The Benghazi Hoax Chapter 16: 60 Minutes

DAVID BROCK, ARI RABIN-HAVT, & MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

After the publication of Media Matters' ebook The Benghazi Hoax, which tells the story of how the right twisted a tragedy into a failed witch hunt against the Obama administration, CBS News came under fire from media critics and journalism experts for airing a botched 60 Minutes report on Benghazi that featured a supposed eyewitness to the attacks who had lied about his actions the night of the attack. The story resulted in an internal investigation into how 60 Minutes got it wrong and a leave of absence by correspondent Lara Logan and producer Max McClellan. Here's the story of how CBS got burned by the Benghazi hoax.

For more on conservative media myths about the September 2012 attack, read The Benghazi Hoax, the new ebook by Media Matters' David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt.

60 Minutes had a bombshell -- or so it thought. Correspondent Lara Logan and her producer Max McClellan had spent more than a year investigating the attack in Benghazi and conducted more than 100 interviews. They wanted to give the news magazine's audience a firsthand account of what took place on September 11, 2012.

The heavily promoted report was 60 Minutes' lead story on the evening of October 27, 2013. Immediately, it was obvious that the program had fallen for several of the previously debunked Benghazi hoaxes. Most notably, in Logan's interview with "whistleblower" Greg Hicks, she led off by saying, "The lingering question is why no larger military response ever crossed the border into Libya."

There were no lingering questions about the military's response. Those questions had been repeatedly asked and answered, by the Accountability Review Board, during congressional hearings, and in numerous media accounts of the event.

For months, generals and former defense secretaries including Leon Panetta, Robert Gates, Adm. Mike Mullen, and Gen. Martin Dempsey had debunked the idea that the United States could have responded to the attack in Benghazi quicker or with more force.

Logan also claimed the CIA teams stationed at the annex was ordered "to wait" before responding to the attack. This falsehood was debunked by the Accountability Review Board, which wrote "the departure of the Annex team was not delayed by orders from superiors."

The new element in CBS' report -- designed to draw buzz to the subject -- was an interview that Logan conducted with "Morgan Jones," who was identified as a "former British soldier" and "security officer who witnessed the attack." 60 Minutes told viewers that "Morgan Jones" was a pseudonym he was using "for his own safety." 

In actuality, "Jones" was a private security contractor named Dylan Davies who worked for Blue Mountain Security, a British company run by a former SAS officer. Blue Mountain was responsible for the diplomatic compound's locally hired unarmed guards, whose assignments included raising and lowering the security gate, checking IDs, and other basic security tasks.

During his 60 Minutes interview, Davies suggested a key problem in Benghazi was that his guards remained unarmed, while a second Libyan security force -- the February 17th Martyrs Brigade, a group Davies claimed to be incompetent -- provided armed security. While this claim was in line with the Accountability Review Board's findings, Davies' faith in his own employees at Blue Mountain was contradicted by both media reports about their performance and the Accountability Review Board, which wrote in its unclassified report that the Blue Mountain guards were "poorly skilled."

The most compelling part of Davies' 60 Minutes interview was his harrowing and heroic tale from that night -- one that was the center of a book he had co-written. The book, called The Embassy House: The Explosive Eyewitness Account of the Libyan Embassy Siege by the Soldier Who Was There, would be published later that week by Threshold, a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster.

Unmentioned throughout the 60 Minutes report was the fact that Simon & Schuster and CBS share a parent company, suggesting that CBS could have had a financial motivation for running a report hyping Davies' story.

In the book and on 60 Minutes, Davies talked about hearing gunshots in a phone call he received from one of the local guards he oversaw at the compound, which was 15 minutes away from where he lived in the city. In a plot straight out of a James Bond film, Davies claimed that went to the compound and scaled its 12-foot wall as Al Qaeda fighters rampaged through the facility.

Davies said, "One guy saw me. He just shouted. I couldn't believe that he'd seen me 'cause it was so dark. He started walkin' towards me."

