in their view to blame police officers in some of the disputed cases.
“President Obama, when he was elected, could have been a unifying leader,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican candidate for president, said at a forum last week. “He has made decisions that I think have inflamed racial tensions.”
On the other side of the ideological spectrum, some liberal African-American activists have complained that Mr. Obama has not done enough to help downtrodden communities. While he is speaking out more, these critics argue, he has hardly used the power of the presidency to make the sort of radical change they say is necessary.
The line Mr. Obama has tried to straddle has been a serrated one. He condemns police brutality as he defends most officers as honorable. He condemns “criminals and thugs” who looted in Baltimore while expressing empathy with those trapped in a cycle of poverty and hopelessness.
In the Bronx on Monday, Mr. Obama bemoaned the death of Brian Moore, a plainclothes New York police officer who had died earlier in the day after being shot in the head Saturday on a Queens street. Most police officers are “good and honest and fair and care deeply about their communities,” even as they put their lives on the line, Mr. Obama said.
“Which is why in addressing the issues in Baltimore or Ferguson or New York, the point I made was that if we’re just looking at policing, we’re looking at it too narrowly,” he added. “If we ask the police to simply contain and control problems that we ourselves have been unwilling to invest and solve, that’s not fair to the communities, it’s not fair to the police.”
Moreover, if society writes off some people, he said, “that’s not the kind of country I want to live in; that’s not what America is about.”
His message to young men like Malachi Hernandez, who attends Boston Latin Academy in Massachusetts, is not to give up.
“I want you to know you matter,” he said. “You matter to us.”
Even as a high school student, Dave Goldberg was urging female classmates to speak up. As a young dot-com executive, he had one girlfriend after another, but fell hard for a driven friend named Sheryl Sandberg, pining after her for years. After they wed, Mr. Goldberg pushed her to negotiate hard for high compensation and arranged his schedule so that he could be home with their children when she was traveling for work.
Mr. Goldberg, who died unexpectedly on Friday, was a genial, 47-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur who built his latest company, SurveyMonkey, from a modest enterprise to one recently valued by investors at $2 billion. But he was also perhaps the signature male feminist of his era: the first major chief executive in memory to spur his wife to become as successful in business as he was, and an essential figure in “Lean In,” Ms. Sandberg’s blockbuster guide to female achievement.
Over the weekend, even strangers were shocked at his death, both because of his relatively young age and because they knew of him as the living, breathing, car-pooling center of a new philosophy of two-career marriage.
“They were very much the role models for what this next generation wants to grapple with,” said Debora L. Spar, the president of Barnard College. In a 2011 commencement speech there, Ms. Sandberg told the graduates that whom they married would be their most important career decision.
In the play “The Heidi Chronicles,” revived on Broadway this spring, a male character who is the founder of a media company says that “I don’t want to come home to an A-plus,” explaining that his ambitions require him to marry an unthreatening helpmeet. Mr. Goldberg grew up to hold the opposite view, starting with his upbringing in progressive Minneapolis circles where “there was woman power in every aspect of our lives,” Jeffrey Dachis, a childhood friend, said in an interview.
The Goldberg parents read “The Feminine Mystique” together — in fact, Mr. Goldberg’s father introduced it to his wife, according to Ms. Sandberg’s book. In 1976, Paula Goldberg helped found a nonprofit to aid children with disabilities. Her husband, Mel, a law professor who taught at night, made the family breakfast at home.
Later, when Dave Goldberg was in high school and his prom date, Jill Chessen, stayed silent in a politics class, he chastised her afterward. He said, “You need to speak up,” Ms. Chessen recalled in an interview. “They need to hear your voice.”
Years later, when Karin Gilford, an early employee at Launch Media, Mr. Goldberg’s digital music company, became a mother, he knew exactly what to do. He kept giving her challenging assignments, she recalled, but also let her work from home one day a week. After Yahoo acquired Launch, Mr. Goldberg became known for distributing roses to all the women in the office on Valentine’s Day.
Ms. Sandberg, who often describes herself as bossy-in-a-good-way, enchanted him when they became friendly in the mid-1990s. He “was smitten with her,” Ms. Chessen remembered. Ms. Sandberg was dating someone else, but Mr. Goldberg still hung around, even helping her and her then-boyfriend move, recalled Bob Roback, a friend and co-founder of Launch. When they finally married in 2004, friends remember thinking how similar the two were, and that the qualities that might have made Ms. Sandberg intimidating to some men drew Mr. Goldberg to her even more.
