The Truth Eventually Comes Out

The Weekly Standard website posted a preview of a January 18th article about the attack  on Benghazi. The article is about the movie 13 Hours, which will appear in theaters on January 15th. The movie was directed by Michael Bay. The movie opens with the quote, “This is a true story.” The movie then details the story of the attack on Benghazi as told largely through the eyes of CIA contractor Jack Silva, played brilliantly by a bearded and newly bemuscled John Krasinski, best known for his role as the affable and sarcastic Jim Halpert on The Office, and four other CIA contractors—Mark “Oz” Geist, John “Tig” Tiegen, Kris “Tanto” Paronto, and “Boon.”

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. The media has not reported the full story of Benghazi, and Michael Bay has decided to tell that story.

The article includes many of the details of the attack as well as a few conclusions:

The film documents the contractors’ concerns about security before the assault on September 11, 2012, making clear that the attack was not an isolated incident but the culmination of a long series of hostilities directed at Western targets. Even before the events of that day, viewers are led to understand the difficulty of distinguishing friend from foe. The February 17th Martyrs Brigade, a Libyan militia the State Department engaged and ostensibly the good guys, is filled with shady characters, some of whom seem to know well in advance the plans of the jihadists who attack the diplomatic compound and the CIA annex. Hours before the attack begins, members of the local police force are observed conducting surveillance on the compound. Throughout the hours of fighting at both sites, when the Americans trying to repel the attacks see large groups of dark-skinned, heavily armed men show up to the battle, they cannot determine whether the new arrivals are there to help them or kill them.

…Two dominant themes emerge from the film: 1) In the chaos of post-Qaddafi Libya it was impossible to distinguish between good guys and bad guys. And, for that reason and others, 2) the U.S. government isn’t very effective in its efforts to create order out of the inevitable instability that results from removing dictators.

The article concludes:

Whatever its impact, 13 Hours is a powerful film that is well worth seeing. From beginning to end, it forcefully rejects the sanitized, no-fault version of Benghazi. In scene after powerful scene, it assigns blame: to policymakers in Washington who naïvely overestimated our ability to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys in post-Qaddafi Libya; to Washington bureaucrats who paid little attention to repeated warnings about the security of U.S. facilities in Benghazi; to CIA officials more concerned with career advancement and positive performance reviews than saving lives.

But perhaps the strongest indictment made by 13 Hours is an unspoken one. The film itself is an implicit but devastating critique of the American media that refused to report this story in this way, an establishment media that left to Hollywood the responsibility of telling these important truths.

The days of the mainstream media smothering the truth and filtering information have been numbered since the inception of alternative media. Now it looks as if there are some in Hollywood who also see the need to tell the truth.