November 1, 2013


CBS "60 Minutes" with Lara Logan.

UPDATE: From the comments, witsended notes a report in The Telegraph on October 14th of last year:

"Blue Mountain, the Camarthen firm that won a $387,000 (£241,000) one year contract from the US State Department to protect the compound in May, sent just one British employee, recruited from the celebrity bodyguard circuit, to oversee the work."
...
"Darryl Davies, the manager of the Benghazi contract for Blue Mountain, flew out of the city hours before the attack was launched. The Daily Telegraph has learned that relations between the firm and its Libyan partner had broken down, leading to the withdrawal of Mr Davies."

Then there's this:

" US congressional investigators have told the Daily Telegraph that consular staff had reported Blue Mountain guards to the Libyan police on one occasion last year. The diplomats believed that two disgruntled Blue Mountain employees were behind a minor pipe bomb attack on the facility.

However after questioning no action was taken by the police or company over the incident."

A pipe bomb attack on the consulate committed by the "security contractors," members of congress were aware of this, and yet Blue Mountain was left to continue to "guard" the diplomats. WTF?

And more confirmation that "Darryl Davies" was no where near the Benghazi consulate.
_________________________________________________________________________________

That belated "60 Minutes" hit job on the Benghazi tragedy -- highly touted by Fox News, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and others on the right -- is now under attack over serious credibility issues.

Graham used the “60 Minutes” report to justify calling Monday for additional hearings into Benghazi and threatened to block a vote on President Obama's nominees until lawmakers had heard from all the surviving witnesses to the attack.

The Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung strongly calls into question the star witness promoted by Lara Logan, who just happens to have a book to sell, has asked for money for his account, and told a completely different tale in his official report on the night of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

The man CBS called Morgan Jones, a pseudonym, described his heroic efforts to save the besieged Americans at the Benghazi compound while the attack was underway, scaling a 12-foot wall and taking down a terrorist with the butt end of a rifle.

So brave. So full of shit.

WaPo:

"But in a written account that Jones, whose real name was confirmed as Dylan Davies by several officials who worked with him in Benghazi, provided to his employer three days after the attack, he told a different story of his experiences that night.

In Davies’s 21 / 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’ 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.

The State Department and GOP congressional aides confirmed that Davies’s Sept. 14, 2012, report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, was included among tens of thousands of documents turned over to lawmakers by the State Department this year."

After the program aired, Fox News' correspondent Adam Housley revealed that he had spoke with Jones on the phone a number of times, but the conversations ended when "he asked for money."

Jones' new book written about the attacks, "The Embassy House," was released this week by a publisher with ties to CBS, a disclosure not included in the "60 Minutes" segment.

Damien Lewis, who co-authored Jones' book, was unaware of the incident report submitted to Blue Mountain but offered one possible explanation to the Washington Post:

“All I can presume, and again I’m speculating, is that his boss told him to stay in the villa and not go anywhere. So he would have penned a report and said he had done what was ordered."

When asked if Senator Graham's hold on all White House nominees was still in effect in light of the criticisms of Jones's account, Graham's spokesman said "no change."

CBS spokesman for "60 Minutes" Kevin Tedesco said, “We stand firmly by the story we broadcast last Sunday.”

Media Matters chairman David Brock is calling on CBS to retract its story. In his letter to CBS executives, Brock writes that the story should be "immediately retracted and an independent investigative committee needs to probe all aspects of how the story was reported."

You can read Brock's full letter to CBS here.

Discussion

We welcome relevant, respectful comments. Any comments that are sexist or in any other way deemed hateful by our staff will be deleted and constitute grounds for a ban from posting on the site. Please refer to our Terms of Service for information on our posting policy.
Mastodon