Agen Tiket Pesawat di Kutai Hubungi 021-9929-2337 atau 0821-2406-5740 Alhijaz Indowisata adalah perusahaan swasta nasional yang bergerak di bidang tour dan travel. Nama Alhijaz terinspirasi dari istilah dua kota suci bagi umat islam pada zaman nabi Muhammad saw. yaitu Makkah dan Madinah. Dua kota yang penuh berkah sehingga diharapkan menular dalam kinerja perusahaan. Sedangkan Indowisata merupakan akronim dari kata indo yang berarti negara Indonesia dan wisata yang menjadi fokus usaha bisnis kami.
Agen Tiket Pesawat di Malang Hubungi 021-9929-2337 atau 0821-2406-5740 Alhijaz Indowisata adalah perusahaan swasta nasional yang bergerak di bidang tour dan travel. Nama Alhijaz terinspirasi dari istilah dua kota suci bagi umat islam pada zaman nabi Muhammad saw. yaitu Makkah dan Madinah. Dua kota yang penuh berkah sehingga diharapkan menular dalam kinerja perusahaan. Sedangkan Indowisata merupakan akronim dari kata indo yang berarti negara Indonesia dan wisata yang menjadi fokus usaha bisnis kami.
Agen Tiket Pesawat di Yogyakarta Hubungi 021-9929-2337 atau 0821-2406-5740 Alhijaz Indowisata adalah perusahaan swasta nasional yang bergerak di bidang tour dan travel. Nama Alhijaz terinspirasi dari istilah dua kota suci bagi umat islam pada zaman nabi Muhammad saw. yaitu Makkah dan Madinah. Dua kota yang penuh berkah sehingga diharapkan menular dalam kinerja perusahaan. Sedangkan Indowisata merupakan akronim dari kata indo yang berarti negara Indonesia dan wisata yang menjadi fokus usaha bisnis kami.
Agen Tiket Pesawat di Bandung Hubungi 021-9929-2337 atau 0821-2406-5740 Alhijaz Indowisata adalah perusahaan swasta nasional yang bergerak di bidang tour dan travel. Nama Alhijaz terinspirasi dari istilah dua kota suci bagi umat islam pada zaman nabi Muhammad saw. yaitu Makkah dan Madinah. Dua kota yang penuh berkah sehingga diharapkan menular dalam kinerja perusahaan. Sedangkan Indowisata merupakan akronim dari kata indo yang berarti negara Indonesia dan wisata yang menjadi fokus usaha bisnis kami.
Agen Tiket Pesawat di Pontianak Hubungi 021-9929-2337 atau 0821-2406-5740 Alhijaz Indowisata adalah perusahaan swasta nasional yang bergerak di bidang tour dan travel. Nama Alhijaz terinspirasi dari istilah dua kota suci bagi umat islam pada zaman nabi Muhammad saw. yaitu Makkah dan Madinah. Dua kota yang penuh berkah sehingga diharapkan menular dalam kinerja perusahaan. Sedangkan Indowisata merupakan akronim dari kata indo yang berarti negara Indonesia dan wisata yang menjadi fokus usaha bisnis kami.
Agen Tiket Pesawat di Samarinda Hubungi 021-9929-2337 atau 0821-2406-5740 Alhijaz Indowisata adalah perusahaan swasta nasional yang bergerak di bidang tour dan travel. Nama Alhijaz terinspirasi dari istilah dua kota suci bagi umat islam pada zaman nabi Muhammad saw. yaitu Makkah dan Madinah. Dua kota yang penuh berkah sehingga diharapkan menular dalam kinerja perusahaan. Sedangkan Indowisata merupakan akronim dari kata indo yang berarti negara Indonesia dan wisata yang menjadi fokus usaha bisnis kami.
Agen Tiket Pesawat di Palembang Hubungi 021-9929-2337 atau 0821-2406-5740 Alhijaz Indowisata adalah perusahaan swasta nasional yang bergerak di bidang tour dan travel. Nama Alhijaz terinspirasi dari istilah dua kota suci bagi umat islam pada zaman nabi Muhammad saw. yaitu Makkah dan Madinah. Dua kota yang penuh berkah sehingga diharapkan menular dalam kinerja perusahaan. Sedangkan Indowisata merupakan akronim dari kata indo yang berarti negara Indonesia dan wisata yang menjadi fokus usaha bisnis kami.
saco-indonesia.com, 400 Anggota gabungan TNI, Polri, dan Pemda DKI telah membersihkan gundukan lumpur yang terdapat di bagian sa
saco-indonesia.com, 400 Anggota gabungan TNI, Polri, dan Pemda DKI telah membersihkan gundukan lumpur yang terdapat di bagian samping gedung SMAN 8, Bukit Duri, Tebet, Jakarta Selatan. Gundukan lumpur setinggi sekitar 25 sentimeter tersebut telah dimasukkan ke dalam ribuan karung yang telah disiapkan.
Dandim Jakarta Selatan Letkol Infantri Ali Aminudin telah menuturkan lokasi tersebut juga merupakan salah satu daerah yang terparah terendam banjir di wilayah Tebet, Jakarta Selatan.
"Sudah 1.500 karung yang telah diangkut. Karya bakti bersama ini telah dilakukan di Jakarta Selatan terutama di sektor 1 yakni wilayah Tebet dan nanti di sektor 2 wilayah Pancoran," ujar Ali saat ditemui di lokasi, Senin (27/1).
Ali juga menambahkan, sejumlah alat berat pun juga dikerahkan guna untuk mengeruk lumpur yang menumpuk di kawasan itu. Lima unit mobil pemadam kebakaran digunakan untuk dapat membersihkan sisa lumpur.
"Setiap anggota menggunakan sekop untuk dapat memasukkan lumpur ke dalam karung, kemudian lumpur juga dikeruk dengan 2 unit loader dan diangkut oleh 3 unit truk. Dari pemadam kebakaran ada 5 unit," jelasnya.
