Exclusive: Benghazi Whistleblower Says He Was Smeared

[DonViejo]

Exclusive: Benghazi Whistleblower Says He Was Smeared

by Eli Lake, Josh Rogin Nov 2, 2013 7:41 PM EDT

A leaked memo appears to undermine significant details in a new book from a witness to the embassy attacks. But its alleged author tells The Daily Beast he didn't write it. Plus, new pictures from the compound.

The Benghazi whistleblower whose new book details massive security failures in the run-up to the September 11, 2012 attacks denies he wrote an incident report made public this week that undermines key details in his memoir.

The debate over the Obama administration’s actions before and after the attack on the U.S. mission was reignited following an Oct. 27 60 Minutes report featuring an interview with Morgan Jones, a pseudonym for a British security contractor who trained and advised the local Libyan guard force for the U.S. mission in Benghazi. Jones’s book, The Embassy House, was released two days later and contains a firsthand account of his time in Benghazi and his actions during the series of attacks that resulted in the death of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

Controversy over Jones’s interview and book reached a high pitch on Oct. 31 when The Washington Post published details of an incident report allegedly written by Jones that contradicts the account in his book and reveals his real name, Dylan Davies.

The four-page indicent 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.

Full article
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/02/exclusive-benghazi-whistleblower-says-he-was-smeared.html

Note: Other DU'ers have id'd Eli Lake, one of the authors of this piece, as a wing nut. --DV

[Tx4obama]

1. ... the man identified in the report as Morgan Jones... real name was confirmed as Dylan Davies...

Media Matters Founder Calling on 60 Minutes to Retract Report on Benghazi

60 Minutes did a new, in-depth report on the attack at the American consulate in Benghazi last year, and it helped to revitalize the national debate over the attack. CBS’s report featured an exclusive with a man who recounted what he witnessed, but Media Matters founder David Brock is calling on 60 Minutes to retract the report for a big error.

The key criticism here surrounds the man identified in the report as Morgan Jones (though his real name was confirmed as Dylan Davies afterwards). He told 60 Minutes he was witness to the attack, and described what he saw around him, but a Washington Post report on Thursday says that does not match his earlier testimony on the matter, just three days after the attack on the compound.

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’s 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.

http://www.mediaite.com/online/media-matters-founder-calling-on-60-minutes-to-retract-report-on-benghazi/

[Xipe Totec]

2. If you don't want to get smeared, don't throw shit at the fan. nt

[geek tragedy]

3. His story: well, yeah, I'm a liar, but I lie for the right reasons

In his interview with The Daily Beast, Davies said the version of the events contained in the incident report matched what he told his supervisor, called “Robert” in his book, who is a top Blue Mountain Group executive. Davies said he lied to Robert about his actions that night because he did not want his supervisor to know he had disobeyed his orders to stay at his villa.

The Daily Beast has redacted the true name of Robert out of his concern for his privacy.

“He told me under no circumstances was I to go up there. I respected him so much I did not want him to know that I had not listened to him,” said Davies, referring to Robert. “I have not seen him since.”

Davies also wrote in his book that Robert had instructed him not to go to the compound under any circumstances. Davies called Robert after going to the hospital, he said, but before his first visit to the compound on the night of Sept. 11. Davies says he told Robert the ambassador was dead but did not tell him what he was up to.

“He was my boss, but more important, he was a father figure and a man of unrivaled experience,” Davies wrote about Robert in the book. “Robert presumed I was still in the villa. I’d chosen not to tell him that I was in a car with two of my guards driving away from the hospital.”