Jalan Malioboro adalah saksi sejarah perkembangan Kota Yogyakarta dengan telah melewati jutaan detik waktu yang terus berputar hingga sekarang ini. Membentang panjang di atas garis imajiner Kraton Yogyakarta, Tugu dan puncak Gunung Merapi. Malioboro adalah detak jatung keramaian kota Yogyakarta yang terus berdegup kencang mengikuti perkembangan jaman. Sejarah penamaan Malioboro juga terdapat dua versi yang cukup melegenda, pertama telah diambil dari nama seorang bangsawan Inggris yaitu Marlborough, seorang residen Kerajaan Inggris di kota Yogjakarta dari tahun 1811 M hingga 1816 M. Versi kedua dalam bahasa sansekerta Malioboro berarti “karangan bunga” dikarenakan tempat ini dulunya telah dipenuhi dengan karangan bunga setiap kali Kraton melaksanakan perayaan. Lebih dari 250 tahun yang lalu Malioboro telah menjelma menjadi sarana kegiatan ekonomi melalui sebuah pasar tradisional pada masa pemerintahan Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono I. Dari tahun 1758 – sekarang Malioboro juga masih terus bertahan dengan detak jantu
ng sebagai kawasan perdagangan dan telah menjadi salah satu daerah yang juga mewakili wajah kota Yogyakarta.

Sejak awal degup jantung Malioboro berdetak sudah telah menjadi pusat pemerintahan dan perekonomian perkotaan. Setiap bagian dari jalan Malioboro ini telah menjadi saksi dari sebuah jalanan biasa hingga menjadi salah satu titik terpenting dalan sejarah kota Yogyakarta dan Indonesia. Bangunan Istana Kepresidenan Yogyakarta yang dibangun sejak tahun 1823 menjadi titik penting sejarah perkembangan kota Yogyakarta yang juga merupakan soko guru Negara Kesatuan Republik Indonesia. Dari bangunan ini berbagai perisitiwa penting sejarah Indonesia dimulai dari sini. Pada tanggal 6 Januari 1946, Yogyakarta telah resmi menjadi ibukota baru Republik Indonesia yang masih muda. Istana Kepresidenan Yogyakarta sebagai kediaman Presiden Soekarno beserta keluarganya. Pelantikan Jenderal Soedirman sebagai Panglima Besar TNI (pada tanggal 3 Juni 1947), diikuti pelantikan sebagai Pucuk Pimpinan Angkatan Perang Republik Indonesia (pada tanggal 3 Juli 1947), serta lima Kabinet Republik yang masih muda itu pun telah dibentuk dan dilantik di Istana ini pula. Benteng V

redeburg yang berhadapan dengan Gedung Agung. Bangunan yang dulu dikenal dengan nama Rusternburg (peristirahatan) dibangun pada tahun 1760 lalu. Kemegahan yang telah dirasakan saat ini dari Benteng Vredeburg pertama kalinya diusulkan pihak Belanda melalui Gubernur W.H. Van Ossenberch dengan alasan menjaga stabilitas keamanan pemerintahan Sultan HB I. Pihak Belanda menunggu waktu 5 tahun untuk bisa mendapatkan restu dari Sultan HB I untuk menyempurnakan Benteng Rusternburg tersebut. Pembuatan benteng ini telah diarsiteki oleh Frans Haak. Kemudian bangunan benteng yang baru tersebut dinamakan Benteng Vredeburg yang berarti perdamaian.

Sepanjang jalan Malioboro adalah penutur cerita bagi setiap orang yang berkunjung di kawasan ini, telah menikmati pengalaman wisata belanja sepanjang bahu jalan yang berkoridor (arcade). Dari produk kerajinan lokal seperti batik, hiasan rotan, wayang kulit, kerajinan bambu (gantungan kunci, lampu hias dan lain sebagainya) juga blangkon (topi khas Jawa/Jogja) serta barang-barang perak, hingga pedagang yang menjual pernak pernik umum yang banyak ditemui di tempat lain. Pengalaman lain dari wisata belanja ini ketika terjadi tawar menawar harga, dengan pertemuan budaya yang berbeda akan terjadi komunikasi yang unik dengan logat bahasa yang berbeda. Jika beruntung, bisa berkurang sepertiga atau bahkan separohnya. Tak lupa mampir ke Pasar Beringharjo, di tempat ini kita banyak dijumpai beraneka produk tradisional yang lebih lengkap. Di pasar ini kita bisa menjumpai produk dari kota tetangga seperti batik Solo dan Pekalongan. Mencari batik tulis atau batik print, atau sekedar mencari tirai penghias jendela dengan motif unik serta sprei indah bermotif batik. Tempat ini juga akan memuaskan hasrat berbelanja barang-barang unik dengan harga yang lebih murah. Berbelanja di kawasan Malioboro serta Beringharjo, pastikan tidak tertipu dengan harga yang ditawarkan. Biasanya para penjual akan menaikkan harga dari biasanya bagi para wisatawan.

Malioboro terus bercerita dengan kisahnya, dari pagi sampai menjelang tengah malam terus berdegup mengiringi aktifitas yang silih berganti. Tengah malam sepanjang jalan Malioboro mengalun lebih pelan dan tenang. Warung lesehan merubah suasana dengan deru musisi jalanan dengan lagu-lagu nostalgia. Berbagai jenis menu makanan ditawarkan para pedagang kepada pengunjung yang menikmati suasana malam kawasan Malioboro.  Perjalanan terus berlanjut sampai  dikawasan nol kilometer kota Yogyakarta, yang telah mengukir sejarah di setiap ingatan orang-orang yang pernah berkunjung ke kota Gudeg ini. Bangunan-bangunan bersejarah menjadi penghuni tetap kawasan nol kilometer yang menjamu ramah bagi pengunjung yang memiliki minat di bidang arsitektur dan fotografi.

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.

Photo

 

“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.

“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.

The book is to be released next week.

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.”