Saat ini, masih ada ratusan karung yang menunggu untuk diangkut. Setelah mengangkut tumpukan lumpur, sisa lumpur dibersihkan dengan cara disiram dengan menggunakan mobil pemadam kebakaran.
"Sekarang tinggal finishing yaitu pembersihan dengan air. Tapi itu masih ada lumpur yang masih diangkut," ujar Ali seraya menunjuk tumpukan lumpur yang ada di dalam selokan air.
Editor : Dian Sukmawati
SEKITAR 222 SISWA JAKARTA TIDAK MENGIKUTI UN
TINGKAT SD
Dinas Pendidikan DKI Jakarta mencatat 99,86 persen atau 153.009 siswa di ibu kota
mengikuti Ujian Nasional (UN) tingkat Sekolah
Dinas Pendidikan DKI Jakarta mencatat 99,86
persen atau 153.009 siswa di ibu kota mengikuti Ujian Nasional (UN) tingkat Sekolah Dasar (SD)
dan sederajat. Dari total keseluruhan yaitu 15.231 siswa, sebanyak 222 siswa atau 0,14 persen
tidak mengikuti UN hari pertama.
Untuk siswa Madrasah Ibtidaiyah (MI),
sebanyak 12.317 siswa (99,63 persen) hadir dan 45 siswa (0,37 persen) tidak hadir. Sementara
untuk siswa SD Luar Biasa (SDLB), kehadiran mencapai 100 persen, yaitu dengan total 123 siswa.
"Pelaksanaan UN untuk tingkat SD dan sederajat di Jakarta pada hari pertama
berjalan lancar. Sebanyak 99,86 persen siswa hadir," kata Kepala Dinas Pendidikan (Disdik)
DKI Jakarta, Taufik Yudi Mulyanto, di Jakarta, Senin (6/5/2013).
"Berdasarkan data kami, dari total 222 siswa atau 0,14 persen yang tidak mengikuti ujian
hari ini, sebanyak 10 siswa tercatat tidak hadir karena meninggal dunia," ujar Taufik.
Taufik mengungkapkan pihaknya juga mencatat sebanyak 33 siswa tidak hadir dengan
alasan sakit, 105 siswa tanpa keterangan, dan 74 siswa terdaftar sebagai siswa inklusi.
Menurut Taufik, pihaknya memberikan kesempatan bagi siswa-siswa yang tidak hadir pada
hari pertama pelaksanaan UN, untuk mengikuti ujian susulan.
"Minggu
depan, rencananya, kami akan mengadakan ujian susulan dengan mata pelajaran yang sama untuk
seluruh siswa yang tidak sempat mengikuti ujian hari ini. Jadi, siswa tidak perlu khawatir,"
ungkap Taufik.
Berdasarkan data Disdik DKI Jakarta, pada hari pertama UN,
sebanyak 140.614 siswa SD (99,87 persen) mengikuti ujian dan 177 (0,13 persen) siswa tidak
hadir.
edukasi.kompas.com
ARAB JAHILIYAH BERHAJI?
Sebelum kedatangan Islam, masyarakat Arab pra-lslam atau lebih dikenal dengan Arab Jahiliyah melakukan banyak penyelewengan terh
Sebelum kedatangan Islam, masyarakat Arab pra-lslam atau lebih dikenal dengan Arab Jahiliyah melakukan banyak penyelewengan terhadap ajaran-ajaran Nabi Ibrahim AS Dengan maksud menghindari bulan Muharram. Di bulan itu, mereka dilarang berperang.
Masyarakat Arab Jahiliyah melakukan modifikasi terhadap sistem penanggalan mereka. Mereka menggunakan penghitungan bulan dengan sistem penggeseran, sehingga bulan Dzulhijjah bergeser ke bulan Muharram, Muharram bergeser ke Safar, dan seterusnya. Dengan begitu, pelaksanaan ibadah haji berubah-ubah setiap tahun. Jika tahun ini haji dilaksanakan pada bulan Muharram atau mereka menyebutnya Safar Awal, misalnya, maka tahun berikutnya haji dilakukan pada bulan Safar atau mereka sebut Safar Tsani, demikian seterusnya.
Pada zaman Jahiliyah, jamaah haji terbagi menjadi dua kelas sosial, yaitu masyarakat non-pedagang dan masyarakat pedagang. Jamaah haji dari kalangan pedagang harus pergi meninggalkan kampung halaman mereka satu bulan atau lebih sebelum musim haji dimulai.
Hal itu ditujukan agar mereka dapat berdagang di Pasar Ukaz selama dua puluh hari. Dari sana, mereka pindah ke Pasar Majnah dan berjualan selama sepuluh hari. Setelah tampak hilal (bulan yang muncul pada setiap tanggai satu) bulan Dzulhijjah, Pasar Majnah ditutup dan mereka bergerak ke kawasan Dzul Majaz untuk berniaga. Di tempat tersebut mereka menetap selama 8 hari. Baru pada Hari Tarwiyah (8 Dzulhijjah) mereka pergi ke Arafah untuk melakukan wukuf.
Lain halnya dengan jamaah haji pedagang, mereka bertolak dari tempat tinggal mereka pada Hari Tarwiyah dan langsung melaksanakan wukuf. Sebagian dari mereka mengerjakan wukuf di Padang Arafah dan sebagian yang lain melakukannya di Namirah, yaitu sebuah daerah yang terletak di tapal batas Tanah Haram.
Sebelum malam, mereka beranjak menuju Muzdalifah. Baru keesokan harinya para jamaah haji non-pedagang itu bergerak menuju Mina. Dari Mina, mereka akan menuju ke Makkah untuk melaksanakan thawaf.
Sejumlah suku Arab pada masa Jahiliyah menetapkan suatu aturan bagi jamaah haji yang pertama kali melakukan ritual tersebut, yaitu menanggalkan seluruh pakaian yang mereka kenakan. Alasannya, pakaian tersebut tidak suci sehingga tidak pantas dikenakan dalam ritual haji. Itu sebabnya, para jamaah haji tersebut melakukan thawaf dengan telanjang bulat.