According to the former British soldier, the excitement continued: "I just hit him with the butt of the rifle in the face" and "he went down." This was further dramatized during his interview with Logan, in which she led hersubject:

LARA LOGAN:  He dropped?

MORGAN JONES: Yeah, like -- like a stone.

LOGAN: With his face smashed in?

JONES: Yeah.

The right was ecstatic. Even though the report did not mention President Obama or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, they claimed the report had vindicated their year of scandalmongering. Fox News contributor Jonah Goldberg expressed the feelings of many on the right, tweeting, "This 60 Minutes #benghazi piece corroborates pretty much everything #foxnews has reported so far." The day after the 60 Minutes segment aired, Fox News would run 13 segments on 11 programs, for a total of more than 47 minutes of coverage. Echoing Goldberg, Bret Baier proclaimed, "Last night, one of journalism's heavy hitters reaffirmed what we knew and had reported on." On Fox & Friends, Steve Doocy blustered, "60 Minutes doesn't cover phony scandals."

From The 700 Club to Breitbart.com, conservatives joined Fox in cheering the 60 Minutes report.

This was ironic, given the fact that 60 Minutes had long been derided by conservatives, in particular for Dan Rather's report on George W. Bush's National Guard service, for which Rather later apologized.

The right's excitement was overblown, as usual. The 60 Minutes report followed the same pattern as every other element of the Benghazi hoax documented in this book. Supposedly new revelations were simply warmed-over versions of hoaxes debunked months before; context that would provide critical information to viewers or readers was missing; and the right-wing media exaggerated the new allegations from the original report into something unrecognizable.

Nothing in the 60 Minutes report implicated Obama or Clinton in any wrongdoing leading up to the attack in Benghazi -- in fact, their names were never mentioned. But conservatives were already on the attack against the president and former secretary of state.

On the Monday after the Davies episode of 60 Minutes aired, Sen. Lindsey Graham threatened to block everynomination before the Senate until "the survivors [of Benghazi] are being made available to Congress." The South Carolina senator never mentioned that the survivors had already answered questions from numerous investigators and that the Senate had access to those interviews. Graham was joined by fellow Benghazi hoaxsters Rep. Jason Chaffetz and Sen. Kelly Ayotte in promoting the report.

One moment that raised a red flag the day after the report aired was an offhand statement from Fox News correspondent Adam Housley, who reported that Davies had been a source of his. However, Housley said, he had "stopped speaking to him when he asked for money."

Initially, 60 Minutes refused to apologize, except for its failure to disclose the financial relationship between CBS and the book's publisher. In the middle of that week, the story took its first blow when The Washington Postreported that an incident report from Davies contradicted the account he provided on 60 Minutes and in his book:

In Davies's 2 ¹/ _2-page incident report to Blue Mountain, the Britain-based contractor hired by the State Department to handle perimeter security at the compound, he wrote that he spent most of that night at his Benghazi beach-side villa. Although he attempted to get to the compound, he wrote in the report, "we could not get anywhere near ... as roadblocks had been set up."

He learned of Stevens's death, Davies wrote, when a Libyan colleague who had been at the hospital came to the villa to show him a cellphone picture of the ambassador's blackened corpse. Davies wrote that he visited the still-smoking compound the next day to view and photograph the destruction.

60 Minutes held fast, telling the paper that it "stand[s] firmly by the story we broadcast last Sunday."

Over the next few days, CBS stonewalled many in the press, refusing to speak on the phone with several major media reporters, choosing instead to send out terse emails that often failed to answer basic and appropriate questions about the story.

After refusing to speak with The Washington Post, Davies resurfaced to talk with Eli Lake of The Daily Beast. Lake was likely chosen because of his status as a right-wing foreign policy reporter who writes for a mainstream publication. Davies told Lake he "believed there was a coordinated campaign to smear him."

