CBS, Lara Logan Apologize For Fake 60 Minutes Benghazi Report, Fire Dan Rather Again

Oopsies! Seems like today must be Apology Day -- we have Barack Obama apologizing that his line about keeping your own insurance didn't include an asterisk to cover really crappy private-market plans, the Republican Congressional Committee calling on Democrats to apologize for not repealing a law they passed, a Texas school district not apologizing for something it should be very, very ashamed of, and now, here's CBS's Lara Logan, apologizing for that 60 Minutes report about Benghazi that was based on the fantasies of a guy who now says that you should trust him, because everything else he previously said about Benghazi was a lie. Too many apologies in one day? We regret nothing! 

So anyhoo, on CBS This Morning this morning, Lara Logan explains that Dylan Davies, the security contractor 60 Minutes built its report around, was not exactly the most reliable guy in the world:

Dylan Davies worked for the State Department in Libya. He was the manager of the local guard force at the Benghazi special mission compound, and he described for us his actions that night, saying that he had entered the compound and he had a confrontation with one of the attackers, and he also said that he had seen the body of Ambassador Chris Stevens in a local hospital. And after our report aired, questions were raised about whether his account was real. After an incident report surfaced that told a different story about what he'd done that night. And, you know, he denied that report. And he said that he told the FBI the same story that he had told us, but what we now know is that he told the FBI a different story to what he told us. And, you know, that was the moment for us when we realized that we no longer had confidence in our source, and that we were wrong to put him on air, and we apologize to our viewers.

Further, Logan said that the 60 Minutes crew was not aware of the original 2012 after-action report that Davies had submitted to his employer, British security contractor Blue Mountain, in which he told his superiors that he had been unable to get to the diplomatic complex because of roadblocks, so he spent the entire time of the attack at his beach villa. Logan said that they initially believed Davies' claim that a  Washington Post story on that report was inaccurate, because he had always told them that he'd disobeyed orders not to go to the compound to help the Americans, but had fibbed about it to his boss.

And of course, even if Davies hadn't been lying, there's nothing in either version of his story that suggests that Benghazi was anything but an awful series of security miscalculations. We're still waiting to hear from the pilot of the nonexistent gunship that Rush Limbaugh thinks Valerie Jarrett ordered not to save the Americans, not to mention a copy of the nonexistent "stand down" order and tapes of the "live feed" that Barack Obama watched in his peripheral vision while having a gay cocaine orgy and poking pins into a Darrell Issa voodoo doll.

But we won't be holding our breath.

[ MediaMatters ]