Namun demikian, aturan tersebut hanya berlaku bagi masyarakat kelas bawah. Orang-orang yang berasal dari kelas sosial menengah ke atas diperbolehkan mengenakan pakaian selama melakukan thawaf meski mereka juga baru pertama menunaikan haji. Akan tetapi, selesai melakukan thawaf pakaian tersebut harus dibuang dan tidak boleh digunakan lagi.
Dalam rangkaian kegiatan haji yang dilakukan oleh masyarakat Arab Jahiliyah, terdapat unsur-unsur tertentu yang menyerupai tuntunan haji yang diajarkan oleh Nabi Ibrahim AS dan Ismail AS. Ini menjadi bukti bahwa masyarakat Arab Jahiliyah sebenarnya masih mempertahankan sebagian ajaran Nabi Ibrahim AS.
Jasa rental mobil menjelang Lebaran kebanjiran order. Pemilik jasa rental mobil, Gunawan (40) juga mengaku semua mobil yang ada
Jasa rental mobil menjelang Lebaran kebanjiran order. Pemilik jasa rental mobil, Gunawan (40) juga mengaku semua mobil yang ada telah dipesan.
"Semua mobil sudah dipesan tinggal diambil para penyewanya saja. Biasanya seminggu sebelum Lebaran sudah dibawa," ujarnya.
Menurut Gunawan, kendati tarif sewa mobil naik hingga 300% dibanding hari biasanya, namun permintaan tetap tinggi.
Dikatakan, larisnya usaha jasa rental karena masyarakat kini lebih mengutamakan kenyamanan. Mudik menggunakan motor sangat tidak aman apalagi dengan keluarga yang membawa anak kecil.
Selain itu, masyarakat enggan menggunakan angkutan umum yang berdesak-desakan. Maka dari itulah pilihan favorit adalah mudik dengan menggunakan mobil.
Lebaran tahun ini, dia juga menyiapkan sebanyak 30 unit mobil yang siap disewakan. Sedangkan harga yang diberikan, menurutnya memiliki kriteria tertentu dan sistem paket.
Pihaknya menerapkan sistem paket. Kalau biasanya Kijang Innova sewanya Rp 350 ribu sehari. Untuk Lebaran dinaikkan menjadi Rp 6,5 juta rupiah untuk paket satu minggu.
Sementara untuk Daihatsu Xenia dari Rp 200 ribu menjadi Rp 300 ribu per hari, Avanza dari Rp 250 ribu menjadi Rp 750 ribu per hari, Mitsubishi L300 dari Rp 500 ribu menjadi Rp 1,5 juta per hari, Pregio dari Rp 600 ribu menjadi Rp 1,2 juta per hari.
Gunawan juga menyediakan hampir semua jenis mobil seperti Innova, Xenia, Avanza, Panther, Kijang LGX, Suzuki APV, Pregio hingga Mitsubishi L300.
Pengelola rental mobil lainnya, Lukman Hadi (30) di kawasan Tlogosari mengatakan, harga sewa yang biasanya harian berubah menjadi paket. "Jadi sudah tidak ada lagi sewa harian tapi paket dalam seminggu," ujarnya.
Menjelang Lebaran tahun ini, kendaraan yang tersedia sudah habis dipesan hingga H+7 Lebaran. Pemesanan sudah dilakukan sejak awal bulan puasa.
Bahkan, ada konsumen yang melakukan order sebulan sebelum puasa. Dibanding hari biasa lonjakan pengguna mobil sewaan sangat tinggi, "Kalau bulan biasa paling sehari cuma tiga unit mobil terpakai, sekarang semua unit habis dirental orang," ujarnya.
KALIBRASI BATERAI LAPTOP AGAR BATRAI TAHAN LAMA
Hai Sobat Blogger thukan Anda dengan Kalibrasi Baterai Laptop bisa menghemat Batrai Laptop kita. Jika dulu ada beberapa lapt
Hai Sobat Blogger thukan Anda dengan Kalibrasi Baterai Laptop bisa menghemat Batrai Laptop kita. Jika dulu ada beberapa laptop yang memiliki aplikasi untuk melakukan kalibrasi baterai. Namun kini hampir tidak ada vendor laptop yang menyediakannya. Padahal fasilitas ini lumayan penting agar kemampuan baterai tetap prima. Walaupun aplikasi bawaan tersebut tidak lagi disertakan, kamu masih bisa melakukan kalibrasi manual. Bagaimana caranya:
Cara Kalibrasi Baterai Laptop adalah sebagai berikut:
1. Buatlah sebuah profil daya baru dengan menjalankan Control Panel melalui menu Start > Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options.
2. Klik Create a power plan pada panel kiri jendela.
3. Beri nama Calibration pada kolom Plan name.
4. Pada semua opsi yang tersedia, pilih Never dan klik tombol Create.
5. Sekarang, aktifkan profil daya yang telah dibuat dan isi ulang notebook sampai 100%.
6. Setelah baterai terisi penuh, cabut catu daya dan biarkan notebook idle. Saat baterai hampir habis dan minta diisi ulang, abaikan perintah tersebut. Biarkan sampai notebook mati kehabisan daya.
7. Jika proses di atas berhasil dilalui, berarti kamu sudah berhasil mengalibrasi baterai notebook. Silakan charge kembali dan gunakan seperti biasa.
selamat mencoba...Semoga BIsa Irit Batrai tanpa beli lagi kaya saya heheheh mantap Komenya ya hehhehe
JUAL OBAT BIUS OBAT TIDUR
Jual Obat Tidur / Jual Obat Bius Cair Jual Obat Bius Hirup Jual Obat Bius Serbuk Jual Obat Tidur Aman Obat Bius Manjur Harga Oba
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Pemesanan dan Konsultasi
Pin BB: 21C7DA51
TELPON / SMS:
085 200 654 999 (T-SEL)
087 836 866 999 (IND XL)
085 740 740 810 (INDOSAT)
Www.jualobatbiusherbal.blogspot.com
Online 24Hours
Kami Buka & Melayani Konsomen 24jam.
