71 search results for "Lara Logan"

War stories

by digby

Compared to a some of our most revered and loathed politicians, Brian Williams is a piker. A lot of people have been reminding the Republicans about Ronald Reagan’s tall tale about having been there when the allies liberated the Death Camps. Brian Beutler wrote about this one a while back:

Ronaldus Magnus. The most beloved man in all of conservatism repeatedly confused (or “confused”) scenes from his acting career with heroic battlefield moments…that he never participated in or witnessed. Reagan, for instance, is reported to have boasted to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal of photographing concentration camps at the end of World War II. He even told Shamir he’d helped liberate Auschwitz. In his autobiography he wrote “by the time I got out of the Army Air Corps all I wanted to do–in common with several million other veterans–was to rest up, make love to my wife.” But as Michael Schaller wrote in his bookReckoning with Reagan, “This obscured the fact that unlike most of the “several million other veterans,” Reagan had left neither home nor wife while in military service.”

I don’t see how anyone can condemn Williams and defend this. Not only was Reagan’s recollection an total fabrication, he put himself at the site of one of the most memorable moments in World War II. No word on why he’d abstained from making love to his wife for the duration since he was in Culver City and she was in the Palisades. Maybe he needed to rest up from schtupping starlets …

But how about this one which people may not recall:

Joe McCarthy AKA Tailgunner Joe. Because of his education McCarthy was given a commission, and he retired from the Marines as a captain. But he later claimed he’d enlisted as a private, flown more missions than he’d actually flown and been sent a letter of commendation by the Chief of Naval Operations. Turns out McCarthy wrote the letter himself. This all occurred before the work that made him truly famous: chief Communist witch hunter on Capitol Hill and chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

You have to give the guy some credit. It takes real chutzpah to write your own letter of commendation.

There’s nothing new about embellishing war stories.It’s a bipartisan sport. Williams’ doesn’t strike me as much of a transgression as those things go. Then again he is a journalist and I suppose they have to get worked up so they can pretend that “integrity” is something they still care about.

Oh, by the way, last time I checked, Lara Logan is still the chief foreign correspondent for 60 Minutes.

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Getting the Village band back together

by digby

I missed this press briefing so I didn’t catch the classic Village behavior. Brian Beutler did. It doesn’t bode well, I’m afraid:

Last week, after Republicans pivoted to Benghazi in unison, The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein observed an interesting phenomenon.

When it came time to put White House press secretary Jay Carney in the hot seat, reporters for smaller outlets—whose correspondents are consigned to the back rows of the briefing room—were interested in real, unfolding dramas: Ukraine, the Affordable Care Act, the Snowden disclosures, and so on.

But when Carney moved to the big-name journalists at the front of the room, the only thing anyone seemed to care about was Benghazi.

Oh Lordy, here we go again. Beutler points out the irony in the fact that the only people who’ve been damaged by this Benghazi! story so far have been big name journalists like Lara Logan and Jonathan Karl, burned by their GOP sources in ruthless fashion. He analyzes the phenomenon correctly, I think:

It suggests that something other (or more) than a zest for producing informative news is driving them. Actually, I think it’s a few different pressures, none of which are new, but which in this case combine to create a perverse incentive to create a story where none exists.

There’s a Drudge-like effect that drives reporters to tackle stories that they know will become widely consumed news products. Drudge himself is much less relevant than he used to be, but his influence is still detectable every time the press corps gloms onto a story that’s already lighting up marquee ideological outlets. In the old days, conservatives depended on Drudge to push stories from the ideological margin into the mainstream. But as media has polarized—and as electioneering has evolved from convincing the undecided to simply rallying the faithful—a meme that mainly plays out on conservative outlets is good enough for the GOP.

There’s also a related pressure to prove bona fides to conservative referee-workers, as if they might possibly be satisfied and will eventually stop making unfalsifiable charges of liberal bias.