Over the next decade, Mr. Goldberg and Ms. Sandberg pioneered new ways of capturing information online, had a son and then a daughter, became immensely wealthy, and hashed out their who-does-what-in-this-marriage issues. Mr. Goldberg’s commute from the Bay Area to Los Angeles became a strain, so he relocated, later joking that he “lost the coin flip” of where they would live. He paid the bills, she planned the birthday parties, and both often left their offices at 5:30 so they could eat dinner with their children before resuming work afterward.
Friends in Silicon Valley say they were careful to conduct their careers separately, politely refusing when outsiders would ask one about the other’s work: Ms. Sandberg’s role building Facebook into an information and advertising powerhouse, and Mr. Goldberg at SurveyMonkey, which made polling faster and cheaper. But privately, their work was intertwined. He often began statements to his team with the phrase “Well, Sheryl said” sharing her business advice. He counseled her, too, starting with her salary negotiations with Mark Zuckerberg.
“I wanted Mark to really feel he stretched to get Sheryl, because she was worth it,” Mr. Goldberg explained in a 2013 “60 Minutes” interview, his Minnesota accent and his smile intact as he offered a rare peek of the intersection of marriage and money at the top of corporate life.
While his wife grew increasingly outspoken about women’s advancement, Mr. Goldberg quietly advised the men in the office on family and partnership matters, an associate said. Six out of 16 members of SurveyMonkey’s management team are female, an almost unheard-of ratio among Silicon Valley “unicorns,” or companies valued at over $1 billion.
When Mellody Hobson, a friend and finance executive, wrote a chapter of “Lean In” about women of color for the college edition of the book, Mr. Goldberg gave her feedback on the draft, a clue to his deep involvement. He joked with Ms. Hobson that she was too long-winded, like Ms. Sandberg, but aside from that, he said he loved the chapter, she said in an interview.
By then, Mr. Goldberg was a figure of fascination who inspired a “where can I get one of those?” reaction among many of the women who had read the best seller “Lean In.” Some lamented that Ms. Sandberg’s advice hinged too much on marrying a Dave Goldberg, who was humble enough to plan around his wife, attentive enough to worry about which shoes his young daughter would wear, and rich enough to help pay for the help that made the family’s balancing act manageable.
Now that he is gone, and Ms. Sandberg goes from being half of a celebrated partnership to perhaps the business world’s most prominent single mother, the pages of “Lean In” carry a new sting of loss.
“We are never at 50-50 at any given moment — perfect equality is hard to define or sustain — but we allow the pendulum to swing back and forth between us,” she wrote in 2013, adding that they were looking forward to raising teenagers together.
“Fortunately, I have Dave to figure it out with me,” she wrote.
Children playing last week in Sandtown-Winchester, the Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray was raised. One young resident called it “a tough community.”
Harvey R. Miller, Renowned Bankruptcy Lawyer, Dies at 82
Mr. Miller, of the firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, represented companies including Lehman Brothers, General Motors and American Airlines, and mentored many of the top Chapter 11 practitioners today.
Dave Goldberg, Head of Web Survey Company and Half of a Silicon Valley Power Couple, Dies at 47
By VINDU GOEL and QUENTIN HARDY
Mr. Goldberg was a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist who was married to Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook.
Dave Goldberg, Head of Web Survey Company and Half of a Silicon Valley Power Couple, Dies at 47 | PAKET UMROH BULAN JANUARI 2016
François Michelin, Head of Tire Company, Dies at 88
Under Mr. Michelin’s leadership, which ended when he left the company in 2002, the Michelin Group became the world’s biggest tire maker, establishing a big presence in the United States and other major markets overseas.
Ex-C.I.A. Official Rebuts Republican Claims on Benghazi Attack in ‘The Great War of Our Time’
WASHINGTON — The former deputy director of the C.I.A. asserts in a forthcoming book that Republicans, in their eagerness to politicize the killing of the American ambassador to Libya, repeatedly distorted the agency’s analysis of events. But he also argues that the C.I.A. should get out of the business of providing “talking points” for administration officials in national security events that quickly become partisan, as happened after the Benghazi attack in 2012.
The official, Michael J. Morell, dismisses the allegation that the United States military and C.I.A. officers “were ordered to stand down and not come to the rescue of their comrades,” and he says there is “no evidence” to support the charge that “there was a conspiracy between C.I.A. and the White House to spin the Benghazi story in a way that would protect the political interests of the president and Secretary Clinton,” referring to the secretary of state at the time, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
But he also concludes that the White House itself embellished some of the talking points provided by the Central Intelligence Agency and had blocked him from sending an internal study of agency conclusions to Congress.
