Just makes no sense

Rating: Null/10 (25 May 2001)

(warning: plot elements, such as they are, revealed)
This movie was contrived to an extreme; basically none of the seminal plot events make the least bit of sense.
1) What happened to the Marines already stationed in the embassy?
2) Where were the rest of the embassy staff? When, in the history of the State Department, have the ambassador's spouse and child remained at a post which had already been evacuated of other staff?
3) Where were the Sana'a police?
4) Where was the Yemeni army?
5) The shooters were obviously not in the crowd on the street; they were hitting people who were running low on a flat roof. How can a Marine officer with 30 years of combat experience fail to realize that? How can that fail to have come up during the court martial proceedings?
6) The U.S. Embassy to Yemen, which according to the film is rowdily protested on a weekly basis, has a wooden door that gives in at the first attempt with a makeshift battering ram? Come on.
7) Even the most caricatured slimeball bureaucrat would not stick a tape in a drawer without first watching it to see whether it vindicated his position.
So this makes it all the more a shame that the movie was, in sum, so reprehensible. It amounts to an hour-and-a-half of glorification and justification of a barbarous and indefensible act. The outcome made no sense, the penultimate scene (the salute) made absolutely no sense, and the film made no sense. Two thumbs amputated.