Stranger than Fiction

"This is a true story." Those words appear onscreen to open 13 Hours, the major motion picture about Benghazi, in theaters on January 15. And with them, director Michael Bay announced that he is taking sides in the long-running debate over the attacks there on September 11, 2012.

For three years, the White House and its defenders in the media have characterized the Libya raids as a tragedy, a series of unfortunate events that were utterly unpreventable and for which no one is much to blame. Many of those who were on the ground in Libya, CIA contractors and diplomats alike, see them as something quite different. To them, Benghazi represents bureaucratic indifference and incompetence before the attacks, deadly governmental indecision and fecklessness during the attacks, and official deception and dishonesty after the attacks.

This is their story. And the fact that it's a story familiar to readers of The Weekly Standard indicates that Bay, the man behind the blockbuster "Transformers" movies, has taken sides in a way that one might not expect from a successful Hollywood director.

The movie is based on the book of the same name, written by Boston University journalism professor Mitchell Zuckoff with five CIA contractors who participated in the many battles in Benghazi that night. The authors announced in the book's introduction that they had sought to avoid the politics of Benghazi in favor of a fact-based account of what happened during the 13 hours of fighting there. And while the film tracks the book's narrative closely, Bay's depiction of the sense of abandonment felt by those men, as they wait for help that never arrives, heightens the outrage.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, as the film is titled in full, begins as CIA contractor Jack Silva leaves his family for Libya. Upon landing in Benghazi, Silva and a fellow contractor embark on what ought to be a routine trip to the CIA's secret annex. But as they make their way through the cluttered streets of Libya's second-largest city, a hostile gang of locals forces their vehicle to a stop at gunpoint, leading to a tense and chaotic exchange of lethal threats. They are allowed to pass, rattled but unharmed. It's a temporary reprieve.