Termasuk Hari Sabtu & Minggu
Obat Bius/Obat Tidur Merk Liquid Sex
LiQuid Sex adalah Obat Bius Yang Berbentuk Cair, Cair Buatan German Ini Bisa bikin Wanita Langsung Pingsan Dalam Beberapa Menit Saja ( 2-3 Menit ).
Dan itu Walau Anda apa - apain pun Target Anda gak bakalan bangun Selama 4 - 5 jam, kadang lebih, selain itu bisa juga untuk membius orang yang mau diperkosa ( gue cuma ngomongin, bukan nyuruh Lo ! Hhehe ... ).
Obat Bius Ini Berbentuk Cair tidak berbau,
tidak berasa, tidak berwarna Dan tidak beracun, ( So It Safely ).
1 botol bisa di pakai untuk berkali kali, cukup ditaruh di air minum apa saja kecuali susu dan air kelapa muda , lebih baik dalam air mineral, teh, jus, sirup atau di minuman yang bersoda.
dan dalam waktu 2 - 3 menit setelah di minum maka langsung bereaksi pada target anda seperti tepar dan terkapar .
AWAS ! ! ! .Tolong Jangan gunakan Obat Bius Cair ini pada orang yang baru dikenal atau penyalah gunaan obat ini.
Baik di gunakan untuk Teman Dekat atau Pacar Sendiri …..
LiQuid Sex Obat Bius Cair .
NEGARA ASAL : German
Netto : 15ml
HARGA : Rp 250.000, -
"Dan Juga Tersedia Produc-Produc Terbaik"
Jual Obat Tidur / Jual Obat Bius Cair Jual Obat Bius Hirup Jual Obat Bius Serbuk Jual Obat Tidur Aman Obat Bius Manjur Harga Obat Bius Murah Cs :085200654999
CHLOROFORM FOR SALE
DIJUAL OBAT BIUS KLOROFORM! HARGA TERBARU CEK ! Permisi agan-agan, saya menjual OBAT BIUS chloroform (trichloromethane / CHCl3) buatan Merck Jerman. Botolnya 2,5 Liter, ane biasanya pake buat pelarut organik di lab. Punya saya kemurniannya diatas 99%! Dan ini merupakan kloroform termurni yang dibikin buat pasar, jadi jangan tanya "gan apa ada campurannya?" dll, ini sudah laboratory grade / standar laboratorium dan dibikin buat standar penelitian. Jadi bukan kloroform abal-abal murahan yang dicampuri,
dll. Lihat aja gambarnya ya!
Chloroform ini bisa digunakan untuk ekstraksi (misalkan alkaloid, dan zat-zat organik lainnya) mungkin yang jurusan biologi / kimia / farmasi, selain itu bisa juga membius orang yang mau diperkosa (gue cuma ngomongin, bukan nyuruh lo! hehe), trus juga bisa buat keperluan rekreasi (nidurin diri di malam hari). Ingat, ini bukan permainan. Sekali dua kali boleh aja pake, jangan keterusan.
Chloroform bukan dimakan, tapi dihirup uapnya. Ane prihatin di kaskus ada seller yang mengatakan chloroform dapat dimakan. 10 ml sudah cukup untuk menimbulkan cardiac arrest / henti jantung pada manusia 70 kg.
Thanks
UNTUK 50, 100 ML HARGA SUDAH NETT, 500 ML, 1000 ML, 2500 ML BISA NEGO dan BELUM ONGKIR, pertanyaan mengenai "berapa harga nett gan?" tidak akan dibalas. Mohon maaf.
50 ml = Rp 750.000,-
100 ml = Rp 1300.000,-
500 ml = Rp 3.250.000,-
1000 ml = Rp 6.000.000,-
Botol 2,5 Liter SEGEL Pure Analysis Merck Germany = Rp 12.000.000,- (murah abis reseller!)
"Dan Juga Tersedia Produc-Produc Terbaik" Jual Obat Tidur / Jual Obat Bius Cair Jual Obat Bius Hirup Jual Obat Bius Serbuk Jual Obat Tidur Aman Obat Bius Manjur Harga Obat Bius Murah Cs :085200654999
Obat Bius Serbuk Soporific
Jual Obat Bius Serbuk, Serbuk Ini Bisa bikin ( PINGSAN ) Dalam Beberapa Detik Saja,
Dan itu Walau Anda apa - apain pun Target Anda gak bakalan bangun Selama 4 - 5 jam, kadang lebih, selain itu bisa juga untuk membius orang yang mau diperkosa ( gue cuma ngomongin, bukan nyuruh Lo ! Hhehe ... )
Obat Bius Ini Berbentuk Serbuk tidak berbau,
tidak berasa, tapi berwarna ( putih Aman ).
1 saset bisa di pakai cukup untuk 2 - 3 kali pemakaian, cukup ditaruh di air minum apa saja KECUALI SUSU & KELAPA MUDA ,dan dalam waktu singkat setelah di minum maka obat itu langsung bereaksi pada target anda .
AWAS ! ! ! .Tolong Jangan gunakan Obat Bius Serbuk ini pada orang yang baru dikenal atau penyalah gunaan obat ini.
Baik di gunakan untuk Teman Dekat atau Pacar Sendiri …..
Obat Bius Serbuk 1 Paket Isi 4 Sachet Harga : Rp 300.000,-
Tersedia Produk Terbaik
Agen Tempat Penjualan Obat Tidur Dan Obat Bius, Obat Tidur Wanita,
saco-indonesia.com, Perayaan Cap Go Meh di Palembang tidak akan serentak dengan daerah lain. Pasalnya, Cap Go Meh di kota ini du
saco-indonesia.com, Perayaan Cap Go Meh di Palembang tidak akan serentak dengan daerah lain. Pasalnya, Cap Go Meh di kota ini dua hari lebih cepat karena permintaan dari dewa.
