CBS News has suspended its chief foreign affairs correspondent, Lara Logan, over an erroneous report on the 2012 Benghazi attack that the network broadcast last month.

Logan's "leave of absence" coincided with the release of an internal review enumerating a damning series of failures behind the broadcast. These included a failure to vet sources, to disclose conflicts of interest and to perform follow-up reporting. The review, by CBS standards and practices director Al Ortiz, also found that the reporting team failed to heed a "red flag" admission by a central source, and was hampered by its own blinkered search "from the start" for "a different angle."

The Benghazi report, which aired on the program 60 Minutes, has been withdrawn by CBS News and removed from YouTube.

"There is a lot to learn from this mistake for the entire organization," CBS News chairman Jeff Fager wrote in a memo to staff announcing the suspensions. "As executive producer, I am responsible for what gets on the air. I pride myself in catching almost everything, but this deception got through and it shouldn’t have."

A producer on the report, Max McClellan, was also suspended. The terms of the suspensions were not disclosed. The move came after an on-air apology by Logan that was derided by media critics as “severely lacking” and “flimsy”.

The 60 Minutes report drew heavily on the testimony of a security contractor to accuse the US government of mishandling the Benghazi attack in Libya, in which ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

The contractor, Dylan Davies, told Logan on air that he had grappled with an attacker at a US compound and later sneaked into a hospital and saw the ambassador's body. It was the same story he told in a book that was being published simultaneously by another arm of the CBS corporation.

Key elements of the story were untrue. The 60 Minutes team knew that Davies had given a different account to his employer, a fact that the internal review said should have been a "red flag". Instead, 60 Minutes accepted Davies's explanation that he lied to his employer to cover up for the fact that he should not have left his villa on the night of the attack.

Eleven days after the report aired, the New York Times revealed that Davies had also told the FBI he had not been to the compound or the hospital that night. CBS News reporters were able to corroborate the Times report "within hours," the internal review found.

The CBS internal review faulted the 60 Minutes report for not disclosing the book deal. It also faulted Logan for continuing to report on the Benghazi attack after making a public speech criticizing the government's handling of the affair and its broader counter-terrorism policies.

CBS News wound down its relationship with longtime anchor Dan Rather in 2005, a year after the network aired a report on George W Bush’s absenteeism during his time with the Air National Guard. Critics said the report drew on fake documents. Rather defends the report as true.