60 Minutes backs off Benghazi witness story
Phony eyewitness and 60 Minutes’ shoddy journalism have done damage to the truth being told.
On October 27, 2013, 60 Minutes ran a blockbuster story of a Benghazi witness who dramatically told of his presence on the scene the night Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed.
His story of being on the scene was new, his information regarding prior warnings was not new. The failure of the Obama administration to provide protection and the cover-up that the attack was the result of a spontaneous protest are the scandal. That’s why we headlined the 60 Minutes report that 60 Minutes “confirms” the scandal, 60 Minutes confirms Benghazi is a real scandal, and you’ve been lied to.
We weren’t the only one seeing that the scandal information confirmed prior reports. Dave Weigel at Slate.com, in trying to minimize the damage to Obama, wrote What Did We Learn From the 60 Minutes Benghazi Report?:
But the report tells us more about what we’ve known for a year, and known in detail since the spring of 2013. Lara Logan’s big coup is an interview with a British security officer who uses a psuedonym; her other on-camera sources, Andy Wood and Gregory Hicks, had testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee….
This colors in some of the story, but it doesn’t advance the scandal. The Stevens cables that warned State about what might happen were revealed almost a year ago, sparking off some minor head-rolling at State but not much else. What conservatives want to know—and when I go to conferences or political rallies, I hear this—is what Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were doing on the night of the attack, and whether they heard earlier warnings but ignored them.
The scandal part of Benghazi now will be lost in the media narrative because it turns out that 60 Minutes star witness may not have been on the scene. His dramatic story of his own heroics that night appears to be false, or at least subject to serious doubt.
Via Noah Rothman at Mediaite, Lara Logan says 60 Minutes got it wrong, and will correct the story this weekend (video at bottom of post):
CBS 60 Minutes reporter Lara Logan admitted on Friday that a person who claimed to have been witness to the deadly September 11, 2012 attack on an American consulate in Benghazi and who served as the centerpiece of a recent report on that attack may have misled her.
In late October, 60 Minutes ran a report featuring the account of British security expert Dylan Davies – though he called himself Morgan Jones – who recounted in detail his actions in the early morning hours during the Benghazi attack.
It was later revealed that Davies told the FBI he did not visit the American diplomatic compound on the night of the attack and had not, as he claimed, seen the body of slain U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
“The most important thing to every person is the truth and today the truth is we made a mistake,” Logan said. “That’s very disappointing for any journalist.”
“Nobody likes to admit that they made a mistake, but if you do, you have to stand up and take responsibility and you have to say that you were wrong,” she continued. “And in this case we were wrong.”
It is unclear as of this writing how much of the story was wrong, whether just the witness’s presence on scene that night or more of his story.
Regardless, this is like manna from heaven for those who say Benghazi is a phony scandal. It’s not a phony scandal, as demonstrated by numerous witnesses whose testimony is not impeachable; but this phony eyewitness and 60 Minutes’ shoddy journalism have done damage to the truth being told.
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Comments
Dave Weigel, JourNoList.
Agreed that the only thing damaged here is getting to the truth. This just clouds the issue.
Funny, leftists lie through their teeth and then swear to it. If caught it’s ho hum.
However, the tiniest contradiction by the right is a great big deal.
Sounds like the definition of a lose/lose game.
Everyone wondered how CBS could let this story get legs and what kind of retribution the reporter would receive.
This is just a slap down from on high!
The guy admitted to a previous lie…what I would call a “junior lie”…to his superiors, because he had been ordered to remain where he was rather than going to the compound.
Shoebat yesterday suggested that finding out whether that order was given by the security company would go a long way toward confirming the story.
ALLLLLLLL that totally aside, MY FLUCKING GOVERMENT lied to me…and lies to me today…about Benghazi.
THAT is the scandal.
60 minutes chooses to believe the FBI over Davies. It’s as simple as that. Davies denies writing the FBI report, The government won’t let any of the other Benghazi survivors talk, but it is acceptable to “out” the ones you disagree with. Doing a search for “Davies, 60 minutes” took three pages before I could find a conservative source for the story. So, the media has won again. Seems to me if the media was really interested they would check to see if Davies was a story teller by nature. If so, then there should be doubt. If not, they should look deeper.
Yeah, this gives me a very sick feeling in my stomach. It feels like nothing but a setup to discredit the entire Benghazi narrative.
I was thinking the same thing.
The turning point comes next week. That’s when some CIA operatives who WERE on the ground are scheduled to testify in closed door classified Congressional hearings. That’s new, but it’s largely been ignored by the media because of the Obamacare disaster. If anything incriminating is learned in that hearing, then the story will advance. If not, then it fades away – probably for good. It’s up to the CIA. Is it willing to come clean and throw the administration that it works for under the bus? Or not.
So when 60 Minutes does the correction segment, they should conclude:
“But most importantly, Obama and Hillary colluded to tell a huge lie for weeks, about some video, to further Obama’s campaign deceitful narrative that al Qaeda was dead and GM was alive.
AND to cover for Hillary’s criminal neglect, leaving her ambassador in a hot zone to die, despite months of Stevens pleading for support, and the direct warnings of vulnerability to impending doom.
A year later Obama is still hiding the real first hand witnesses from Congress”
fade out with pictures of the four left to die
$5 says Obama/Clinton operatives shoveled this guy onto 60 Minutes, a fake leaker whose job it is to throw mud into the Benghazi waters, muddy it up so you can’t see anything, can’t know what to believe, and if not kill, at least delay the inevitable unraveling of the true story.
