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Fighting dirty: could Michael Bay’s Benghazi movie take down Hillary Clinton?

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The 2012 attack on a US diplomatic compound in Libya obsesses critics of the Obama administration. The film version, 13 Hours, has been lauded by Donald Trump and Fox News. Will it have the desired impact?

British film-goers are unlikely to besiege the multiplexes to see Michael Bay’s new movie, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi, when it goes on release tomorrow, but if you had been in the vicinity of Des Moines, Iowa, two weeks ago, you could have watched it for free. As part of his campaign tour, Donald Trump reached into his deep pockets to fund a special screening of 13 Hours for his supporters at the Urbandale Carmike Cobblestone 9 multiplex. “Mr Trump would like all Americans to know the truth about what happened at Benghazi,” explained the presidential candidate’s representative.

Trump’s largesse is not an isolated incident. Many others on the political right have been promoting 13 Hours in recent weeks. At the end of the 14 January presidential debate, Trump’s rival Ted Cruz announced: “Tomorrow morning a new movie will debut about the incredible bravery of the men fighting for their lives in Benghazi and the politicians that abandoned them.” By that time, Rick Santorum had already referenced the movie in the preceding undercard debate. Fox News has devoted some three hours of airtime to plugging the movie over the past few weeks, across 24 segments. Introducing a 13 Hours special, Fox anchor Megyn Kelly described it as “the gripping new film that may pose a threat to the Hillary Clinton White House” – which tells you pretty much all you need to know about why “what happened at Benghazi” is such a preoccupation. Just to clear up any ambiguities, Fox’s Andrea Tantaros went one step further, stating: “If anyone sees this movie, which they should go see it, and then goes on to vote for Hillary Clinton, they’re a criminal.”

An armed man before the blazing US consulate in Benghazi, 11 September 2012. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images

What did happen at Benghazi? This much everybody can agree on: on the night of 11 September 2012, an attack took place on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city. Four American citizens were killed, including the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens. The fighting took place at two locations: the US consulate and a covert CIA facility known as “the Annex”, about half a mile away. This was 56 days before President Obama’s reelection. Hillary Clinton was secretary of state (the US equivalent of foreign secretary). The rest is politics.

The Republican side has readily compared Benghazi to Watergate, but in fact it’s more like the UK’s Hutton inquiry: a muddy, drawn-out, partisan-political scrap that has never quite developed into the game-changing controversy it was billed as. And like the Hutton inquiry (which investigated a death connected to the UK’s entry into the Iraq war), it is an episode that would take hours of research to really get up to speed with if you weren’t following it in real time. Despite numerous attempts and an inordinate amount of political energy, media speculation and public funds, the Benghazi issue has failed to claim any political scalps. But 13 Hours represents one last chance to keep the issue alive long enough to influence the coming US presidential campaign. Anything seems possible at a time when Donald Trump in the White House is a realistic prospect. Now we must entertain the possibility that the director of the Transformers movies could determine the next leader of the free world.

Paid for free screening … Donald Trump. Photograph: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

The disputed issues over the attack essentially fall into three categories: before, during and after.

On the “before” end, there is the question of the security situation in Benghazi at the time, and whether or not the US took it seriously enough. It was a time of optimism in Libya: Muammar Gaddafi had been deposed and Libya’s first democratic elections had taken place that July. But in the preceding weeks there had been smaller attacks on the US consulate and the UN mission. In June, the UK ambassador’s convoy was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Armed militias and al-Qaida affiliates were known to be active in the city. Christopher Stevens – a popular, bridge-building idealist by all accounts – had raised concerns about the situation, but US security on the ground had been scaled down.

The other, more immediate “before” issue, is the movie The Innocence of Muslims, an inflammatory low-budget production insulting the prophet Muhammad. News of the movie, and a trailer on YouTube translated into Arabic, provoked demonstrations across the Muslim world. On the evening of the Benghazi attack, a 3,000-strong crowd had gathered outside the US embassy in Cairo. Protestors tore down the US flag and replaced it with a black Islamist flag.

As for the “during”, the main bone of contention is whether or not the US did enough to defend its besieged citizens once the attack began. Military resources in the region, such as F-16s in Italy, were never deployed. The only realistic defence capability was the security contractors up the road in the CIA Annex. These are the “secret soldiers” of Michael Bay’s movie. According to some accounts (including those of the contractors themselves), they begged for permission to rescue Stevens and his staff, but were ordered to “stand down”. By the time they arrived at the consulate, Stevens and another American were dead. An hour later, the Annex itself came under attack. The contractors defended it until help arrived the next morning. Two of them lost their lives. Some 30 Americans were rescued.