And separately, when they feel that their subjects have withheld information from them, mainstream reporters become consumed by a trade association–like mentality, where the relevance and news value of the information become less important than making a point about transparency and the consequences of freezing out the press. Here I sympathize up to the point at which the withheld information turns out to not have any bearing on the story itself, as is apparently the case with the latest Benghazi disclosure.

Put it all together, and you get this weird phenomenon where less-prominent beat reporters have their eyes on the balls that are actually bouncing in front of them, and the press corps’ celebrities are fixated on one that popped a year ago.

Deja vu all over again. This is the phenomenon we saw in play for years back in the 90s. It’s hard to believe they might be getting the band back together particularly since Benghazi is obviously a made for TV Clinton scandal. It must be some kind of sense memory.

The only thing that Beutler leaves out is the way these scandals are engineered to snowball without any real resolution but to snowball into to an “atmosphere of scandal” that keeps on rolling and getting bigger with each new addition. Benghazi! is just the beginning.

I had been hopeful that the mainstream media would have wised up by now but apparently not. I guess never.

Benghazi!™

by digby

ICYMI, CBS News was named Misinformer of the year by Media Matters mostly (but not exclusively) for Lara Logan’s 60 Minutes Benghazi hoax:

Even now, nearly two months after it aired, almost nothing about CBS News’ “exclusive” (and infamous) 60 Minutes report on Benghazi makes sense. From conception, to execution, to the network’s stubborn claims that the report met its high standards even as it publicly dissolved, the story on the Benghazi terror attack of 2012 quickly became a case study in how not to practice journalism on the national stage. And in how dangerous it is to lose sight of fair play and common sense when wielding the power and prestige of the country’s most-watched news program.

The 60 Minutes Benghazi hoax had it all: a flimsy political premise featuring previously debunked myths, a correspondent with an established agenda, a blinding corporate conflict of interest, and an untrustworthy “witness” who apparently fabricated his story and had once reportedly asked a journalist to pay him for his information.

It’s quite a cock-up, but the most surprising thing about it is that it came from CBS instead of what we used to think of as one of the Right Wing Noise Machine flagship organizations. Benghazi!™ is a story the right wing has flogged endlessly as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s 9/11 despite the fact that it made no sense whatsoever.

And how galling it must be to have this contradictory, epic investigative report on Benghazi hit the front page of the NY Times today:

Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

A fuller accounting of the attacks suggests lessons for the United States that go well beyond Libya. It shows the risks of expecting American aid in a time of desperation to buy durable loyalty, and the difficulty of discerning friends from allies of convenience in a culture shaped by decades of anti-Western sentiment. Both are challenges now hanging over the American involvement in Syria’s civil conflict.

The attack also suggests that, as the threats from local militants around the region have multiplied, an intensive focus on combating Al Qaeda may distract from safeguarding American interests.

Once again it’s revealed that the US military isn’t a super-hero who can sweep in and save the day simply because we are a powerful nation with good intentions. The people who benefit often don’t thank us for our trouble. In fact, for all out vaunted high tech intelligence we often get it all wrong and do more harm than good when we wage war or empower others to do it.  In fact, wars of choice are a blunt instrument that almost always makes things worse. Imagine that.

Update: If you thought the RWNM would accept the NYT’s account lying down, think again. Nothing can shake their faith in Benghazi!™

Keep in mind that the author of this piece, Stephen Hayes, also wrote a book called The Connection: How Al Qaeda’s Collaboration With Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America and was repeatedly cited by Dick Cheney as reliable.

Failing up at CBS

by digby

Apparently, CBS plans to deal with the impending loss of their official National Security state fluffer by inviting their most notorious hoaxter back into the fold having only “suffered” a month’s vacation over the holidays:

Lara Logan and Max McClellan, the ’60 Minutes’ journalists who were put on a leave of absence following their now-retracted report on Benghazi, are set to return to the program early next year, POLITICO has learned.