Responding to the idea that there was a discrepancy between the Blue Mountain incident report and the story he told 60 Minutes, Davies claimed he did not write the document in question but that the story it contained did match what he told his supervisor at the company. He said the story in the incident report was a lie he told to hide the fact that he had disobeyed his boss, who had ordered him to stay at his villa.

While 60 Minutes continued to defend its piece, Lara Logan told The New York Times that she "attributed the critical response to the report to the intense political warfare that has surrounded the episode."

Prominent authorities on journalism were not so kind. Interviewed by Media Matters' Joe Strupp, many spoke out in shock at CBS' behavior including Kelly McBride of The Poynter Institute who said, "What they should have acknowledged was the fact that he wrote a report saying that he wasn't at the site." She continued, "They should have acknowledged that ... they either didn't know about it or they failed to anticipate that critics would use this as a way of tearing down their story." She concluded that "considering that this guy, that his very presence at the compound that night is in question, they could have tried to verify from other sources that he was. Other sources, even if those were off the record sources, they could have done something to address this discrepancy."

On the evening of November 7, 60 Minutes' story completely imploded. The New York Times' Bill Carter and Michael S. Schmidt reported that Davies "gave the F.B.I. an account of the night that terrorists attacked the mission on Sept. 11, 2012 that contradicts a version of events he provided in a recently published book and in an interview." This contrasted directly with Davies' claim that his interview with the FBI lined up with the account in his book and on 60 Minutes.

CBS finally had to concede the story was fatally flawed. Jeff Fager, chairman of CBS News and executive producer of 60 Minutes, told the Times, "We're surprised to hear about this, and if it shows we've been misled, we will make a correction." The network pulled the story off its website and YouTube channel, and it posted a statement that read: "60 Minutes has learned of new information that undercuts the account told to us by Morgan Jones of his actions on the night of the attack on the Benghazi compound. We are currently looking into this serious matter to determine if he misled us, and if so, we will make a correction."

Appearing on CBS This Morning the next day, Logan said, "We were wrong. We made a mistake." She also told the audience that 60 Minutes would issue a correction the following Sunday. As CBS offered apologies, Threshold decided to take the costly step of pulling The Embassy House from circulation.

On Sunday, at the tail end of the program, Logan appeared on camera to issue her correction. "We end our broadcast tonight with a correction on a story we reported October 27 about the attack on the American special mission compound in Benghazi, in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed," Logan said. "In the story, a security officer working for the State Department, Dylan Davies, told us he went to the compound during the attack and detailed his role that night."

She continued:

After our report aired, questions arose about whether his account was true, when an incident report surfaced. It told a different story about what he did the night of the attack. Davies denied having anything to do with that incident report and insisted the story he told us was not only accurate, it was the same story he told the FBI when they interviewed him.

On Thursday night, when we discovered the account he gave the FBI was different than what he told us, we realized we had been misled, and it was a mistake to include him in our report. For that, we are very sorry. The most important thing to every person at 60 Minutes is the truth, and the truth is, we made a mistake.

The apology was not well received. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote on Twitter, "Two outstanding features of the @60Minutes correction: written in the passive voice, edits out the role played by other news organizations."

Also on Twitter, New York magazine writer Frank Rich observed, "Failure of @CBSNews to report how Lara Logan was duped for 'a year' (her claim) by a Benghazi hoax guarantees others will do it for them."

Former Meet the Press host Marvin Kalb wrote at Politico, "CBS News remains an immensely important resource, but it has now suffered an avoidable setback at a time when all of the media is under a cloud of doubt and suspicion. The network must regain the credibility it lost in Benghazi."

After several days of heavy criticism, CBS announced it was conducting a "journalistic review" of the report. The network gave a statement to McClatchy News that implied the investigation had begun immediately after criticism of the story arose, despite having previously declared it would make no further statements on the matter, and previously stating no such investigation was taking place.

