Lying about Benghazi: why would then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lie to the public and even to the families of slain Americans on the very day they and the nation received the coffins of those families' deceased loved ones?

• Author: Emord, Jonathan W.
• Position: Political Landscape

FOX NEWS Channel's Megyn Kelly has raised Lhe visibility of a dispute between the families of those slain at Benghazi, Libya, and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton concerning what Clinton told those families on Sept. 14, 2012. According to four different relatives of those slain, including those who attended the Joint Base Andrews Transfer of Remains Ceremony for the return of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other slain Benghazi embassy employees, Secretary Clinton assured the families that she would have the "filmmaker responsible for the deaths arrested," feeding into a narrative Clinton then knew to be false: that the Benghazi attacks were the result of a spontaneous uprising in response to an anti-Muslim video rather than a terrorist attack on the embassy compound. The father of Ty Woods, slain at Benghazi, kept a contemporaneous journal in which he quoted Clinton's statement: "We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son."

Assembling all of the facts, it now appears clear that Clinton endeavored to misdirect the public to avoid accountability for her own dereliction of duty and engaged in an extensive cover-up which persists to this day. She failed to call on Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to dispatch the military in an immediate defense of the besieged embassy compound, and she failed to heed the repeated calls weeks before from Ambassador Stevens to reinforce the compound in light of a clear and present threat posed by Ansar al-Sharia terrorists. Instead of admitting the derelictions and taking responsibility for them, she propounded a false narrative, callously, indeed heartlessly, communicating that falsehood even to the families of the brave men who died.

The film "13 Hours" adds more to this picture, as Kelly adduced directly from the heroic American soldiers whose story is told in that film. Those soldiers were stationed at The Annex, a CIA facility 1.5 miles away from the embassy compound. In "The Kelly File" interview with three of the five surviving soldiers who were stationed at The Annex--Mark "Oz" Geist (former Marine), John "Tig" Tiegen (former Marine), and Kris "Tanto" Paronto (ex-Army Ranger)--each stated that they had received a "stand down" order from their superior, the CIA chief in the region, that delayed their intervention for 30 minutes despite desperate calls from the compound for help. In the end, the three soldiers say they violated the stand-down order and proceeded with a counteroffensive, but it was too late for Ambassador Stevens and the other slain Americans. The CIA chief, whose identity has not been released, is adamant that he never gave the "stand down" order.

It is beyond doubt, however, that the claim that the attack...