The “after” questions chiefly revolve around the official response to the attacks: who said what to whom, and when. According to their opponents, Obama and Clinton and, in particular, UN ambassador Susan Rice knowingly claimed the attack was a result of the Innocence of Muslims film, rather than a terrorist plot. Their statements have been parsed for contradictions. As was the process by which the government arrived at its “talking points” before explaining the story to the public. Internal emails revealed that initial references to al-Qaida were removed. Clinton and Obama put it down to conflicting accounts of a fast-moving situation; their enemies suspected a political coverup.

The US flag is burned in protest against the film The Innocence of Muslims. Photograph: Abbas Sandji/AP

“Benghazi had all the perfect elements for the Republicans,” says journalist and writer Frank Rich, now editor-at-large at New York magazine. “It involves Hillary Clinton, who was always the likely heir to Obama. It has, seemingly, Americans serving their country being murdered by terrorists through some kind of dereliction or malevolence. And this was all going on in the runup to the 2012 election.”

The Republicans’ first attempt to weaponise Benghazi fell comically flat. During the presidential debate of October 2012, Mitt Romney put it to Obama that he had taken 14 days to acknowledge that the attacks were “an act of terror”. Chair Candy Crowley had to interrupt and correct Romney: Obama had, in fact, described them as “an act of terror” the next day. “Could you say that a little louder, Candy?” Obama joked. The audience laughed and applauded; Romney looked like a fool.

In the years since, six official investigations into the attacks have done little better, finding no evidence of a cover-up, the infamous “stand down” order or any other wrongdoing. Still not satisfied, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives voted to set up a special select committee to fully investigate in May 2014. Events came to a head last October, when Hillary Clinton took the stand for an 11-hour grilling. In the past, Clinton’s lawyerly evasiveness has often been a negative aspect of her political persona, but here she came into her own. She was composed, defiant and more human than she had ever looked. When she was questioned, nine hours in, over whether she had spent the night after the attack alone – “the whole night?” – Clinton burst out laughing. The absurdity of the situation was apparent to all. She came out of the hearing looking more presidential than when she went in.

Hillary Clinton appears before the House select committee to answer questions about Benghazi, October 2015. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

“It really was her finest hour,” says Rich. “The Republicans were trying to run this McCarthy-like public hearing against her, and they had their facts wrong, they had stupid questions, they were off on tangents, they were making speeches. So the whole thing sort of blew up in their faces.”

Rich is unsurprised Benghazi never really caught fire. “Many Americans do not even know where Benghazi is. There was no case there, and they’ve never been able to make it. And all the points they’ve tried to push – Susan Rice, the “talking points” – that is such inside baseball for most Americans.” In the intervening years, Benghazi has been upstaged by worse acts of terrorism, Rich argues, such as the Isis beheadings, or the attacks in Paris or San Bernardino.

Now Republicans must hope 13 Hours can erase the memory of Clinton’s 11 hours. As the title suggests, the movie deals only with the “during” phase of the attacks, which Bay renders with his trademark onslaught of frenetic, choppily edited action, pounding battle drums and militaristic machismo. There’s a bomb’s-eye view of a mortar attack, similar to the one he gave us in Pearl Harbor. There are shots of the Stars and Stripes riddled with bulletholes. The actions of these “secret soldiers” were unimpeachably heroic, but Bay tips his hand by making them all seasoned, tough-talking, bushy-bearded mavericks. Their CIA chief, by contrast, is a surly desk-jockey who dismisses them as “hired help” and tells them to stay out of the way of his snobby Harvard-type agents. Predictably the tables turn once the attacks start: “You’re not giving orders any more, you’re taking them,” they tell the CIA guy.

We don’t see Obama or Hillary Clinton directly, but the movie ticks many of the rightwing boxes. The disputed “stand down” order is in there. There are references to the overall lack of security in Benghazi (“Uncle Sam’s on a budget right now”). There are repeated pleas to central command for the air support that never came. Bay made the movie with input from the real-life contractors and various confidential high-level contacts, he says. He insists the movie “avoids politics” and “gives you the facts”. The CI A’s verdict was less glowing. “No one will mistake this movie for a documentary,” said a spokesperson. “It’s a distortion of the events and people who served in Benghazi that night. It’s shameful that, in order to highlight the heroism of some, those responsible for the movie felt the need to denigrate the courage of other Americans who served in harm’s way.”

