60 Minutes’ Lara Logan appeared on CBS This Morning today to inform viewers that the program would be issuing a formal apology during its November 10th broadcast. The apology will be about relying on a British security contractor’s account of events on the ground in Benghazi on 9/11/12. The contractor – Dylan Davies – went by the pseudonym Morgan Jones for the 60 Minutes report. In the report, Davies said he ran to the Special Mission Compound (SMC) during the attack and later saw the body of Ambassador Christopher Stevens at the hospital.

Logan: Her apology still leaves one important question unanswered.

In her interview with CBS This Morning, Logan said an FBI report attributed to Davies was inconsistent with that story.

In the days after the 60 Minutes piece, an incident report surfaced that was allegedly filed by Davies, though he denies ever writing one. However, he didn’t deny the account presented therein, which indicated he went to neither the SMC nor the hospital. When confronted about the conflicting accounts, Davies said he lied to his boss because he was told not to go to the SMC and didn’t want his boss to know he disobeyed an order.

That leads to an extremely important question: Was Davies instructed to stand down?

As a contractor retained by the U.S. State Department, this continues to remain a relevant question. If the answer is “yes”, it means that both the CIA Annex and a British soldier who had been contracted by the State Department had both been told to stand down.

The excerpt from the 60 Minutes piece that initially stood out to us had to do with Logan’s assertion that CIA Annex personnel “ignored orders to wait”. This statement is completely at odds with the findings of the Accountability Review Board (ARB), which was convened by… you guessed it, the State Department.

The ARB said the CIA Annex personnel were “not delayed by orders from superiors”.

Here is a short excerpt from the 60 Minutes report which includes that quote; that report has since been taken down from the 60 Minutes YouTube page:

It is interesting that Davies is being discredited but Logan’s claim that CIA Annex personnel “ignored orders to wait” is not.

Why? And what is the source of such a matter-of-fact claim?

It would seem that the distraction here is the credibility of Davies. The extremely important point of interest that is getting overlooked has to do with the claim that Davies was instructed to stand down. To this point, that has not been disputed. Doing so would call Davies’ courage into question because it would mean that he chose not to go to the SMC, then lied and said he did so he could write a book. No one seems willing to do that, nor should they be. The man was in Benghazi on 9/11/12. Courage was not in short supply; that we know.

60 Minutes has taken down the entire October 27th report from YouTube.

Here is Logan issuing her mea culpa on behalf of 60 Minutes, Via CBS This Morning: