In 13 Hours, Surviving CIA Contractors’ Stand-Down Story Might Help GOP — They Hope

Still smelling of popcorn and soda, the luminaries of the conservative scene in Washington, D.C., filed into the ballroom of the Georgetown Ritz-Carlton on Friday night. They’d just left a movie screening put on by GOP research group America Rising and the conservative super PAC Future45. Now they settled in, cocktails in hand, to listen to Republican senator Tom Cotton and other panelists opine on the film.

“Because this is Washington, D.C., we watch a movie, and then we have a panel about it,” deadpanned the event’s moderator, conservative journalist Mary Katherine Ham.

But this wasn’t just any movie. This was 13 Hours, director Michael Bay’s new film on the September 2012 Benghazi attacks that left four Americans dead and sparked a political crisis for then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton. With less than three weeks to go until the Iowa caucus, it’s not clear whether the film’s portrayal of a State Department utterly indifferent to the plight of its people will cost Clinton votes. But damned if Republicans are going to pass up an opportunity to bring the might of Hollywood to bear against the Democratic presidential front-runner.

RELATED: 13 Hours Honors the Sacrifice of the Men on the Ground in Benghazi

“This movie highlights the utter negligence of Hillary Clinton’s State Department leading up to the Benghazi attacks,” said Cotton, pondering what a movie about the D.C. response to Benghazi would look like. “Maybe the sequel should be called Five Minutes,” he said, “because that’s about as much time as President Obama and Secretary Clinton put into their role here.”

13 Hours largely eschews blatant partisanship for fiery, slow-motion explosions and crackling gunfire. The president is mentioned only once, in passing, and Clinton’s name never comes up. The infamous anti-Islamic YouTube video is barely a factor. But as U.S. contractors grimly slog through wave after wave of attackers and terrified CIA analysts call fruitlessly for backup, the audience can’t help but wonder why the cavalry never shows up.

“They [Obama and Clinton] wanted to put Libya in the rear-view mirror,” said Cotton. “To put in those kinds of assets — to add more security, to provide air cover — would’ve actually highlighted the failure of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s policy in Libya.”

To the other panelists, the movie demonstrated how the foreign policies of Obama and Clinton are cut from the same cloth. Elliott Abrams, the former deputy national-security adviser under George W. Bush, highlighted one scene in which an American contractor asked Washington to send fighter jets on a Benghazi fly-by “to put the fear of God and the United States” into their Islamist attackers. “Putting the fear of God and the United States into people is a very good thing to do.” But the Obama administration is not respected by America’s adversaries, he added, pointing to this week’s brief capture of U.S. sailors by Iranian forces as proof.

#share#Even with its focus on the firefight and the men on the ground, 13 Hours has already stirred up political controversy. Democrats on the House Benghazi panel are fuming over the film’s claim that the Benghazi CIA chief ordered the hired guns to “stand down” while the consulate where Ambassador Chris Stevens was sheltering came under attack a mile away. Six separate congressional panels — one led by Republican Mike Rogers, then the House Intelligence Committee chairman — concluded that no one had issued a stand-down order. Most of the GOP members on the Republican-led committee, however, refused to sign the final document stating the group’s conclusion. And all five of the surviving contractors are adamant that the CIA station chief delayed their attempt to rescue Stevens.

RELATED: 13 Hours: Of Course There’s Evidence of a ‘Stand-Down Order’ in Benghazi

None of the panelists took up the question of why both Democratic and Republican lawmakers would contradict the men on the ground that night. Afterwards, when asked by National Review Online what he made of the discrepancy, Abrams said:

Generally I would say, if five of the six guys remember it that way, that’s probably what happened. It’s not a matter of paperwork, it’s not a matter of after-action reports. It’s what they themselves heard.

Many attendees doubted whether the movie would move the needle in a Republican fight to defeat Hillary Clinton, especially since most Democrats and independents seem to have moved on long ago from the Benghazi scandal. But both Abrams and Cotton, along with the Republican groups who held the showing, see the film as a new opportunity to persuade the skeptics.

“A lot of free movie tickets would help,” said Abrams, when asked how to make voters believe that Clinton’s failure in Benghazi was “a big deal.”

“Something tells me you’re not going to have to hand out free tickets for this one,” Cotton replied.

— Brendan Bordelon is a political reporter for National Review Online.