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During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump has come down hard on the Obama administration for intervening in Libya to help topple Muammar Qaddafi. Trump says, for example, that the world would be better off with Qaddafi in power. Indeed, he has argued that “frankly there is no Libya; it’s all broken up; they have no control; nobody knows what’s going on.” Trump probably isn’t far wrong in his assessment. However, as Andrew Kaczynski at BuzzFeed documents, Trump strongly supported the U.S. intervention in Libya at the time it occurred. According to Kaczynski, in 2011, sounding every bit like Samantha Power...

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...

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said that Republicans in Congress should look into a mirror when asking why the attack on an American consulate in Benghazi was as deadly as it was. She said that House Republicans who voted to cut security funding for overseas embassies are directly responsible for the lack of security personnel at that outpost. Boxer's claim is contradicted by testimony delivered before a Congressional Oversight Committee hearing last week. Boxer exonerated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday for any responsibility relating to the Benghazi attack, saying that it she testified before Congress in good faith...

A spokesman for the CIA is criticizing the Michael Bay movie "13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi" as a "distortion of the events and people who served in Benghazi that night." The spokesman, Ryan Trapani, was quoted in an exclusive Washington Post story, which also features an interview with the CIA chief in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, when Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were killed in a siege of the diplomatic compound and attack on the CIA annex. "No one will mistake this movie for a documentary," Tripani told the Post. "It's a distortion of the events...

It is the most fateful moment in a movie that purports to present a searingly accurate account of the 2012 attacks that left four Americans dead in Benghazi, Libya: a scene in which the highest-ranking CIA operative at a secret agency compound orders his security team to “stand down” rather than rush off to rescue U.S. diplomats under siege less than a mile away. According to the officer in charge of the CIA’s Benghazi base that night, the scene in the movie is entirely untrue. “There never was a stand-down order,” said the base chief known as Bob, speaking publicly...

Combat Action. The true story from the perspective of the military contractors who rescued Americans in the terrorist attacks on the American embassy and CIA facility in Benghazi on 9/11 2012. Woah. Michael Bay, you are forgiven of Transformers. In fact, all Michael Bay haters will have to stand down and admit that this phenomenal action movie is a well-told and entertaining story of American valor. No vain empty action, this is rich and full heroism. I think Bay is probably the only one who could get this movie made because no one can accuse him of political agenda in...

Patricia Smith and Charles Woods, parents of two of the Benghazi dead, Sean Smith and Tyrone Woods, would disagree with the notion that history is a lie agreed upon. They do not agree with and do not consent to Hillary Clinton’s attempted rewriting of history and the attempted hiding of what is arguably her criminal negligence in what she calls the “fog of war.”

Fifteen years ago this month, on Jan. 20, 2001, his last day in office, Bill Clinton issued a pardon for international fugitive Marc Rich. It would become perhaps the most condemned official act of Clinton’s political career. A New York Times editorial called it “a shocking abuse of presidential power.” The usually Clinton-friendly New Republic noted it “is often mentioned as Exhibit A of Clintonian sliminess.” Congressman Barney Frank added, “It was a real betrayal by Bill Clinton of all who had been strongly supportive of him to do something this unjustified. It was contemptuous.” Marc Rich was wanted for...

Movie Review: 13 Hours, A Great Movie and an Enormous, Enormous Problem for Hillary 13 Hours is, doubtless, the best film of Michael Bay's career. It's also an objectively good movie. Let me get to the politics first. The film is not blatantly political. Do not doubt, however, that it does not have an overt political meaning. It's overt -- just not in-your-face. The film is filled with the heroes wondering "When is someone coming to help us?" There are shots of planes lying dormant while Americans are being shot to pieces. There is an exchange where one soldier (actually,...

Just got out of Benghazi 13 hours. Wow what a movie! It was evident from the start this was an accurate portrayal. The actual participants in Benghazi helped Director Michael Bay plot out the movie. At times the characters/heroes were a bit hard to follow as one bearded dude looked just like the next. But the overall story, plot and accounts were told perfectly. From the beginning of the movie until the end you can see how higher ups were stifling the contractors and CIA Agents. They also did a good job showing that each man had a family to...

Paramount Pictures is releasing 13 Hours: Secret Soldiers of Benghazi nation-wide on Friday. It tells the story of the attack on two U.S. diplomatic outposts in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012 that took four American lives, including that of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya. Despite claims from Paramount and director Michael Bay that the film isn't political (the book on which it's based certainly wasn't), The Hollywood Reporter has noted that it's being marketed specifically to conservatives. So they're specifically targeting one side of the political aisle while more or less neglecting the other? Well, yeah. You don't shop...