Logan and her producer, who had unfinished projects in the works when they left in November, have started booking camera crews for news packages, network sources said. Their return could come as early as next month.

CBS says it hasn’t been officially “scheduled” yet which just means the exact dates aren’t decided. Logan’s coming back and will suffer no long term repercussions.

In case you are wondering what Dan Rather is up to these days, you can find him doing interesting long form reporting at AXSTV. He is persona non grata at the Tiffany network. After all, he relied on a bad source about an inconsequential story from 40 years ago, which is unforgivable. Logan will still have the most vaunted news program in history pushing her shallow jigoistic drivel — whether it’s true or not.

One of the less discussed aspects of the work Greenwald and his cohorts are doing (and presumably will continue to do) is their intention to rebel against the conventions and structures of not just the government but of mainstream journalism, in both style and substance. His new venture with Pierre Omidyar is being designed around this new journalism and should be a very interesting experiment. CBS, on the other hand, seems to be intent upon becoming the avatar of everything that’s wrong with it, most especially its overweening supplication to the powerful, both in the private sector and the government. Considering its proud history going all the way back to the 50s it’s a sad denouement.

For a rundown of the “problems” with last night’s 60 Minutes advertisement for NSA secrecy, see this article by Spencer Ackerman.

It’s holiday fundraiser time …

Just because it was a lie doesn’t mean it wasn’t true

by digby

No surprise here:

CBS News confirmed on Monday that Logan and producer Max McClellan were asked to take a leave of absence after an internal review of her reporting found major flaws. Logan had been forced to apologize and issue a partial retraction when reports from other media outlets showed that her source, security contractor Dylan Davies, was not at the U.S. mission in Benghazi during the Sept. 11, 2011 terrorist attack as he had claimed.

On Wednesday morning, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade asked Huckabee to respond to the news that Logan had been effectively suspended indefinitely from 60 Minutes.

“Very shocked,” Huckabee said. “And I think that the fact is that we’re missing the big story here. We still don’t know what happened in Benghazi. Our government lied to us, they covered it up.”

“Lara Logan is certainly a hero journalist to at least attempt to get the story out,” he added.

She is a hero journalist who has been in the path of great danger over the years, true. But in her “attempt to get the story out” as she wanted to tell it, she reported a hoax. Maybe if she hadn’t jumped to conclusions about what happened in Benghazi from the beginning (as the whole right wing has done) she wouldn’t have been so eager to believe her source’s absurd story — which anyone with half a brain could see was right out of a cheap novel or video game.

But this does illustrate how Fox News looks at the facts. They just don’t matter. Which is not “advocacy journalism.” It’s propaganda.

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McClatchy takes the 60 Minutes “review” to task

by digby

McClatchy, which did an excellent analysis of problems beyond the hoax in Lara Logan’s Benghazi story now takes a look at the obvious deficiencies in the “review” that resulted in Logan and her producer being suspended (with pay evidently):

Ortiz’s 10-point summary of his findings skirts some of the main issues still lingering about the segment. He offered no explanation, for example, of how Logan came in contact with Dylan Davies, the main source for the story, or why Logan did not reveal that Davies had written a soon-to-be-published book for another CBS-owned company. The book project since has been canceled.

The review also did not explain Logan’s assertions that al Qaida was behind the attack – that is a widely disputed assertion – or that the hospital where Stevens was treated was controlled by al Qaida, something that was inaccurate. The review concluded only that Logan had not attributed those assertions properly.
[…]
Ortiz did not address whether Davies was put in touch with “60 Minutes” by the would-be publisher of his book, Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS. “‘60 Minutes’ erred in not disclosing that connection in the segment,” Ortiz concluded.

The review also refers to other questions raised by McClatchy. The 15-minute segment repeatedly referred to the attack as an al Qaida operation, saying that fact was “well known,” and claimed Stevens was treated at a hospital controlled by al Qaida.