Sorry Henry, I clicked thumbs down when I meant to reply. I can’t help but think the same as you. The Clinton/Obama think tanks manage scandal with incredibly creative deceits. Of course it helps to have a fawning media ready to turn the page. This false witness blowup will give mouthpieces on the Left plenty to say when their talking heads appear for Benghazi sound-bites, and Hilary will escape accountability for monumental incompetence and dereliction of duty.
Somewhere there is a smoking gun, or perhaps a better term would be a ‘Benghazi Blue Dress.’ Will it be found?
This news is definitely unnerving to people — like yours truly — who have been waiting for the networks to quit covering Obama’s inferior posterior and treat Benghazi like the brazen cover-up that it truly is. One thing must be said, however: In admitting that there are problems with the eyewitness account of her on-air report, Lara Logan has demonstrated that among her 60 Minutes colleagues, she has more integrity than either a) Dan Rather, who to this day vouches for the veracity of a source that provided him with false documents that supposedly “proved” a story that hit a dead-end four years before, or b) Steve Kroft, who conducted the contemporaneous September 12th interview with Obama after his Rose Garden comments about the Benghazi attack following Mitt Romney’s contentious press conference with other MSMers.
We now know that Kroft’s interview (which wouldn’t be played on television until September 24) was missing two snippets undoubtedly relevant to the 2012 Presidential campaign. First, a stuttering admission from Obama that his campaign’s rhetoric and advertising contained outright falsehoods about Mitt Romney (“[H]ave we gone overboard [?]…You know, that happens in politics”). That exchange was only available on the CBS News website, and thus was missed by millions who watched the broadcast version on 60 Minutes on Sunday night. The second deleted part: Obama’s specific confirmation that hours earlier in the Rose Garden, he took pains NOT to refer to the Benghazi attacks as “terrorism,” saying that “It’s too early to know” if the attack fit that description.
Why was that second part so important? Because it directly contradicted what Obama said in the second Presidential debate about having called Benghazi “a terrorist act” on October 16, 2012. No doubt Kroft was watching that debate, and knew good and well that he had in his possession tape on which Obama said the complete opposite. But that September 12, 2012 footage was embargoed by CBS until November 4, 2012 — Sunday before the election — and, again, only released online. It might have completely escaped notice before the final vote had not FNC’s Bret Baier made note of it in his FoxNews.com column.
I tweeted shortly after Logan’s report that I was going to enjoy watching Media Matters’ desperate attempts to paint her as a Sean Hannity wannabe who was flogging a “phony scandal,” especially since now those clowns have published an e-book alleging the entire issue was cooked up by Romney! That’s typical compost from the minds of David Brock & Eric Boehlert, and thankfully it’s too ridiculous to be lent credence by veracity problems about personal heroism that night.
“terror” not “terrorist attack”, I believe is evidence on how minutely crafted Obama’s prompter statements really are, which can later be attributed to any position needed.
It belies the whole crafting of the lie “you can keep your doctor. PERIOD.”
Obama simply used a lie to sell it, now is covering with more lies, while always deliberately purging millions from the private insurance roles, forcing them into his “better exchange”.
The new improved lie: He is sorry (stupid) you (think you) were misled, by (completely honest) words that he said.
I remember an old Bible teaching on the five steps Satan used to deceive Eve, slowly going from “thou shalt surely die”, to “thou shalt NOT surely die”. Obama does this all the time, adding words, changing words, adding qualifiers”. 🙂
Turn the table on Lara Logan and CBS.
If Benghazi isn’t a scandal, then neither did her sexual assault in Egypt happened the way she and her witnesses claimed it did.
Just a little poison in the well. Mediamatters was on this the morning after Logan’s report aired demanding CBS retract the whole story, almost as if they had been cued in.
Why would Davies lie like some schmuck? He should have known Comrade Commissar O’s response would be more than venomous. Was he sent out there as an administration plant to deliberately set up Logan and CBS?
Comrade Commissar O will likely do anything to avoid the rubes catching on that he did absolutely nothing but stimulate Reggie Love’s rectal epithelium the night four Americans, including the American Ambassador, were killed in Benghazi.
“If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it! Period! Guaranteed!” Just like selling snake oil to the unwitting out the back of a covered wagon.
I think the truth is far worse than anyone could imagine.
Those 35 + guys were not there to sell flowers.
[…] decision by 60 Minutes to retract aspects of their report is another blow to the already damaged brand of American journalism and likely serves as a warning […]
This is an extremely important story— a scary one. A blogger-journalist should follow up on it, because there may be gold under this dirt. A congressional investigation would be invaluable, since CBS execs could be forced to testify under oath even if the Administration disobeyed subpoenas.
60 Minutes vetted the story, and knew, it seems, that Davies had lied in his report to his employer. Apparently he told the same story to the FBI as to his employer. If he lied to the FBI, it’s the “Martha Stewart felony” I think, so that’s some evidence he indeed lied. But what does the FBI report really say? Has it been made public? Do we trust the FBI? What is the chain of custody of the report? Could it be that someone in the Administration wrote it and leaked it purporting it to be an FBI report? Or is it perhaps that his employer simply passed along his report to them to the FBI to use for their report, so there actually ISN’T any new report coming to light?
It’s completely implausible that CBS would pull a show and a publisher would pull a book just because they found out that a source had told a lie they already knew about and decided he had explained satisfactorily twice at the time instead of once.
He should be looking carefully at his contract with the publisher. It might say the publisher is free to void the agreement at any time for any reason, in which case, too bad. But if it only allows non-publication for good cause, then he should sue for breach, and if their defense is that they heard about the FBI report, he will, in discovery, be able to ask for all communications between the publisher and the government, right?