What is missing from this picture is the Libyans themselves. Many of the ones who have seen the film (pirated copies of Hollywood movies are widely available there) are amused by 13 Hours’ depiction of their country. Repeatedly Bay’s characters complain that “we can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys”, and it’s no wonder, since virtually every Libyan in the film is portrayed as a potential terrorist. Only one of them gets a speaking part: a nervous translator who is dragged into the combat. Rather than thank him, at the end of the ordeal, one of the Americans tells him: “Your country’s gotta figure this shit out.”

“It’s not really about Benghazi. It’s an action film, but it could have been set in Djibouti,” says Tasbeeh Herwees, a Libyan journalist based in Los Angeles. “It was offensive in its portrayal of Libyans. There were no good Libyan characters. The men are all fighters or soldiers. The women all wear the full black niqab [the face-covering veil], which no one in Benghazi really wears. I couldn’t believe it.” Growing up in the US, the only time Herwees saw Libyans in the movies was the terrorists in Back To The Future, who shoot Christopher Lloyd. “Now we have Back To The Future and 13 Hours – not a great roster of representations.”

“I expected him to make us look bad but at least he could’ve been more accurate about it,” says Libya-based journalist Aladdin Attiga, who points out that 13 Hours was actually shot in Malta. “He could’ve at least tried to make the city look like Benghazi, and he could have mentioned the Libyans who actually tried to save the ambassador more. I think it was a lazy movie with a political agenda.”

Attiga actually met Michael Bay when he was shooting 13 Hours, in Malta. “He asked us about Libya in 2012 and I told him it was the best year we had had, probably ever. He didn’t like that,” says Attiga. “I felt he wasn’t interested in details, as he had what he wanted in his mind already.

On a more serious note, Libya’s situation has tragically deteriorated since the 2012 Benghazi attack. Hassan al-Amin, a Libyan journalist and human rights activist in the UK, describes the attacks as “the first major warning. And that warning was ignored.” Amin returned from a 30-year exile to be elected as a member of Libya’s post-revolutionary government, but within a year, he was forced back into exile when armed militias took control. Today Libya is in effect a failed state, divided between an Islamist government in Tripoli and an internationally recognised parliament in Tobruk, with Islamic State and other jihadist groups controlling territory. “The situation in Libya right now is so complicated, so chaotic,” says Amin. “Nobody is putting the country first, they’re putting their own interests first. The liberals are not even on the scene any more.” The political circus in the US is “really of no significance as far as Libyans are concerned,” he continues.

Michael Bay directs John Krasinski on the set of 13 Hours. Photograph: Everett/REX/Shutterstock

Many people have left Benghazi for Tripoli, Jordan, Turkey or Europe. For those left behind, life in the city continues to worsen, says Herwees: “People are being kicked out of their homes by militia men and told they have an hour to leave. There is still violence every day. There are weapons everywhere. And you have a generation of young men who are feeling particularly disenfranchised, who are economically disadvantaged, who are politically powerless, and have been taught by a very patriarchal culture that the only way to assert or reclaim their masculinity is through violence.” It is difficult to imagine what a movie such as 13 Hours can contribute to the situation.

After preview screenings on military bases, to first responders and to conservative critics, plus a 19-city press tour by three of the real-life fighters from the attack, not to mention the trumpeting of Trump, Fox News and other excitable rightwingers, 13 Hours took $33m at the US box office in its opening week, dropping to under $10m the week after. It is really only playing to the Fox News demographic: predominantly elderly white males in southern states, who were already Republican voters. All of this suggests the movie is unlikely to influence the outcome of the US election at all.

But then big political movies never really do, Rich maintains. As co-producer of the TV satire Veep, as well as being a political journalist, Rich feels qualified to judge. He cites Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. “They held a screening of it in the US Senate,” he says. “The op-eds after were like: ‘This is going to change race relations in America.’ In fact, we’ve had one of the worst periods of racial violence in the US since.” It was the same thing with Michael Moore’s Bush-baiting Fahrenheit 9/11: it became the highest-grossing documentary of all time just before the 2004 presidential election, but it didn’t keep Bush out of the White House.

Somewhat dispiritingly, the movie that has had the greatest impact on real-life 21st-century history is The Innocence Of Muslims, and nobody even saw that. That is not to suggest political cinema should call it a day, but nor should it overestimate its own importance. As Rich puts it: “It’s amazing how little people in showbiz understand politics, and how little people in politics understand showbiz.”

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