Wakil Matrisia Komda Sumsel yang juga merupakan generasi kedua pengurus perayaan Cap Go Meh Pulau Kemaro, Tjik Harun juga mengakui perayaan Cap Go Meh biasanya digelar setiap tanggal 15 pascaperayaan Imlek.
"Cap Go Meh di Palembang tanggal 13 Imlek atau 12 Februari besok. Selain sudah jadi tradisi, dipercepat ini karena permintaan dari dewa," ungkapnya kepada merdeka.com, Selasa (11/2).
Namun, Harun juga tidak menjelaskan lebih rinci alasan permintaan dewa itu. Dirinya hanya menjelaskan akal sehat manusia tidak akan mengerti maksud tersebut. "Kita syukuri saja lebih cepat. Ini berkah bagi kita karena bisa merayakan Cap Go Meh di tempat lain," kata dia.
Menurut dia, Cap Go Meh telah menjadi salah satu tujuan utama etnis Tionghoa di Indonesia, bahkan di dunia. Sebab, perayaannya lebih meriah dan beragam kegiatan digelar. "Di Indonesia, hanya Palembang dan Pontianak yang selalu ramai saat Cap Go Meh," tukasnya.
Editor : Dian Sukmawati
William Sokolin, Wine Seller Who Broke Famed Bottle, Dies at 85
The bottle Mr. Sokolin famously broke was a 1787 Château Margaux, which was said to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Mr. Sokolin had been hoping to sell it for $519,750.
Ben Carson Says He’ll Seek 2016 G.O.P. Nomination
ate in February, Dr. Ben Carson, the celebrated pediatric neurosurgeon turned political insurrectionist, was trying to check off another box on his presidential-campaign to-do list: hiring a press secretary. The lead prospect, a public-relations specialist named Deana Bass, had come to meet him at the dimly lit Capitol Hill office of Carson’s confidant and business manager, Armstrong Williams. Carson sat back and scrutinized her from behind a small granite table, as life-size cardboard cutouts of more conventional politicians — President Obama, with a tight smile, and Senator John McCain, glowering — loomed behind each of his shoulders. (The mock $3 bill someone had left on a table in Williams’s waiting room undercut any notion that this was a bipartisan zone; it featured Obama wearing a turban.)
Bass seemed momentarily speechless, and not just because no one had warned her that a New York Times reporter would be sitting in on her job interview. Though she knew Williams — a jack-of-all-trades entrepreneur who owns several television stations and a public-affairs business and who hosts a daily talk-radio show — through Washington’s small circle of black conservatives, the two hadn’t spoken in years until he called her two days earlier. He had been struggling to come up with the perfect national spokesperson, he told her. Then, at the gym, her name popped into his head; Williams was fairly certain she was the one. Sitting across from a likely candidate for president, Bass was adjusting to the idea that her life might be about to take a sudden chaotic turn.
“It’s like getting the most random call on a Monday that you simply do not see coming,” she said. “Oftentimes, that is how the Lord works.”
His life in brain surgery
has prepared him for the
presidency, he maintains,
better than lives in
politics have for his rivals.
Carson concurred: “It’s always how he works in my life.” Carson is soft-spoken and often talks with his eyes half closed, frequently punctuating his sentences with a small laugh, even if the humor of his statement is not readily apparent. Bass told Carson that she had been a Republican staff member on Capitol Hill then worked for the Republican National Committee. In 2007 she started a Christian public-relations firm with her sister. She enjoyed working on the Hill, she said, but the pay wasn’t as high as the hours were long. “We figured that we worked like slaves for other people, and we wanted to work for ourselves.”
Carson stopped her. “You know you can’t mention that word, right?” Carson waited a beat, then laughed, and Williams and Bass joined in. He was getting to the point; he needed a professional who could help him check his penchant for creating uncontrolled controversy just by talking.
The Ben Carson movement began in 2013, when Carson, a neurosurgeon, whose operating-room prowess and up-from-poverty back story had made him the subject of a television movie and a regular on the inspirational-speaking circuit, was invited to address the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. With Barack Obama sitting just two seats away, Carson warned that “moral decay” and “fiscal irresponsibility” could destroy America just as it did ancient Rome. He proposed a substitute for Obamacare — Health Savings Accounts, which, he said, would end any talk of “death panels” — and a flat-tax based on the concept of tithing. His address, combined with the president’s stony reaction, was a smash with Republican activists. Speaking and interview requests flooded in. Carson, then 61, announced his planned retirement a few weeks later, freeing his calendar to accept just about all of them. In the months that followed, his rhetoric became increasingly strident. The claim that drew the most attention, perhaps, was that Obamacare was “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”
Bass’s own use of the word prompted Carson to ask her what she thought about that incident. She considered for a moment.
“If you want to reach people and have them even understand what you’re saying, there is a way to do it, without that hyperbole, that might be. . . . ” She paused. “I just think it’s important not to shut people off before they —”
Carson jumped in. “That doesn’t allow them to hear what you’re saying?”
Bass nodded.
Likening Obamacare to slavery — and slavery was incomparably worse, Carson said — had its political advantages for a candidacy like his. It was the kind of statement that stoked the angriest of the Republican voters: conservative stalwarts who can’t hear enough bad things about Obama. This, in turn, led to more talk-radio and Fox News appearances, more book sales, more donations to the super PAC started in his name, more support in the polls. (The day before the meeting, one poll of Republican voters showed Carson statistically tied for first place with Jeb Bush and Scott Walker.)
Rhetorical excess was good for business, but Carson now wants to be seen as more than a novelty candidate. He has come to learn that such extreme analogies, while true to his views, aren’t especially presidential. They alienate more moderate voters and, perhaps even more damaging, reinforce the impression that he is not “serious” — that he is another Herman Cain, the black former Godfather’s Pizza chief executive who rose to the top of the early presidential polls in 2011 but then bowed out before the Iowa caucuses, largely because of leaked allegations of sexual misconduct, which he denied but from which he never recovered. Cain lingers as a cautionary tale for the party as much as for a right-leaning candidate like Carson. The fact that Cain, with his folksy sayings (“shucky ducky”) and misnomers (“Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan”), reached the top of the national polls — much less that he was eventually followed there by the likes of Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, who all topped one or another poll in the 2012 primary season — wound up being a considerable embarrassment for the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, and for the longtime party regulars who were trying to fast-track his way to the nomination.
