Kirsten Powers

Democratic partisans have seized on the new movie 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, which portrays the fateful night that left four Americans, including a U.S. ambassador, dead.

They’ve gone on the attack against what director Michael Bay describes in the opening scene as a “true story” as nothing but a “partisan witch hunt,” as David Brock put it, and an attempt to affect the political debate during an election year. Hillary Clinton has not seen the film but said on Meet the Press, “I know people have raised questions about … some of the dramatization.”

Yes, the film is dramatic. How could the portrayal of a 13-hour attack by armed militants on a U.S. diplomatic mission and CIA annex be otherwise? But it’s also a decidedly non-political rendering of that night. Clinton is never mentioned, and President Obama makes a single brief appearance. Bay stuck closely to the story told in the best-selling book by Boston University journalism professor Mitchell Zuckoff and five CIA contractors who survived the attack in Benghazi, Libya, on Sep. 11, 2012. (A sixth contractor died.) But Hillary henchman Brock has blasted the movie, insisting that people ignore the horrifying firsthand account of these five men.

In an interview, three of the former elite military officers portrayed in the movie — Mark “Oz” Geist, Kris “Tanto” Paronto and John “Tig” Tiegen — told me the movie was completely true to their experience on the ground.

“We wanted the movie to … just tell the truth and tell the story as we lived it,” Geist said. “Don’t make it into something political.”

This story is “inspirational, about overcoming adversity, faith in God, standing with your brothers, never quitting and never giving up,” Paronto added. “That’s what (people) should be thinking about when they hear about Benghazi.”

Because the news media have mostly treated the Benghazi attack as a partisan political story, most Americans still don’t know what actually happened that night.

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A bearded and buff John Krasinski — best known as the quirky Jim Halpert on The Office — was transformed to play former Navy SEAL Jack Silva. He was drawn to the project because, he told me, “I was slightly embarrassed I didn’t know this story. I consider myself a responsible citizen, and I thought I knew what was going on. But I had never heard about these six guys. The actual story has become just about the political side, so people think the word Benghazi is a political thing and they don’t know these six heroes put their lives on the line, and it’s time they acknowledged that.”

The movie succeeds in telling this story. But sure to anger Obama administration supporters are the fleeting, but damning, references to the absurd assertion that the attack grew out of a YouTube video protest as well as scenes exposing blood-boiling bureaucratic incompetence and negligence both before and after the attack began. Perhaps nothing has caused more consternation than a scene depicting the CIA bureau chief giving the men a “stand down” order when they sought permission to save Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., has blasted this as “clearly at odd with the facts.”

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“The words were said to me. I heard him say, ‘Stand down’,” Tiegen told me. Paronto added, “I saw (him being) told to stand down and we were told twice to wait. Saying (this) happened didn’t bring us any love. It’s the truth.”

Americans can decide who they want to believe: the people who actually lived through the 13-hour attack or the bungling and partisan bureaucrats who have yet to take full responsibility for the tragedy that happened on their watch. “The truth is not partisan,” Paronto told me. Or at least it shouldn’t be.

Kirsten Powers writes weekly for USA TODAY and is author of The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech.

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