But who took part in storming the compound is disputed, and there is no known information that the attack was led by al Qaida. Instead, the attackers consisted of members of several jihadist groups, including Ansar al Shariah, a Libyan militia that was responsible for security in much of Benghazi. Several Libyans told McClatchy the hospital was guarded by Ansar al Shariah, not al Qaida.

The journalistic review did not question the accuracy of Logan’s assertions about al Qaida but said they were inadequately attributed in the segment.
[…]
The review also backed the report’s assertion that Stevens’ schedule for Sept. 12, 2012, had been found in the compound more than a year after the attack. But it skirts the fact that the only person CBS dispatched to Benghazi during what “60 Minutes” called a “year-long investigation” was a security contractor who, in his words, “works in journalism.”

“Video taken by the producer-cameraman whom the ‘60 Minutes’ team sent to the Benghazi compound last month clearly shows that the pictures of the Technical Operations Center were authentic, including the picture of the schedule in the debris,” the memo said.

But the contractor did not describe himself as a producer-cameraman in a conversation with McClatchy, in which he recounted hiring two Libyans to accompany him on Oct. 4-7 for the story. The contractor, who contacted McClatchy, refused to give his real name or name the company for which he works, but he provided photos from his visit.

On Tuesday, McClatchy found the memo shown in the “60 Minutes” report, lying on top of debris in the compound’s technical operations center.

The memo, however, undercuts Logan’s assertion that the Benghazi Medical Center was under al Qaida control at the time of the attack. The schedule shows that Stevens was scheduled to visit the medical center at 11 a.m. – an unlikely destination if the hospital had been controlled by al Qaida.

I don’t even know what to say about the fact that this contractor-journalist just happened to find Ambassador Stevens’ schedule lying atop the rubble a year after the event, but it is more than a little bit curious.

Up until now, I haven’t written about Logan’s contractor husband because I’m just not comfortable attributing any problems with her journalism to what he does. But this does make me curious now because it turns out we’re dealing with two contractors in the middle of this bogus story, one who’s been completely discredited and one who’s some kind of mercenary reporter. And Logan’s also married to one (although there’s some dispute as to just how much of a real spook sort he really was.) When you combine tall hat with Logan’s lugubrious characterization in her piece of the contractor con man as someone “who’s been keeping our diplomats safe from harm for years” you start to think there really could be a connection. I have no real evidence of it obviously, but it’s pretty clear that the world of contractors in general may have been a factor in this hoax.

In any case, you just have to laugh at this:

When Logan and Burkett began their affair in Baghdad, he was married and she was in a relationship. They were married in 2008. “I knew him for about six years before we got together,” she told The New York Times in a soft-focus feature in 2012. “He had a very secretive job, and I always respected that. I know tons of people in that world, and I never ask them questions because it’s a violation right there.”

“He never crossed my boundaries,” Logan said of Burkett. “I never crossed his.”

Can you see the problem here? She knows tons of people in “that world” but never asks them questions because it would be a “violation?” Logan is CBS News’ Chief Foreign Correspondent. I don’t know what she thinks she’s “violating” but it’s obvious to me that she’s violating the terms of her employment. Journalists ask questions. It’s the most basic requirement of the job.

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Oh good. Freedom of the press is sort of, for the moment, maybe, safe

by digby

This is really a question?

Holder indicated that the Justice Department is not planning to prosecute former Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who received documents from Snowden and has written a series of stories based on the leaked material. Greenwald, an American citizen who lives in Brazil, has said he is reluctant to come to the U.S. because he fears detention and possible prosecution.

“Unless information that has not come to my attention is presented to me, what I have indicated in my testimony before Congress is that any journalist who’s engaged in true journalistic activities is not going to be prosecuted by this Justice Department,” Holder said.

“I certainly don’t agree with what Greenwald has done,” Holder said. “In some ways, he blurs the line between advocate and journalist. But on the basis of what I know now, I’m not sure there is a basis for prosecution of Greenwald.”