Carson liked Bass and, without directly saying so, made it clear the job was hers for the taking. Carson’s campaign chairman, Terry Giles — a white lawyer whose clients have included the comedian Richard Pryor and the stepson of the model Anna Nicole Smith and who helped reconcile the business interests of the descendants of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — had assembled a mostly white campaign team, including many from the 2012 Gingrich effort, and Carson wanted a person of color to speak for him. Bass said she would have to mull it over, pray about it. Carson nodded approvingly. “Pray about it,” he said. “See what you think.”
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Williams knew the party was intent on protecting the eventual 2016 nominee from the same embarrassment Romney suffered. Already, suspiciously tough articles about Carson were showing up in conservative magazines and on right-wing websites. “They’re protecting these establishment candidates,” Williams said. “This is coming from within the house. This is family.” At the very least, he wanted to make sure that Carson didn’t do their work for them. (Carson would commit another unforced error a week later, when he told CNN that homosexuality was clearly a choice, because a lot of people go in prison straight and “when they come out, they’re gay”; he later apologized.)
“We need somebody to protect him, sometimes, from himself,” he told Bass — laughing, but only half kidding.
A candidacy like Carson’s presents a new kind of problem to the establishment wing of the G.O.P., which, at least since 1980, has selected its presidential nominees with a routine efficiency that Democrats could only envy. The establishment candidate has usually been a current or former governor or senator, blandly Protestant, hailing from the moderate, big-business wing of the party (or at least friendly with it) and almost always a second-, third- or fourth-time national contender — someone who had waited “his turn.” These candidates would tack predictably to the right during the primaries to satisfy the evangelicals, deficit hawks, libertarian leaners and other inconvenient but vital constituents who made up the “base” of the party. In return, the base would, after a brief flirtation with some fantasy candidate like Steve Forbes or Pat Buchanan, “hold their noses” and deliver their votes come November. This bargain was always tenuous, of course, and when some of the furthest-right activists turned against George W. Bush, citing (among other apostasies) his expansion of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit, it began to fall apart. After Barack Obama defeated McCain in 2008, the party’s once dependable base started to reconsider the wisdom of holding their noses at all.
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Republican candidates at a pre-straw-poll debate, held at Iowa State University in 2011.Credit Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
This insurgent attitude was helped along by changes in the nomination rules. In 2010, the Republican National Committee, hoping to capture the excitement of the coast-to-coast Democratic primary competition between Obama and Hillary Clinton, introduced new voting rules that required many of the early voting states to award some delegates to losing candidates, based on their shares of the vote. The proportional voting rules would encourage struggling candidates to stay in the primaries even after successive losses, as Clinton did, because they might be able to pull together enough delegates to take the nomination in a convention-floor fight or at least use them to bargain for a prime speaking slot or cabinet post.
This shift in incentives did not go unnoticed by potential 2012 candidates, nor did changes in election law that allowed billionaire donors to form super PACs in support of pet candidacies. At the same time, increasingly widespread broadband Internet access allowed candidates to reach supporters directly with video and email appeals and supporters to send money with the tap of a smartphone, making it easier than ever for individual candidates to ignore the wishes of the party.
Into this newly chaotic Republican landscape strode Mitt Romney. There could be no doubt that it was his turn, and yet his journey to the nomination was interrupted by one against-the-odds challenger after another — Cain, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul; always Ron Paul. It was easy to dismiss the 2012 primaries as a meaningless circus, but the onslaught did much more than tarnish the overall Republican brand. It also forced Romney to spend money he could have used against Obama and defend his right flank with embarrassing pandering that shadowed him through the general election. It was while trying to block a surge from Gingrich, for instance, that Romney told a debate audience that he was for the “self-deportation” of undocumented immigrants.
At the 2012 convention in Tampa, a group of longtime party hands, including Romney’s lawyer, Ben Ginsberg, gathered to discuss how to prevent a repeat of what had become known inside and outside the party as the “clown show.” Their aim was not just to protect the party but also to protect a potential President Romney from a primary challenge in 2016. They forced through new rules that would give future presumptive nominees more control over delegates in the event of a convention fight. They did away with the mandatory proportional delegate awards that encouraged long-shot candidacies. And, in a noticeably targeted effort, they raised the threshold that candidates needed to meet to enter their names into nomination, just as Ron Paul’s supporters were working to reach it. When John A. Boehner gaveled the rules in on a voice vote — a vote that many listeners heard as a tie, if not an outright loss — the hall erupted and a line of Ron Paul supporters walked off the floor in protest, along with many Tea Party members.
At a party meeting last winter, Reince Priebus, who as party chairman is charged with maintaining the support of all his constituencies, did restore some proportional primary and caucus voting, but only in states that held voting within a shortened two-week window. And he also condensed the nominating schedule to four and a half months from six months, and, for the first time required candidates to participate in a shortened debate schedule, determined by the party, not by the whims of the networks. (The panel that recommended those changes included names closely identified with the establishment — the former Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, the Mississippi committeeman Haley Barbour and, notably, Jeb Bush’s closest adviser, Sally Bradshaw.)
Grass-roots activists have complained that the condensed schedule robs nonestablishment candidates — “movement candidates” like Carson — of the extra time they need to build momentum, money and organizations. But Priebus, who says the nomination could be close to settled by April, said it helped all the party’s constituencies when the nominee was decided quickly. “We don’t need a six-month slice-and-dice festival,” Priebus said when we spoke in mid-March. “While I can’t always control everyone’s mouth, I can control how long we can kill each other.”