This investigation was not "independent" of CBS. Al Ortiz, executive producer for special events at CBS News, was appointed to head the investigation. Dylan Byers of Politico pointed out the problem with this review: Ortiz is "tasked with conducting an investigation of his own boss, Jeff Fager. Fager is both the executive producer of '60 Minutes' and the chairman of CBS News, which means that any dirt Ortiz digs up on '60 Minutes' reporting will reflect back on the man who pays his check."

Alicia Shepard, former ombudsman at NPR told Joe Strupp of Media Matters, "There's no way that Al Ortiz can do an investigation that anyone outside CBS News, and maybe inside, will find credible at this point." Shepard continued, "The network needs to hire a panel of outside independent journalists and let them loose inside 60 Minutes to find out step by step what happened. And be totally transparent. It's the only way for 60 Minutes to regain its once-stellar reputation. This is so why news organizations still need ombudsmen."

In 2004, following a 60 Minutes story that questioned George W. Bush's service in the National Guard, whose reporting was based in part on forged documents, CBS fired four producers, effectively ended the storied career of anchor Dan Rather, and canceled the 60 Minutes II franchise on which the segment aired. 

Ultimately the pressure grew too great. Two days before Thanksgiving, Jeff Fager sent an email announcing the results of Ortiz's investigation and informing CBS staff that "I have asked Lara Logan, who has distinguished herself and has put herself in harm's way many times in the course of covering stories for us, to take a leave of absence, which she has agreed to do." Additionally Fager "asked the same of producer Max McClellan, who also has a distinguished career at CBS News."

Acknowledging the story was a "regrettable mistake" Fager wrote "when faced with a such an error, we must use it as an opportunity to make our broadcast even stronger."

While clearly CBS was trying to put their Benghazi Hoax behind them, many questions were still left unanswered about the report including:

• How did 60 Minutes find Dylan Davies?
• Was there an agreement with Threshold to promote his book in the lead up to its release?
• Al Ortiz's review does not address the role of senior CBS executives including network Chairman and 60 Minutes executive producer Jeff Fager in the airing of the Benghazi piece. What was the role of Fager and other executives in vetting/approving the segment?
• How long are Logan and McClellan on leave for?
• Ortiz's review repeatedly mentions that a "team" was involved in producing the segment but names no one except Logan and McClellan. Who else was involved in reporting the story? Who reviewed and approved the final draft? Did anyone at any time raise questions about the quality of the reporting?

Until these and other questions are answered CBS will not have moved past its role in perpetuating the Benghazi Hoax. 

60 Minutes Still Hasn't Mentioned Their Benghazi Conflict Of Interest

MATT GERTZ/Media Matters For America:

60 Minutes still hasn't told its viewers that its since-retracted report on the September 2012 Benghazi attacks promoted a book that was published by a CBS subsidiary -- a conflict of interest the network acknowledged was a mistake a week ago.

Media commentators have been raining criticism on CBS News in response to 60 Minutes' tepid, incomplete apology for their retracted report on Benghazi. Those critics have pointed out that the 90-second apology failed to explain how the segment made it to air given the serious questions about the credibility of its star "witness" Dylan Davies, and have lambasted the network for failing to announce an investigation into the handling of the story.

But even before CBS News finally acknowledged the problems with Davies story, the network conceded it had made a mistake in failing to tell the viewers of the October 27 story that Davies' book, which the segment promoted, was published by Simon & Schuster, which is a division of CBS.

On November 5, The New York Times reported:

CBS said that Jeffrey Fager, chairman of CBS News and executive producer of "60 Minutes," said on Tuesday that he regretted not making the connection between Mr. Davies and CBS public.

[CBS correspondent Lara] Logan said, "Honestly, it never factored into the story. It was a mistake; we should have done it, precisely because there's nothing to hide. It was an oversight."

That "oversight" was not corrected during 60 Minutes' brief November 10 apology, which discussed only the failure to properly vet Davies' story, not the conflict of interest. 

