But the report did not say who denied those requests. Was it the CIA? The Pentagon? The White House? Critics of the administration want to know in their efforts to assign blame for the tragedy. On Monday morning, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asked that very question to President Obama who said the matter was still under investigation and he couldn't give further comment. "If we find out that there was a big breakdown, and somebody didn't do their job, they'll be held accountable," he said. Meanwhile, the agencies involved with the Benghazi attack have been issuing independent denials.

On Friday, the CIA was the first agency to issue a denial. "No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate," said CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood.

That denial led some to allege that the White House itself denied the requests for backup. On Saturday, National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor dismissed those accusations in an e-mail to Yahoo News' Oliver Knox. "Neither the president nor anyone in the White House denied any requests for assistance in Benghazi," he said.

With the CIA and White House denials in place, speculation shifted to the Pentagon. "So, since the the CIA says it wasn't any of their guys, and since the White House is trying to eliminate any blame on themselves, does this mean the order not to help those Americans under siege in Benghazi came from the military?" wrote The Weekly Standard's Daniel Halper. "The White House, it would seem, is trying to shift blame in that direction."

Now, with the addition of the Pentagon's denial to The Atlantic Wire, all three major players in the government's national security apparatus have weighed in on the Fox News report. Each of them used slightly different language to describe their agency or department's role in the attack. But the CIA, Pentagon, and National Security Council each used guarded language to describe their involvement, and it can be difficult to divine what exactly they're saying. As such, we asked a pair of national security lawyers to look into the various statements.

It's important to remember that the CIA and the Pentagon often work together but that the operational relationship between the agencies can be fluid and ambiguous. That's why it's so difficult to infer who may have given the order to "stand down" and under what circumstances that request was denied. What can we learn from the denials?

Kel McClanahan, the executive director of the National Security Counselors and an attorney who specializes in national security law, said he didn't detect any false or misleading statements in any of the denials but noticed a few things about the words the CIA and the Pentagon used that raise questions. With regard to Jennifer Youngblood's statement, he said "all she said was that nobody told Woods 'not to help those in need.'"