Donald Trump is renting out an Iowa movie theater and is providing tickets to a screening of "13 Hours," a dramatization of the 2012 Benghazi terror attack that is to be released nationwide on Friday. Trump's Iowa state co-chair Tana Goertz told Trump supporters they could get free tickets to the screening at the Cobblestone Theater just outside of Des Moines, according to a source who attended Trump's debate watch party in Iowa Thursday night.

Donald Trump has rented space at an Urbandale movie theater and will give Iowans free tickets to a showing of the Benghazi movie that critics of Hillary Clinton have been eagerly awaiting. “Mr. Trump would like all Americans to know the truth about what happened at Benghazi,” the GOP presidential candidate’s Iowa co-chair Tana Goertz said Thursday night. Trump will pay for the showing of “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” at 6 p.m. Friday at the Carmike Cobblestone 9 Theatre at 86th Street and Hickman Road, Goertz said. “The theater is paid for. The tickets are paid for....

As someone who spends a fair amount of time reading conservative media and a fair amount of time reading about film, I was struck by an odd coincidence last week. On January 6, both the Weekly Standard and National Review Online published reviews of the new Michael Bay movie about the terrorist attack on America's diplomatic compounds in Benghazi, "13 Hours." Around this time, nationally syndicated radio host Hugh Hewitt mentioned that he had seen it; a few days later, he wrote about it for the Washington Examiner. Noting the synchronicity (as well as the fact that these conservative outlets...

On New Year's Eve, the State Department released 3,000 new Hillary Clinton emails from her tenure as secretary of state. While much of the corporate media dove into investigating pointless gossip, Brad Hoff at the Levant Report decided to look for more clues into understanding the epic failure that was the 2011 war on Libya by the US and NATO. What Hoff discovered in the emails was Secretary Clinton being briefed by a trusted advisor, Sidney Blumenthal, on events in Libya where Clinton's public statements appear to contradict her private understanding. The issues range from the early presence of special...

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is not just an entertaining movie, it's a 144-minute rebuttal to everything the Obama administration has been saying about the attack since it took place on September 11, 2012.The "true story" of Benghazi, as told by the secret soldiers, is a powerful rebuke to the "tall tales" that were told by the White House, the State Department and their defenders. There was no "fog of war" that prevented the Department of Defense from sending military assets to Benghazi -- just a foggy narrative that was created by the commander in chief and...

A preview by Benghazi security officer Kris “Tanto” Paronto of 13 Hours, the block-buster Michael Bay film that premieres on Thursday, raises dramatic new questions about the refusal by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to authorize a military rescue of the besieged U.S. diplomatic facility and the nearby CIA Annex on Sept 11-12, 2012. In a presentation at a conference organized by the Maryland Citizen Action Network last weekend, Paronto revealed that two AC-130H “Spectre” gunships were “on call” that night, both within range of Benghazi. One of them was a six-hour flight away, co-located with a U.S. special operations...

In a new batch of released emails from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, a former US diplomat suggested to Clinton that she push the Palestinians to form Arab Spring-like protests against Israel to push the government to make fresh overtures towards a two-state solution. Thomas Pickering, a former US ambassador to Israel, wrote to Clinton on December 18, 2011 that she should recommend sparking Palestinian demonstrations, led by female protesters, to force Israel to re-enter peace negotiations. The protests, which also called on Israeli Jews to hold parallel demonstrations against the government, should be led by and attended by...

Alan Dershowitz was on Fox and Friends yesterday morning pushing his new book. When asked about Hillary's situation, he suggested that she was in no legal jeopardy because she "didn't know at the time" that the highly information she received, stored and sent was highly classified. I don't believe that for one second. She should have known. It was her job to know. We are left with two choices- either Hillary is bumbling incompetent moron or she is a galactic scale liar. Remember when Hillary said “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email."? Oh yes...

The Navy is poised to promote the admiral in charge of its elite SEAL teams and other commando units even though Pentagon investigators determined that he illegally retaliated against staff members whom he mistakenly suspected were whistleblowers. Rear Adm. Brian Losey was investigated five times by the Defense Department's inspector general after subordinates complained that he had wrongly fired, demoted or punished them during a vengeful but fruitless hunt for the person who had anonymously reported him for a minor travel-policy infraction, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. After conducting separate, years-long investigations that involved more than 100...