CBS Apologizes For 60 Minutes Benghazi Report as Primary Source’s Forthcoming Book “Suspended”

CBS
News’ Lara Logan
apologized today for a 60 Minutes report on the September 11,
2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi. The report’s primary
source, a security contractor going by the pseudonym Morgan Jones
and revealed to be named Dylan Davies, claimed he was at the US
mission the night of the attack, that in fact he scaled a wall and
fought one of the attackers, who told him they were there
“to kill Americans.” CBS News’ retraction comes after
reports that the Davies’ statement to the FBI (that he wasn’t
there that night) did not match what he told CBS, and wrote in a
book about the experience. According to The New York
Times’ Julie
Bosman, Simon & Schuster is now suspending publication of
the book.

The story would suggest that the US government could have
responded more quickly to the ongoing incident in Benghazi than it
had, as some critics of the administration have argued. The attack
in Benghazi involved two separate assaults over a seven hour
period, at the US mission, and then at the CIA annex in Benghazi.
 According to
some sources, the White House and State Department never
authorized military assets to cross over into Libya even as they
were being mobilized.

Leon Panetta, then the defense secretary,
admitted to Congress he had only had one conversation about the
attack on Benghazi with President Obama the night it happened, and
that the president did not ask for specifics on the kind of
response that would be possible. General Martin Dempsey added at
the time that the standard protocol was to keep White House aides
informed, not necessarily the president himself. Nevertheless, that
story is at odds with the president’s claims he’s “more
deeply involved” in intelligence operations than any president
before him. Not on September 11 he wasn’t.

A military response may have been impossible in any case—former
Bush and Obama defense secretary Robert Gates
told CBS’ Face the Nation in May that the idea that a response
was possible was based on a “cartoonish” view of the US military.
Cartoonish it may have been, with a price tag for US defense at
nearly $2 billion a day, it may not have been such a far-fetched
expectation.

None of this, of course, diminishes the bigger scandals in
Benghazi; in the immediate aftermath, administration officials and
their supporters sought
to blame an otherwise obscure YouTube clip on a “spontaneous
demonstration” that actually appeared, again
almost immediately, as a coordinated terrorist attack, putting
the First Amendment in the spotlight instead of the attackers. The
Obama Administration has also continued to avoid holding anyone
substantively accountable or providing any kind of real
transparency on the issue, going so far as to call it a “sideshow”
and asking
what difference at this point the details even make.