That’s big of him. I wonder if he thinks Lara Logan blurs the line between advocate and journalist? Or Brit Hume? Or Melissa Harris Perry? Or Rachel Maddow?

I’m pretty sure that’s advocacy.

I don’t happen to think any of those people I mentioned have broken any rules by being advocates and journalists. But I wonder if the Attorney General agrees.

Glenn responded to the generous announcement by the Attorney General that the first Amendment still exists:

“That this question is even on people’s minds is a rather grim reflection of the Obama administration’s record on press freedoms,” he said in an e-mail. “It is a positive step that the Attorney General expressly recognizes that journalism is not and should not be a crime in the United States, but given this administration’s poor record on press freedoms, I’ll consult with my counsel on whether one can or should rely on such caveat-riddled oral assertions about the government’s intentions.”

Yeah, until the Attorney General is more than simply “not sure” there is a basis for prosecuting someone for committing journalism, I think I’d err on the side of caution.

I still can’t believe this even a question but just reading the authoritarian pronouncements of allegedly liberal journalists on this subject reminds me that my  faith in the bedrock American values of freedom of speech and the press was naive in the extreme.

Oh and by the way, those same allegedly liberal journalists should, but probably own’t, thank Snowden and the journalists who published his files for the fact that the DOJ is now going to do something it should have been doing all along:

The disclosure about the review of criminal cases comes just weeks after the Justice Department informed a suspect for the first time that it intends to use evidence against him gathered through the government’s warrantless surveillance program under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The Justice Department notifications are likely to lead to a constitutional challenge to surveillance law, which allows the interception of electronic communication between foreign targets and people in the United States. The Supreme Court had previously declined to hear a challenge to the law because litigants could not prove they had been monitored.

Holder said he did not know how many cases are involved, but he said the notifications will come on a rolling basis as Justice Department officials find the information.

The notifications could, in some instances, involve cases where defendants have already been convicted and are in prison. In those matters, defense attorneys may try to reopen the cases.

For the first time last month, the Justice Department informed a terrorism suspect in Colorado that it intends to use “information obtained or derived from acquisition of foreign intelligence information conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”

The notification came in the case against Jamshid Muhtorov, a refu­gee from Uzbekistan who lives in Aurora, Colo. He was charged in 2012 with providing material aid to the Islamic Jihad Union, and he and another man were suspected of trying to participate in a terrorist attack planned by the group.

That first notification came after a vigorous internal debate last summer between lawyers in the National Security Division and Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who argued that there was no legal basis for withholding disclosure, said an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

The National Security Division lawyers had argued that it was not necessary to make the notifications unless the evidence derived from the wiretap or intercepted e-mail was introduced directly into the case, the official said. Eventually, Verrilli’s argument won out.

The conservative courts will probably just end up legalizing warrantless surveillance as the government tends to do with all these messy questions these days but at least we’ll have a little more transparency.
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The War of the Worlds, Part XXV


by digby

Run for your lives !!!!

Tarek Mehanna of Sudbury received a fair trial when he was convicted of four terror-related charges and three charges of lying to authorities, a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found. Mehanna was sentenced to 17 1/2 years in federal prison, which the court also upheld.

“Terrorism is the modern-day equivalent of the bubonic plague: It is an existential threat,” the court said, adding that the case required the trial court “to patrol a fine line between national security concerns and forbidden encroachments on constitutionally protected freedoms of speech and association.”

What are the terrorists going to do, invade us on millions of life rafts? Recruit the Pentagon to blow up the US Congress and the president? Are they going to march into Washington and take over the government at gun point or are they going to run for office and win democratically? Because I can’t see any way in hell that “terrorism” is an existential threat unless they are able to somehow take over our government and turn the US into a Caliphate, something which some fundamentalists may dream of in their messianic fever but which has the same chance of actually happening as an invasion from the Moon.