Likewise, when CBS Evening News covered the story on November 8, anchor Scott Pelley said that Davies had written a book that had been published by a CBS division, but did not note that that information had not been mentioned during the original 60 Minutes segment.

CBS has only acknowledged this problem on air during a November 8 segment on CBS' This Morning, when anchor Jeff Glor reported that "60 [Minutes] has already acknowledged it was a mistake not to disclose that the book was being published by Simon & Schuster, which is a CBS company."

Notably, This Morning typically has an audience of 2.5 to 3 million viewers. 60 Minutes, by contrast, is the most-watched news program in America; the October 27 broadcast was seen by almost 11 million people, while the November 10 edition was watched by more than 15 million.

New York Times’ Stelter: ’60 Minutes’ reporter Lara Logan’s scandal ‘worse’ than Dan Rather’s

By David Edwards/Raw Story

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter told CNN on Monday that CBS correspondent Lara Logan and her team at 60 Minutes may have been blinded by an agenda when reporting a story about Benghazi that turned out not to be true.

On Sunday night’s 60 Minutes broadcast, Logan was forced to apologize and issue a partial retraction after reports showed that her source, security contractor Dylan Davies, was not at the U.S. mission in Benghazi during the Sept. 11, 2011 terrorist attack as he had claimed.

“It took two weeks to have that apology on 60 Minutes,” Stelter explained to the hosts of CNN’sNew Day. “The piece aired at the end of October and there were questions raised almost immediately about it. So I think the question is now and the thing that media writers will be writing about this week are, what took so long and what is 60 Minutes doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again?”

“So far, CBS has resisted having any investigation,” he added, pointing to a 2002 story about President George W. Bush’s time in the National Guard that eventually led to the firing of longtime anchorman Dan Rather and other staff.

“This may be in some ways worse,” Stelter said. “This may be a lot less resonate though. On the one hand, that was all about liberal bias and there were lots of people who already had questions about Dan Rather and whether he biased or not. I don’t know if there’s those same kinds of questions this time. I’m not sure if cries of conservative bias are as resonate as those cries were.”

But because the Benghazi story was something that 60 Minutes and Logan spent a year on, it was reasonable to ask if they may have been biased in their reporting, Stelter said.

“This wasn’t a story that was breaking news, this was a story that they worked on for a year,” he observed. “And that’s why I think people wonder, did they come in with an agenda?”

Watch the video below from CNN’s New Day, broadcast Nov. 11, 2013.

60 Minutes’ Lara Logan offers correction on Benghazi story; ‘We made a mistake’

By George Chidi/Raw Story

CBS 60 Minutes issued a correction and an apology Sunday night for a report that aired last month about the attack on the Benghazi compound in 2012, in which the producers included interview material from a source that has had his credibility come under significant challenge.

CBS correspondent Lara Logan said of Dylan Davies, the British contractor at the heart of the controversial story, that 60 Minutes learned Thursday from the FBI that the account Davies told federal investigators was different from what he told news producers. “We realized we had been misled, and it was a mistake to include him in our report,” she said. “For that, we are very sorry.”

While accusing his detractors of conducting a smear campaign, Davies nonetheless admitted to the Washington Post last weekend to lying to a superior about what he had been doing on Sept. 11, 2012, the night of the Benghazi attack.

In an incident report immediately following the attack, Davies said he had been at his beachside villa during much of the calamity. But in his memoir and on 60 Minutes, Davies claimed that he had raced to the Benghazi compound during the attack, climbed a 12-foot wall and engaged in hand-to-hand combat with an attacker. Davies claims he told the truth to 60 Minutes and in his new memoir.

But the discrepancy between the two versions appears to have created enough questions about Davies’ credibility to prompt the brief correction.

Watch the correction, below.

