CBS May Issue A Correction To Its Bombshell Report On Benghazi
CBS issued a tersely written statement Thursday night that said the network was looking into whether it was misled by Morgan Jones (a pseudonym), the star source in a recent "60 Minutes" segment on the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi.
The full statement:
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.
The move follows more than a week of criticism that had piled up on the network amid an investigation into Dylan Davies' (the source's real name) previous claims.
The Washington Post reported last week that Davies had previously submitted an incident report to his employer in which he said he was not near the compound during the attack, an account that differed from the one he gave to CBS. He later told The Daily Beast that he had been "smeared," and that he didn't write the incident report.
But it appears that CBS released its statement pre-emptively Thursday night to counter a story in the New York Times that says Davies, a security officer hired to protect the mission, told the FBI that he did not go to the compound the night of the attack.
That is consistent with what he told Blue Mountain, the Britain-based contractor hired by the State Department to secure the perimeter at the compound, and inconsistent with what he told CBS.
In a previous interview with the New York Times' Bill Carter, the network had defended its reporting on the segment, which had renewed scrutiny on the Obama administration. And Lara Logan, the correspondent who reported the segment for more than a year, said criticism of the network was due to politics.
"We worked on this for a year. We killed ourselves not to allow politics into this report," she told the Times.
CBS has pulled the page that contained the original report from its site:
CBS
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