And here’s what the bubonic plague did to Europe, via Wikipedia:

The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, killing an estimated 75 to 200 million people and peaking in Europe in the years 1348–50 CE. Although there were several competing theories as to the etiology of the Black Death, analysis of DNA from victims in northern and southern Europe published in 2010 and 2011 indicates that the pathogen responsible was the Yersinia pestis bacterium, probably causing several forms of plague.

The Black Death is thought to have originated in the arid plains of central Asia, where it then travelled along the Silk Road, reaching the Crimea by 1346. From there, it was most likely carried by Oriental rat fleas living on the black rats that were regular passengers on merchant ships. Spreading throughout the Mediterranean and Europe, the Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60% of Europe’s total population. All in all, the plague reduced the world population from an estimated 450 million down to 350–375 million in the 14th century.

Al Qaeda killed 3000 people on 9/11 and hundreds more in other terrorist attacks around the world.

What sophistry from a federal appeals court. What total unadulterated bullshit.

Honestly, until I heard Lara Logan going on like a lunatic about the “dark forces” who want to take us back centuries and now this, I had thought we had evolved past the looney tunes, panic artist nonsense of the post 9/11 period. (What’s Victor Davis Hanson been up to lately anyway?)

Also too: We might just want to be a little bit more skeptical of claims that terrorism is the modern equivalent of the bubonic plague and is going to kill us all in our beds and a little bit less skeptical of the real modern equivalent of the bubonic plague — an actual plague that will kill us all in our beds. 

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Benghazi comedy and some keen insight

by digby

The Colbert Report and Daily Shows both had hilarious takes on the 60 Minutes debacle last night. Here’s Stephen:

The Colbert Report
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The Colbert Report
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Stewart takes on Huckleberry Graham’s refusal to change his view in light of the “correction”:

The Daily Show
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On a more serious note, this piece on the hoax and its meaning by Amy Davidson gets to the point I’ve recently come to understand is at the heart of this controversy: Lara Logan’s mediocre journalism (which is informed by her highly romantic, Manichean worldview):

It’s a sad aspect of this story that Logan claims the segment was more than a year in the making. Where did the time go? In the fairly long piece, Logan fails to offer any real statement about the Administration’s perspective. Only two other people are interviewed on camera. One is a military man who doesn’t understand why the diplomats didn’t get out of Benghazi months earlier. Another is a diplomat who doesn’t understand why, at the critical moment, significant military forces didn’t move into Benghazi from across the border. Davies, who is somehow supposed to tie these threads together, doesn’t understand why, on the first day he first arrived in the city, he found Libyan guards “inside, drinking tea, laughing and joking” rather than looking sharp, and why everyone didn’t heed a private contractor, like him. Not that Davies is identified as such: he’s a “security officer,” Logan says. “A former British soldier, he’s been helping to keep U.S. diplomats and military leaders safe for the last decade.” (Nor does she mention that his book, promoted in the segment, was published by Simon & Schuster, a unit of CBS, something she has admitted was a mistake.) But who knows what Davies said before or during the attack. His account is about as good as a spilled cup of tea, making the rest unreadable.

Those military and diplomatic questions deserve better answers, ones about policy choices rather than half-discerned conspiracies. You wouldn’t know from Logan’s report that the United States was engaged at the time in a historic and violent transition in Libya, in which the Qaddafi regime was overthrown with the help of our forces, or about that revolution’s disordered denouement, or about the Obama Administration’s decision to ignore the War Powers Act. Libya is presented as nothing but a place with a diplomatic mission and Al Qaeda’s black flags in the street. Brave men swinging rifle butts are thwarted by craven ones in Washington who won’t move their “military assets” into the country.

And as she points out, nobody’s bothering to tell the real story:

Benghazi the scandal is full of absurdities. Libya, the real country, is the scene of its own national tragedy, and an American one, the walls of which have barely been scaled.