Former '60 Minutes' Producer: Discredited Benghazi Story Was Done To Appeal To Conservatives

IGOR BOBIC/Talking Points Memo

A former "60 Minutes" producer who was fired over a 2004 story about then-President George W. Bush's service in the Air National Guard said Friday that CBS' now retracted story detailing the attack in Benghazi, Libya was done to appeal to conservatives.

"My concern is that the story was done very pointedly to appeal to a more conservative audience's beliefs about what happened at Benghazi," Mary Mapes told Media Matters. "They appear to have done that story to appeal specifically to a politically conservative audience that is obsessed with Benghazi and believes that Benghazi was much more than a tragedy."
Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who is also widely believed to have left the network as a result of the 2004 flap, declined to comment on the discredited Benghazi story when reached byTPM through a spokesperson on Friday.
The chairman of CBS News and executive producer of "60 Minutes" on Friday apologized for airing the story, telling Variety that the network would now "own it." 
CBS said it was misled by the source who provided the account, and publication has been halted for a book about the night on Sept. 11, 2012.

What Would Dan Rather Do? With Benghazi Debacle, 60 Minutes Faces Another Crisis of Credibility

ERIC BOEHLERT/Media Matters For America:

On September 10, 2004, CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather dedicated five minutes of the telecast to address the brewing controversy around a 60 Minutes II report he had aired two days earlier. Featuring disputed documents from a former commander in the Texas Air National Guard, the 60 Minutes II report detailed the lingering questions about President Bush's service in a coveted state-side Guard unit during the height of the Vietnam War and how, despite his no-show service, Bush was awarded an honorable discharge.

Within hours of the report, conservative bloggers raised doubts about the documents' validity. The next day, mainstream outlets began airing their own doubts. With the network's credibility on the line, less than 48 hours after the initial report, Rather and CBS responded with a detailed defense of their reporting on its evening newscast, even though the Guard report aired on a different program, 60 Minutes II.

Rather's public defense was just one of many, high-profile actions the embattled network took in an effort to answer critics at the time. By September 20, CBS stopped defending the Guard report. It apologized for airing the segment and announced the creation of an outside panel to investigate what had gone wrong in the reporting process. In the end, four senior CBS producers were let go, 60 Minutes II was canceled, and Dan Rather was soon out as the Evening News anchor. (Rather still stands by his memo reporting.) However, CBS' independent review could not determine if the controversial Guard documents were forged. It did conclude however, there was no evidence the Guard story was driven by partisan considerations inside CBS.

CBS's frantic corporate response to the Guard controversy (which included blatant kowtowing to its partisan critics; see more below) stands in stark contrast to the network's utterly passive, non-response to thewidening controversy surrounding the heavily-hyped 60 Minutes report that aired on October 27 about the terrorist attacks on the U.S. compound in Benghazi in 2012.

That report has been plagued by problems, including obvious conflicts of interest and the more recent revelation that its star witness told contradictory tales about the terror attack and what he did as it unfolded that night.

The difference in the two crisis responses is striking in part because the underlying Guard story that CBS told about Bush failing to serve his duty has been proven to be true: In the spring of 1972, with 770 days left of required duty, then-Lt. Bush unilaterally decided that he was done fulfilling his military obligation and walked away from the Guard. That means CBS could have omitted the disputed documents from its Guard report and still told an accurate story about Bush's non-service.

But CBS's dubious Benghazi report revolved around already debunked allegations about why no U.S. military forces from outside Libya were sent to save the Americans at the besieged Benghazi compound. In other words, CBS's witness controversy is attached to an-already inaccurate Benghazi report, which makes the recent 60 Minutes' transgression more serious than the one that triggered the Guard frenzy.  

Journalism veterans tell Media Matters that CBS must address the glaring problems with its Benghazi report and the growing newsroom scandal. Yet the silence persists. So it's worth pondering why CBS responded so quickly, and energetically, to conservative critics in the wake of the Guard story, and why CBS feels comfortable ignoring those who point out gaping holes in its politically charged Benghazi report.

If CBS appointed another review panel this week, it would have a lot to examine.