All the rules changes were built to sidestep the problems of 2012. But the 2016 field is shaping up to be vastly different and far larger. A new Republican hints that he or she is considering a run seemingly every week. There are moderates like Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and former Gov. George Pataki of New York; no-compromise conservatives like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania; business-wingers like the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina; one-of-a-kinds like Donald Trump — some 20 in all, a dozen or so who seem fairly serious about it. That opens the possibility of multiple candidates vying for all the major Republican constituencies, some of them possibly goaded along by super-PAC-funding billionaires, all of them trading wins and collecting delegates well into spring.
Giles says his candidate can capitalize on all that chaos. Rivals may laugh, but Giles argues that if Carson can make a respectable showing in Iowa, then win in South Carolina — or at least come in second should a home-state senator, Lindsey Graham, run — and come in second behind Bush or Senator Marco Rubio in their home state of Florida, he could be positioned to make a real run. But that would depend on avoiding pitfalls like Carson’s ill-considered comments on homosexuality. Rather than capitalizing on the chaos, Carson may only contribute to it.
Ben Carson is, in many ways, the ideal Republican presidential candidate. With a not-too-selective reading of his life story, conservative voters can — and do — see in him an inspiring, up-from-nowhere African-American who shares their beliefs, a right-wing answer to Barack Obama. Before he was born, his parents moved to Detroit from rural Tennessee as part of the second great migration. His father, Robert Solomon Carson, worked at a Cadillac factory. His mother, Sonya — who herself had grown up as one of 24 children and left school at third grade — cleaned houses. When Carson was 8, Sonya discovered that Robert was keeping a second family. She moved, with her two sons, into a rundown group house. It was in a part of town that Carson described to me as crawling with “big rats and roaches and all kinds of horrible things.” Sonya worked several jobs at a time and made up the shortfall with food stamps. (Carson has called for paring back the social safety net but not doing away with it.)
Carson recounts this story in his best-selling 1990 memoir, “Gifted Hands,” which also became the basis for a 2009 movie on TNT, starring Cuba Gooding Jr. as Carson. Raised as a Seventh Day Adventist, Carson realized that he wanted to become a physician during a church sermon about a missionary doctor who, while serving overseas, was almost attacked by thieves but found safety by putting his faith in God. When Carson, then 8, told his mother his new dream, “She said, ‘Absolutely, you could do it, you could do anything,’ ” he told me. Forced by his mother to read two extra books a week, he made it to Yale, then to medical school at the University of Michigan, where he decided to specialize in neurosurgery. He was selected for residency at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, where he was named director of pediatric neurosurgery at 33, becoming the youngest person, and the first black person, to hold the title. He drew national attention by conducting a succession of operations that had never been performed successfully, most famously planning and managing the first separation of conjoined twins connected through major blood vessels in the brain.
Carson, a two-time Jimmy Carter voter, traces his conservative political awakening to a patient he met during the Reagan years. During a routine obstetrics rotation, he found himself treating an unwed pregnant teenager who had run away from her well-to-do parents. When Carson asked her how she was getting by, she informed him she was on public assistance; this led him to ponder the fact that the government was paying for the result of what he did not view as a “wise decision.” The incident, he says, fed his growing sense that the welfare system too often saps motivation and rewards irresponsible behavior. (When we spoke, he suggested that the government should cut off assistance to would-be unwed mothers, but only after warning them that it would do so within a certain amount of time, say five years. “I bet you’d see a dramatic decrease in unwed motherhood.”)
Carson’s friends at Hopkins say they do not remember him being particularly outspoken about his conservatism. He devoted most of his public engagement to urging poor kids in bad neighborhoods to use “these fancy brains God gave us,” through weekly school visits, student hospital tours and, ultimately, a multimillion-dollar scholarship program. “His issues were always medical care for the poor, education for the poor, equal opportunity — helping the less fortunate and really inspiring them as an example,” a mentor who named him to the chief pediatrics-neurosurgery post at Hopkins, Dr. Donlin Long, told me.
Even when Carson got the chance, in 1997, to speak in front of President Bill Clinton, at the national prayer breakfast, he mostly discussed the lack of role models for black children who were not sports stars or rappers. (There was possibly an oblique reference to Clinton’s sex scandals, when he told the audience that, if they are always honest, they won’t have to worry later about “skeletons in the closet.”)
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Ben Carson at CPAC on Feb. 26 in Oxon Hill, Md.Credit Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times
In 2011, Carson’s politics took a strident turn, mirroring that of many in his party during the Obama years. “America the Beautiful,” his sixth book, which he wrote with Candy Carson, his wife of 39 years, included a get-tough-on-illegal-immigration message and offered anti-establishment praise for the Tea Party. It suggested that blacks who voted for Obama only because he was black were themselves practicing a form of racism. (Earlier this year he admitted to Buzzfeed that portions of the book were lifted directly from several sources without proper attribution.) His prayer-breakfast performance in 2013, and the extremity of his remarks in the months afterward (Obamacare is the worst thing since slavery; the United States is “very much like Nazi Germany”; allowing same-sex marriage could lead to allowing bestiality), left some of his old friends bewildered. Students at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine protested his planned convocation address there in 2013, and he eventually backed out. When I asked Carson about the view at Hopkins that he had changed, he said his themes are still the same: “hard work, self-reliance, helping other people.” If he had become more overtly political, he said, it was only because the Obama years had led him to believe that “we’re really moving in a direction that is very, very destructive.”
None of this went unnoticed by campaign professionals. In August 2013, John Philip Sousa IV and Vernon Robinson, each of whom professes to be a virtual stranger to Carson, and who had previously been active in the anti-illegal-immigration movement, started the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee. Sousa was just coming off a campaign to defend the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, Joe Arpaio, from a recall effort, and he told me that he found Carson’s lack of political experience refreshing. “We have 500 guys and gals with probably a collective 5,000 years experience, and look at the mess we’re in,” he said.
