We all just want the truth, right? If so, then Darrell Issa should immediately commence investigating CBS’ Benghazi witness after his admission that he lied in documents supplied to Congress about where he was on the night of the attack.
Dylan Davies made quite a splash in an October 27 60 Minutes report, in which he detailed his own heroics while managing to smear others. It turns out, he lied about where he was that night. He told his superiors and our Congress that he couldn’t get near the compound that night due to roadblocks, but he was actually busy saving the world, according to his book and his CBS show.
Of course, Dylan Davies isn’t the name he used in his story. He plays Morgan Jones, security officer for Blue Mountain, the Britain-based contractor hired by the State Department, and also, terrorist bester, wall jumper, and general fearless Benghazi fighter extraordinaire. Where others failed, he jumped in.
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Karen DeYoung at the Washington Post broke it down:
The man whom CBS called Morgan Jones, a pseudonym, described racing to the Benghazi compound while the attack was underway, scaling a 12-foot wall and downing an extremist with the butt end of a rifle as he tried in vain to rescue the besieged Americans.
Ah, yes. Almost like a movie or a Republican gun fetish fantasy where the hero is naturally played by the guy who wrote the book. The problem is that this guy, under his real name, told quite a different story in an incident report. This different story was also provided to Congressional committees investigating the Benghazi attacks, so we might expect Darrell Issa to call Davies in to testify ASAP—after all, Issa excuses his epic spending on witch hunts by saying he just wants the truth.
Did Davies lie? Yes, and he apparently lied to Congress unless his book and CBS interview were lies. It’s one or the other.
In his incident report, Davies claims he was at a beach villa that night and his superior ordered him to stay away from the attack. If that’s true someone might want to ask Blue Mountain for their definition of perimeter “security”. Who knows, maybe this is all we could afford after Republicans cut the budget for embassy and consulate security. So, at any rate, he was nowhere near the compound to be scaling walls and “downing” terrorists per his book and CBS show.
Unsurprisingly, the GOP is impressed and satisfied by fiction. Karen DeYoung at the Washington Post broke the problems with Davies’ story. She further reported, “Republican aides said discrepancies in Davies’s accounts do not undermine wider points made by him”.
But then, all it takes to impress them these days is a con artist and deep contempt for this president and anyone who voted for him.
In an interview with the Daily Beast, Davies claimed he did not write the incident report. Instead he complained about mudslinging, as if writing his uncorroborated and now deeply suspicious account was not mudslinging – but someone providing an account with his name on it is mudslinging.
Josh Rogin for Daily Beast:
The four-page indicent (sic) report, obtained by The Daily Beast, has not been previously published. A State Department official confirmed it matches the version sent to the U.S. government by Davies’s then-employer Blue Mountain Group, the private security company based in Britain, on Sept. 14, 2012, and subsequently provided to Congressional committees investigating the Benghazi attacks.
The incident report can be read in full here, via Daily Beast.
If you’re waiting for the part where CBS does what it did to Dan Rather, you can forget it. That’s not happening. CBS is following ABC’s Benghazi emails lies path — defend, deny, ignore and never explain. A spokesman for the the CBS “documentary”, Kevin Tedesco, told the Washington Post he stands by the story. The very talented Lara Logan is behind this story. So either the story isn’t true or Davies or his employer lied in documents supplied to Congress as a part of a Congressional inquiry. If Issa is so concerned about security, isn’t this a screaming alarm?
Questions remain as to whether or not CBS knew of the incident report prior to airing the interview, or if they have some reason for ignoring it, but the discrepancies loom large. Possibly compounding the issues surrounding Davies’ story, Fox News correspondent Adam Housley claimed that Davies demanded money to talk. If Fox News won’t touch a story that helps them hate on Obama or Clinton, that story is possibly lower than dirt.
Darrell Issa is apparently not concerned about being lied to by someone whose inaccuracies help Darrell Issa try to impeach Obama over a fake scandal while never addressing the Republicans defunding security. So, co-opting real heroes’ stories with what appears to be a fake one, and dragging the families of the four slain through the agony of this all again is all okay with CBS and the GOP, or this guy didn’t lie in his stories, in which case he lied to Congress. (One of our writers was colleagues with one of the slain, and this small connection always makes my heart constrict for his family and friends every time the GOP tries to politicize the Benghazi attack again. It’s just so ugly.)
When WaPo tried to get to the bottom of Davies’ two stories, “Damien Lewis, co-author of the book, said in a telephone interview that Davies was ‘not well’ and is hospitalized.” Davies told the Daily Beast that he underwent medical procedures last week because his doctors believe he has testicular cancer.
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