OPINION:
Despite everything President Obama and Hillary Clinton do, Benghazi just won’t stay buried. The most explosive debacle of the Obama presidency, which dramatically exposed the folly and deceit of Mr. Obama’s strategy of “leading from behind,” comes now to the silver screen. The movie threatens to severely damage the presidential plans of his former secretary of state. The movie might even determine whether Hillary’s path leads to the White House or the Big House.
“13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi,” opens in U.S. theaters this week, and it’s a rare action thriller that seems to need no help from fiction to make it exciting. It’s a narrative of the deadly battle fought by a U.S. security team against terrorists — and unspecified figures in Washington — to rescue U.S. diplomats at the U.S. Consulate and a nearby CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, on the night of Sept. 11, 2012. Four Americans didn’t make it, and the film’s challenge to the official record of why they died is bound to make Mrs. Clinton and her former boss wiggle and squirm.
Armed security agents Kris Paronto, John Tiegen and Mark Geist set out on a futile attempt to extract U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and Sean Smith, an information officer, from the embassy compound, and they watched fellow security agents Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty fall. The three men went on television to vouch for the authenticity of the story. Mr. Paronto has called the movie portrayal “apolitical,” honoring the dead by making sure the administration’s smoke and mirrors don’t distort the facts.
They refute the Benghazi Accountability Review Board’s conclusion that no order was given that night to hold back rescue forces. When the security team asked permission to drive from the CIA annex to the consulate in answer to a telephone call for help, they say they were told to “wait,” and then told twice to “stand down.” The 30-minute delay likely would have made the difference between life and death.
The rescuers on the ground make no claim to knowing who gave the order to stay put, but they demonstrate no uncertainty in labeling Hillary Clinton a liar for telling the families of the fallen that an anti-Islamic video triggered the violence in Benghazi, while privately telling her daughter Chelsea that the attack was an act of terror.
Facts are not always for sale. Politicians can occasionally buy a heroic reputation with help from expensive public relations flacks, but America’s warriors purchase credibility with their blood. When the account of what happened in Benghazi, put out by Hillary and the president, is measured next to the account of the men who fought for the lives of their fellow Americans, there’s no doubt about whose account is credible, and whose is not.
“13 Hours” breaks little new ground about Hillary Clinton’s role in the Benghazi debacle, but it adds weight to suspicions that she cannot be trusted. Her attempts to explain away her mishandling of official State Department emails compounds this perception. Joseph diGenova, a former federal prosecutor in Washington, says the FBI “would go ballistic” if she is not indicted.
A new poll suggests that 20 percent of Democrats would be likely to vote for Donald Trump rather than Hillary. That may or not be accurate, but what is accurate is that Hillary’s image of invincibility is gone. When she looked 10 feet tall she appeared to be above the law. But that was then. Not now.
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