Many others in the party feel the same way. Carson’s PAC finished 2014 with more than $13 million in donations, more than Ready for Hillary. Much of its money has gone toward further fund-raising, but Sousa — the great-grandson of the famous composer — points out that their effort has already built far more than just a war chest, organizing leaders in all 99 of Iowa’s counties. Regardless, Carson credits the fund-raising success of Sousa and Robinson with persuading him to enter the race.
Very early the morning after the job interview, Carson was in a black S.U.V., heading from Washington to the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Md., where he was to give the opening candidate speech of the Conservative Political Action Conference. The event, which functions as an early tryout for Republican presidential contenders, tends to skew rightward in its audience, drawing many of the same sorts of people who shouted at Boehner in Tampa. As such, it tends to favor anti-establishment candidates, but the news leading up to this year’s event was that Jeb Bush hoped to make inroads there.
It was still dark when we set out, and I joked with Carson about the hour, telling him he’d better get used to it. He retorted that his career in pediatric brain surgery made him no stranger to early mornings. This is a big theme of Carson’s presidential pitch: that neither the rigors of the campaign nor those of the White House can faze a man who held children’s lives in his hands. His life in brain surgery has prepared him for the presidency, he maintains, better than lives in politics have for his rivals. At the very least, he says, it conditioned him against getting too worked up about any problem that isn’t life threatening. “I mean, it’s grueling, but interestingly enough, I don’t feel the pressure,” he said.
At the convention hall, we were quickly surrounded by admirers. Two women were already waiting to meet him — white, middle-aged volunteers for Carson’s super PAC, who had traveled from South Carolina. One of them, Chris Horne, was holding a dog-eared and taped Bible. A founding member of the Charleston Tea Party who went on to work for Gingrich’s successful South Carolina primary campaign in 2012, Horne lamented over the attacks that Carson was sure to face. “You served us, you served the Lord, just don’t let them steal that from you,” she said. Her friend told him, “You’ve got God behind you!” Such religious evocations trailed Carson constantly while I walked the CPAC floor with him. Evangelicals are impressed not only with his devotion to their politics but also with his career path; as one of them told me, what’s more pro-life than saving babies?
During our ride to the conference, Carson told me his speech was not looking to “feed the beast.” When his appointed time came, he kept his remarks as tame as promised. “Real compassion” meant “using our intellect” to help people “climb out of dependency and realize the American dream,” he said. The national debt is going to “destroy us,” Obamacare was about “redistribution and control,” but Republicans better come forward with their own alternative before they repeal it, he said.
Because his speech was first, and it started several minutes early, the auditorium was slow to fill. Still, the first day saw a crush of people seeking autographs and pictures as he roamed the hall. The Draft Carson committee’s 150 volunteers swarmed the auditorium, collecting emails and handing out “Run Ben Run” stickers. After a quick interview with Sean Hannity, the conservative-radio and Fox News host — his second in two days — Carson was off to Tampa.
In the hours that followed his talk, the hall offered a view in miniature of what the next 12 to 14 months might hold for the party. Chris Christie, sitting across from the tough-minded talk-radio host Laura Ingraham, boasted about his multiple vetoes of Planned Parenthood funding, his refusal to raise income taxes and his belief that “sometimes people need to be told to sit down and shut up.” Cruz, an audience favorite, warning his fellow Republicans against falling for a “squishy moderate,” declared, “Take all 125,000 I.R.S. agents and put ’em on our Southern border!” Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, surging in polls, boasted that if he could face down the 100,000 union supporters who protested his legislation limiting collective bargaining for public employees, he could certainly handle ISIS. The next day, the traditional CPAC favorite Rand Paul spoke, packing the hall with his supporters who chanted “President Paul.” He warned, counter to the overall hawkish tenor of the event, that “we should not succumb to the notion that a government inept at home will somehow become successful abroad.” But he also vowed to end foreign aid to countries whose citizens are seen burning American flags. “Not one penny more to these haters of America.”
Perhaps the defining moment came near the end of the conference, when Jeb Bush spoke. In a neat trick of political gamesmanship — and a show of establishment muscle — his team had bused in an ample cheering section for the dozens of cameras on hand for his appearance. But a small contingent of Tea Party activists and Rand Paul supporters staged a walk out. When Bush began a question-and-answer session, they turned and left the auditorium to chant “U.S.A., U.S.A.” in the hallway, led by a man in colonial garb waving a huge “Don’t Tread on Me” banner. Plenty of other detractors stayed in the hall and peppered Bush’s remarks with booing as he stood by positions unpopular with the conservative grass roots: support for the Common Core standards and an immigration overhaul that provides a “path to legal status” for undocumented immigrants. Bush took it all in good humor, but finally seemed to give up.
“For those who made an ‘oo’ sound — is that what it was? — I’m marking you down as neutral,” he said. “And I want to be your second choice.”
Bush strategists told me they would not repeat Romney’s mistakes. Of course they would love to glide to an early nomination, they said, but they are prepared for a long contest and won’t be wasting any energy bending under pressure from a Paul or a Cruz or a Carson.
No one doubts that the pressure will increase, though. Despite the best wishes of the party’s leaders, GOP primary voters have given little indication that they will narrow the field quickly.
Before I left, I spotted Newt Gingrich, himself a fleeting presidential front-runner during those strange primary days of 2012. I asked him whether he thought all the party maneuvering — all the attempts to change the rules and fast-track the process — would preclude someone from presenting the sort of outside primary challenge he had carried out in the last election.
“No,” he told me, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Look at where Ben Carson is right now.”
Jim Rutenberg is the chief political correspondent for the magazine. His most recent feature was about Megyn Kelly.
Gilbert Haroche, Builder of an Economy Travel Empire, Dies at 87
Mr. Haroche was a founder of Liberty Travel, which grew from a two-man operation to the largest leisure travel operation in the United States.
Don Mankiewicz, Screenwriter in a Family Film Tradition, Dies at 93
Mr. Mankiewicz, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter for “I Want to Live!,” also wrote episodes of television shows such as “Star Trek” and “Marcus Welby, M.D.”
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.
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.”
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.
