Fox News' Special Report continued the network's attempts to push the myth that a “stand down order” was issued to American security personnel on the ground during the 2012 Benghazi attacks, a claim immediately debunked by a panelist on the show.

On the September 4 edition of Special Report, host Bret Baier aired video of his interview with three CIA security personnel who responded to the September 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi. The interview will be featured during Fox News' special “13 Hours at Benghazi,” which will air on September 5 and is based on a forthcoming book of the same name that the personnel played a role in writing. Introducing the interview, Baier asked the former security personnel about what he claimed to be “one of the most controversial questions arising from Benghazi: Was helped delayed?” Baier described the interview as a “dramatic new turn in what the Obama administration and its allies would like to dismiss as an old story.”

The three CIA security personnel explained to Baier that the CIA's station chief in Benghazi told them to wait before responding to the attacks. One of the men told Baier “I assumed they were trying to coordinate us to link up with 17 February, which is the local militia.”

But contrary to Baier's presentation of the story as new and “dramatic,” New York Times reported in a September 4 article that the security personnel accounts made in the book “fits with the publicly known facts and chronology,” explaining that U.S. officials have previously acknowledged that “the Central Intelligence Agency security team paused to try to enlist support from Libyan militia allies.”

In fact, during a panel discussing Baier's interview later on the program, conservative Washington Post columnist Charles Lane explained that the delay was probably to ensure the safety of the remaining CIA security personnel and was, in fact, not controversial at all:

LANE: The person I want to hear from is Bob, the CIA guy who told them to wait. Because when we hear from Bob we'll hear why he told them to wait. What we heard from your interview was they assumed he was waiting for more support from the local militia. Which, by the way, might not be a bad reason to wait. In other words, you want to go - you don't want to rush in with just three guys into what was obviously a very, very dangerous situation. You'd want to wait to see if you could round up some more support. In other words, there's a difference between waiting and waiting for no good reason and, even worse, waiting because you were told 'we don't care what happens to the Ambassador.' I want to hear from Bob, I want to hear the CIA make him available and tell us exactly what was going on. What I'm not hearing in this is that anybody in Washington said, 'we don't care what happens to the Ambassador, write it off, stay away.'

Even panelist Steve Hayes pointed out that the House Intelligence Committee's Benghazi report “says that there was no stand down order.” And Baier himself conceded that the Senate Intelligence Committee January 2014 review of the attacks “said that in fact it was working to get this February 17 militia to respond first.”

The evidence that CIA operatives were not delayed by “orders from above” is overwhelming and has existed for quite some time -- but if Fox's upcoming Benghazi documentary is any indication, the network will continue its attempts to make a scandal out of the “stand down order” myth.