Benghazi Attack Retold
Just in time for the kick-off of the electoral season comes a movie that reminds Americans yet again what is wrong with the government we have endured for the past eight years. The riveting 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, directed by big-budget action film director Michael Bay and based on the nonfiction book 13 Hours by Mitchell Zuckoff, is a soldier’s-eye view of the notorious terrorist assaults on two American compounds in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. The movie is not for all tastes, featuring combat violence aplenty (though no gratuitous gore) and an excess of R-rated language. But it is political storytelling at its best — precisely because it tries very hard to be subtle. There are no overt references to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, for example, even as the frustrating paralysis of official government channels puts lives in danger. But the viewer is left in no doubt as to who the worst villain is: not the battalions of Libyan terrorists, but the government functionaries unable and unwilling to make the hard decisions.
With Hillary Clinton now in a tight race with Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination, 13 Hours is as politically relevant as any election-year film since 1976’s All the President’s Men. Yet to be seen, however, is whether this film will have a discernible impact on the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Face-saving Lies
From the beginning, the Benghazi attack was politicized by the Obama administration; of this there can be no serious doubt. It has been well-established via testimony and paper trails — much of it directly pertaining to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — that the Obama administration, fearing an electoral backlash, sought to portray the twin attacks as a demonstration, which spiraled out of hand, against an obscure anti-Muslim film; this while knowing from the outset that it was in fact a carefully planned and executed terrorist attack by Libyan extremists, timed to fall on the infamous anniversary of the original September 11 terror attacks on U.S. soil. For example, Secretary of State Clinton, scant hours after the original attack, made a public statement blaming the attacks on an incoherent American-made anti-Muslim video Innocence of Muslims: The Crimes of Prophet Mohammed. President Obama made similar claims the following day, with Hillary Clinton standing beside him. And then-White House Press Secretary Jay Carney laid the blame squarely on the notorious video two days after that in a press conference. As late as two weeks after the attack, on September 23, President Obama continued to retail the official line, telling no less prominent an audience than the UN General Assembly that “there is no video that justifies an attack on an embassy.”
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