Free Republic

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...

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...

The archaeological park is located at the mouth of a river where wild parsley (selinon) grows, which was the origin of the name of the waterway. The city was founded by Megara Hyblaea residents in Sicily in the seventh century BC near two port-canals, now sanded over, and engaged in intense maritime trade. ''It was due to this expert use of the geographical role of Selinunte,'' historians say, ''that their inhabitants, in the space of just over two centuries, achieved an economic prosperity unrivaled in the Greek world or in that of Sicily/Magna Grecia.'' A city of grandiose size was...