On October 27, 60 Minutes featured a supposed "eyewitness" of the September 2012 attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities; one who claimed that during the attack he heroically scaled a wall of the U.S. compound, knocked out a terrorist with his rifle butt, and later traveled across town to the Benghazi hospital to see Ambassador Chris Stevens' dead body.

The story Dylan Davies told CBS though, was wildly different than the far more subdued account he gave his superiors, according to an incident report that was obtained by The Washington Post. According to the Post, Davies had previously filed a report with his security contractor employer saying that he "could not get anywhere near" the compound the night of the attack.

Davies now claims he lied to his employer because he didn't want his boss to know he'd disobeyed strict orders that night to stay away from the Benghazi compound. While acknowledging that deceit, Davies claims he was telling the truth on 60 Minutes. 

But how are viewers to know? And why weren't they made aware of the contradictory version of events that the witness has given about Benghazi? Was CBS aware of the flagrant contradiction and didn't tell viewers?  And if CBS wasn't aware, what does that say about the brand of journalism its reporters practice considering 60 Minutes  correspondent Lara Logan and her producer bragged that the Benghazi story was a year in the making and involved "dozens and dozens and dozens" of interviews?

Quite simply, how is it possible to spend a year checking out a story only to have it completely implode within five days of airing on CBS?

Keep in mind that on Fox News, reporter Adam Housley claimed that Davies asked for money in exchange for an interview. (Davies has since denied that claim.)  Foreign Policy reported that Davies' memoir is being published by Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is a part of CBS Corporation, which owns 60 Minutes. Yet that fact was not disclosed in the 60 Minutes story. Nor was the fact that the rights to Davies' book have already been sold to a Hollywood producer.

All in all, the 60 Minutes report can now be accurately described as a train wreck.

CBS's response since the deeply flawed report was aired? Silence punctuated by a boilerplate announcement that it stands by the story. (Actually, during last night's 60 Minutes telecast, three viewer letters were read on-air praising the report, one calling it "amazing.") Contrast that with the all-hands-on-deck approach CBS took following its disputed Guard report from September 8, 2004:

September 9, 2004: A CBS spokesperson responded to early right-wing allegation by insisting, "As is standard practice at CBS News, each of the documents broadcast on '60 Minutes' was thoroughly investigated by independent experts, and we are convinced of their authenticity." The statement added that CBS reporters had verified the documents by talking to unidentified people who saw them "at the time they were written."

September 9: "CBS News released a statement yesterday standing by its reporting, saying that each of the documents "was thoroughly vetted by independent experts and we are convinced of their authenticity." The statement added that CBS reporters had verified the documents by talking to unidentified people who saw them "at the time they were written."

September 10: CBS released another statement: "CBS released another statement: "This report was not based solely on recovered documents, but rather on a preponderance of evidence, including documents that were provided by unimpeachable sources, interviews with former Texas National Guard officials and individuals who worked closely back in the early 1970s with Colonel Jerry Killian....  In addition, the documents are backed up not only by independent handwriting and forensic document experts but by sources familiar with their content. Contrary to some rumors, no internal investigation is underway at CBS News nor is one planned. We have complete confidence in our reporting and will continue to pursue the story."

September 10: Rather's rebuttal aired on The CBS Evening News.  

September 11: The CBS Evening News aired an update about the memo controversy, which contained yet another statement from the network: "We believe the documents to be genuine. We stand by our story and will continue to report on it."

September 14: CBS Evening News again revisited the story, reporting that in a radio interview Laura Bush suggested the disputed Guard documents were "probably" forgeries, while noting "CBS News continues to stand by its reporting."

September 20: CBS News chairman Andrew Heyward issued an apology: "Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report. We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret." Dan Rather added, "If I knew then what I know now -- I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question."

September 20: CBS announced the creation of the review panel.

September 22. CBS announced Richard Thornburgh, who served as President George H.W. Bush's attorney general, and Louis Boccardi, former executive editor and CEO of the Associated Press, would led the review panel.