Logan’s not interested in such panty-waist navel-gazing so unless that story can be told through stories of brave mercenaries saving Western Civilization from the forces of darkness, I wouldn’t count on 60 Minutes to do it. You’ll get a much more grounded understanding by watching Colbert and Stewart.

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The purple prose of Dylandavies/Morganjones

by digby

Mother Jones has excerpts of the Dylan Davies/Morgan Jones book about his Benghazi exploits. He describes how he was visited after the fact by three FBI agents, a State Department staffer, and “a lady in her late fifties who introduced herself as a head prosecutor from New York”. They asked his opinion of security at the embassy:

“Where d’you want me to start? We had fucking loads of concerns. We—or rather the RSOs [Regional Security Officers]—detailed those concerns in numerous emails to the State Department. Nothing was ever done.” I paused. “And you know what— I feel guilty as fuck because we failed to get the security sorted, and because on the day of the race I let the RSOs down…”

The woman prosecutor stepped in now. “No, no, no—let’s be clear on one thing: you let no one down.” “Dead right,” the FBI guy added. “Without you we’d have no information at all right now. Since the attack no one has been on the ground in that compound apart from you, and we cannot thank you enough for all those photos.” “I still feel guilty that I didn’t make it over the wall the first time I tried.” I went to make them all another coffee. The lady prosecutor came into the kitchen. “Hey, you know, Morgan— you did a good thing,” she volunteered. “You did the right thing. Do not beat yourself up over this, okay? You’re a good man. A good man, you hear me?” I was tearing up. She was the motherly, kindly figure that I needed right now, and it was good of her to say those words. She stayed with me as I made the coffees, but in the background I could hear the guys firing questions back and forth at each other in hushed voices. You ask him…No, you ask him…

I took them in the tray of drinks. “Guys: Listen up. I heard you whispering. I heard you saying ask him this; ask him that. You have something you want to ask me, or that you think might upset me or is insensitive—just ask. Let’s get it out there. I will not be offended.” “No, no, man, everything is okay,” the FBI guy who’d led the questioning reassured me. “And hey, thanks for the coffees…”

It was time for the team to leave. They thanked me for all that I had done in Benghazi…They told me they’d need me to fly to the United States at some point, to give my side of the story in full. I said I’d be happy to go. Whatever it would take to try to right the wrongs perpetrated on that hellish night, and to ensure the lessons would be learned. The lead FBI agent gave me his card: “You ever need anything ever, you just call me.” The guy who was the most choked-up among them embraced me. The lady prosecutor gave me a hug as well. “You did the right thing,” she told me again. “You did the right thing.”

You can see why he had the whole 60 Minutes crew so fooled. I’m sure FBI agents and prosecutors always treat their witnesses with such reverence when they’re in the field. And everybody knows they’re a weepy bunch. There’s nothing in that story to set off any alarm bells with professional journalists.

Here’s how Lara Logan describes her own skill at cutting through lies:

LARA LOGAN: And I can’t stand interviewing people who lie to you all the time, or wrap what they have to say in so much diplomatic speak that you spend hours just trying to work out what the hell they just told you. I prefer people that are straight talking.

MARVIN KALB: Do you think the military people when they talk to you are straight talkers?

LARA LOGAN: Not always, not always. But I’ve become very adept at sorting out the talking points from what’s real. And over the years, I’ve acquired a reputation for having some depth of knowledge, so they’re a little more nervous about serving me up a plate of– this is recorded, right?

That man, who described himself in laughably heroic terms, scaling walls in the dark, taking on the terrorists mano a mano, apparently sounded “real” to her. To me, he sounded like Glenn Beck’s hero in his “don’t tease the panther” novel (which could be Dylandaviesmorganjones’ inspiration, now that I think of it.)

Chris Hayes had an excellent discussion of the story tonight, well worth watching if you want to catch up.

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