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Michael J. MorellCredit Mark Wilson/Getty Images
“I finally did so without asking,” just before leaving government, he writes, and after the White House released internal emails to a committee investigating the State Department’s handling of the issue.
A lengthy congressional investigation remains underway, one that many Republicans hope to use against Mrs. Clinton in the 2016 election cycle.
In parts of the book, “The Great War of Our Time” (Twelve), Mr. Morell praises his C.I.A. colleagues for many successes in stopping terrorist attacks, but he is surprisingly critical of other C.I.A. failings — and those of the National Security Agency.
Soon after Mr. Morell retired in 2013 after 33 years in the agency, President Obama appointed him to a commission reviewing the actions of the National Security Agency after the disclosures of Edward J. Snowden, a former intelligence contractor who released classified documents about the government’s eavesdropping abilities. Mr. Morell writes that he was surprised by what he found.
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“You would have thought that of all the government entities on the planet, the one least vulnerable to such grand theft would have been the N.S.A.,” he writes. “But it turned out that the N.S.A. had left itself vulnerable.”
He concludes that most Wall Street firms had better cybersecurity than the N.S.A. had when Mr. Snowden swept information from its systems in 2013. While he said he found himself “chagrined by how well the N.S.A. was doing” compared with the C.I.A. in stepping up its collection of data on intelligence targets, he also sensed that the N.S.A., which specializes in electronic spying, was operating without considering the implications of its methods.
“The N.S.A. had largely been collecting information because it could, not necessarily in all cases because it should,” he says.
Mr. Morell was a career analyst who rose through the ranks of the agency, and he ended up in the No. 2 post. He served as President George W. Bush’s personal intelligence briefer in the first months of his presidency — in those days, he could often be spotted at the Starbucks in Waco, Tex., catching up on his reading — and was with him in the schoolhouse in Florida on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when the Bush presidency changed in an instant.
Mr. Morell twice took over as acting C.I.A. director, first when Leon E. Panetta was appointed secretary of defense and then when retired Gen. David H. Petraeus resigned over an extramarital affair with his biographer, a relationship that included his handing her classified notes of his time as America’s best-known military commander.
Mr. Morell says he first learned of the affair from Mr. Petraeus only the night before he resigned, and just as the Benghazi events were turning into a political firestorm. While praising Mr. Petraeus, who had told his deputy “I am very lucky” to run the C.I.A., Mr. Morell writes that “the organization did not feel the same way about him.” The former general “created the impression through the tone of his voice and his body language that he did not want people to disagree with him (which was not true in my own interaction with him),” he says.
But it is his account of the Benghazi attacks — and how the C.I.A. was drawn into the debate over whether the Obama White House deliberately distorted its account of the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens — that is bound to attract attention, at least partly because of its relevance to the coming presidential election. The initial assessments that the C.I.A. gave to the White House said demonstrations had preceded the attack. By the time analysts reversed their opinion, Susan E. Rice, now the national security adviser, had made a series of statements on Sunday talk shows describing the initial assessment. The controversy and other comments Ms. Rice made derailed Mr. Obama’s plan to appoint her as secretary of state.
The experience prompted Mr. Morell to write that the C.I.A. should stay out of the business of preparing talking points — especially on issues that are being seized upon for “political purposes.” He is critical of the State Department for not beefing up security in Libya for its diplomats, as the C.I.A., he said, did for its employees.
But he concludes that the assault in which the ambassador was killed took place “with little or no advance planning” and “was not well organized.” He says the attackers “did not appear to be looking for Americans to harm. They appeared intent on looting and conducting some vandalism,” setting fires that killed Mr. Stevens and a security official, Sean Smith.
Mr. Morell paints a picture of an agency that was struggling, largely unsuccessfully, to understand dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa when the Arab Spring broke out in late 2011 in Tunisia. The agency’s analysts failed to see the forces of revolution coming — and then failed again, he writes, when they told Mr. Obama that the uprisings would undercut Al Qaeda by showing there was a democratic pathway to change.
“There is no good explanation for our not being able to see the pressures growing to dangerous levels across the region,” he writes. The agency had again relied too heavily “on a handful of strong leaders in the countries of concern to help us understand what was going on in the Arab street,” he says, and those leaders themselves were clueless.
Moreover, an agency that has always overvalued secretly gathered intelligence and undervalued “open source” material “was not doing enough to mine the wealth of information available through social media,” he writes. “We thought and told policy makers that this outburst of popular revolt would damage Al Qaeda by undermining the group’s narrative,” he writes.
Instead, weak governments in Egypt, and the absence of governance from Libya to Yemen, were “a boon to Islamic extremists across both the Middle East and North Africa.”