Incredibly, it was later discovered that CBS officials were so spooked by the conservative attacks on the network in 2004, that when it came to assembling its "independent" panel the network did the following:

*Included Rush Limbaugh, Fox News chairman Roger Ailes and Matt Drudge on a list of possible review panel candidates.

* Conceded the list of panel candidates tilted towards the right in order to "open itself up to its harshest conservative critics and to ensure that the Panel's findings would be found credible."

*Reached out to "GOP folks" prior to assembling its "independent" panel and took their temperature on who should oversee the work.

*CBS insiders were concerned that former GOP senator Warren Rudman would not "mollify" the network's right-wing critics; he was not selected for the "independent" panel.

Earlier this year in an interview with USA Today, CBS CEO Les Moonves reflected on his tenure at the network and singled out the Guard memo "mess" as among the most difficult situations he had to deal with. It "was extremely trying," Moonves said. "We had to protect the integrity of CBS News, which had this great legacy, and I wanted to make sure we did it properly so that CBS News could thrive again, which I think they've done."

As 60 Minutes' Benghazi scoop continues to implode, the network has shown no such interest in protecting the integrity of CBS News.

Report: Benghazi witness was nowhere near diplomatic compound during terrorist attack

By Travis Gettys/Raw Story

A security subcontractor who gave his account to CBS “60 Minutes” of the events leading up to the fatal attack at Benghazi had previously told his employers he was nowhere near the diplomatic compound at the time, according to a Washington Postreport.

The Oct. 27 television report was based on a yearlong investigation by reporter Lara Logan and producer Max McCellan and featured an interview with a man identified by the pseudonym “Morgan Jones,” who was described as “a security officer who witnessed the attack.”

A Fox News correspondent said the following day that the network had been working on a story with the same security officer, but those efforts ended when he asked for money in exchange for his participation.

Threshold Editions, which specializes in “conservative non-fiction,” published a bookTuesday by the same source, called The Embassy House: The Explosive Eyewitness Account of the Libyan Embassy Siege by the Soldier Who Was There.

The Washington Post report, published Thursday, said the book largely backs up the account provided to “60 Minutes,” but the newspaper says the source provided a written account to his employers three days after the attack that he’d spent the night of the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack at his own beachside villa in Benghazi.

“We could not get anywhere near (the diplomatic compound) as roadblocks had been set up,” said the security contractor, whose real name was confirmed as Dylan Davies by officials who’d worked with him in Libya.

The newspaper reported that Davies provided a 2 ½-page incident report to his employer, Blue Mountain, the British contractor hired by the State Department to guard the compound’s perimeter.

Davies said he learned U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens had been killed in the raid showed him a cell phone photo of the diplomat’s charred remains, and the security officer visited the still-smoking compound the following day to photograph what was left.

The “60 Minutes” report claimed the security officer had scaled a 12-foot wall while it was still overrun with Al Qaeda forces, and Davies said on the program that he’d personally struck one of the terrorists in the face with the butt of his rifle.

He also told “60 Minutes” that he’d gone to the hospital and seen Stevens’ body.
Davies told CBS that he and a Foreign Service officer had been worried about security at the compound.

The security officer’s co-author told The Washington Post that Davies may have been dishonest in his incident report because his employer had asked him to stay away from the compound after he was told of the attack by telephone.

A CBS spokesman told the newspaper that the network stands firmly behind its story as it aired Sunday.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) used the “60 Minutes” report to justify calling Monday for additional hearings into Benghazi and threatened to block Senate appointments until lawmakers had heard from all the surviving witnesses to the attack.

However, Graham conceded Wednesday that witnesses have already been questioned by members of Congress, but their testimony hasn’t been publicly released because the investigations are still ongoing.

David Brock, chairman of Media Matters, has called on CBS to retract its Benghazi report based on the security officer’s comments.