Mr. Morell is gentle about most of the politicians he dealt with — he expresses admiration for both Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama, though he accuses former Vice President Dick Cheney of deliberately implying a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq that the C.I.A. had concluded probably did not exist. But when it comes to the events leading up to the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq, he is critical of his own agency.
Mr. Morell concludes that the Bush White House did not have to twist intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s alleged effort to rekindle the country’s work on weapons of mass destruction.
“The view that hard-liners in the Bush administration forced the intelligence community into its position on W.M.D. is just flat wrong,” he writes. “No one pushed. The analysts were already there and they had been there for years, long before Bush came to office.”
Ex-C.I.A. Official Rebuts Republican Claims on Benghazi Attack in ‘The Great War of Our Time’ | PAKET UMROH BULAN JANUARI 2016
Ben E. King, Soulful Singer of ‘Stand by Me,’ Dies at 76
Mr. King sang for the Drifters and found success as a solo performer with hits like “Spanish Harlem.”
Mr. Bartoszewski was given honorary Israeli citizenship for his work to save Jews during World War II and later surprised even himself by being instrumental in reconciling Poland and Germany.
Finding Scandal in New York and New Jersey, but No Shame
From sea to shining sea, or at least from one side of the Hudson to the other, politicians you have barely heard of are being accused of wrongdoing. There were so many court proceedings involving public officials on Monday that it was hard to keep up.
In Newark, two underlings of Gov. Chris Christie were arraigned on charges that they were in on the truly deranged plot to block traffic leading onto the George Washington Bridge.
Ten miles away, in Lower Manhattan, Dean G. Skelos, the leader of the New York State Senate, and his son, Adam B. Skelos, were arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on accusations of far more conventional political larceny, involving a job with a sewer company for the son and commissions on title insurance and bond work.
The younger man managed to receive a 150 percent pay increase from the sewer company even though, as he said on tape, he “literally knew nothing about water or, you know, any of that stuff,” according to a criminal complaint the United States attorney’s office filed.
The bridge traffic caper is its own species of crazy; what distinguishes the charges against the two Skeloses is the apparent absence of a survival instinct. It is one thing not to know anything about water or that stuff. More remarkable, if true, is the fact that the sewer machinations continued even after the former New York Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, was charged in January with taking bribes disguised as fees.
It was by then common gossip in political and news media circles that Senator Skelos, a Republican, the counterpart in the Senate to Mr. Silver, a Democrat, in the Assembly, could be next in line for the criminal dock. “Stay tuned,” the United States attorney, Preet Bharara said, leaving not much to the imagination.
Even though the cat had been unmistakably belled, Skelos father and son continued to talk about how to advance the interests of the sewer company, though the son did begin to use a burner cellphone, the kind people pay for in cash, with no traceable contracts.
That was indeed prudent, as prosecutors had been wiretapping the cellphones of both men. But it would seem that the burner was of limited value, because by then the prosecutors had managed to secure the help of a business executive who agreed to record calls with the Skeloses. It would further seem that the business executive was more attentive to the perils of pending investigations than the politician.
Through the end of the New York State budget negotiations in March, the hopes of the younger Skelos rested on his father’s ability to devise legislation that would benefit the sewer company. That did not pan out. But Senator Skelos did boast that he had haggled with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, in a successful effort to raise a $150 million allocation for Long Island to $550 million, for what the budget called “transformative economic development projects.” It included money for the kind of work done by the sewer company.
The lawyer for Adam Skelos said he was not guilty and would win in court. Senator Skelos issued a ringing declaration that he was unequivocally innocent.
THIS was also the approach taken in New Jersey by Bill Baroni, a man of great presence and eloquence who stopped outside the federal courthouse to note that he had taken risks as a Republican by bucking his party to support paid family leave, medical marijuana and marriage equality. “I would never risk my career, my job, my reputation for something like this,” Mr. Baroni said. “I am an innocent man.”
The lawyer for his co-defendant, Bridget Anne Kelly, the former deputy chief of staff to Mr. Christie, a Republican, said that she would strongly rebut the charges.
Perhaps they had nothing to do with the lane closings. But neither Mr. Baroni nor Ms. Kelly addressed the question of why they did not return repeated calls from the mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., begging them to stop the traffic tie-ups, over three days.
That silence was a low moment. But perhaps New York hit bottom faster. Senator Skelos, the prosecutors charged, arranged to meet Long Island politicians at the wake of Wenjian Liu, a New York City police officer shot dead in December, to press for payments to the company employing his son.
Sometimes it seems as though for some people, the only thing to be ashamed of is shame itself.
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