By David Martosko

PUBLISHED: 20:19 EST, 16 August 2013 | UPDATED: 20:20 EST, 16 August 2013

An Illinois Republican congressman told constituents at a town hall meeting on Wednesday that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton screamed at a fellow member of Congress two days after a U.S. diplomatic station in Benghazi, Libya was destroyed, merely for saying aloud that the attack was carried out by terrorist groups..

The Obama administration later acknowledged that reality.

But White House officials initially maintained that the deaths of four Americans and the firebomb attack on the State Department mission was the result of a spontaneous protest against a low-budget YouTube film that was critical of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

'Two days after this attack,' said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, 'we were in a briefing with Hillary Clinton and she screamed at a member of Congress who’d dare suggest that this was a terrorist attack.'

'Now we find out that while it was happening, they knew it was a terrorist attack. These are answers that we're going to get to the bottom of.'

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The congressman appeared on the fox News Channel on Friday, recalling Clinton 'basically, in a very loud, angry voice, [saying] "It's irresponsible to even suggest this is a terror attack. This is a YouTube video. We know that there are protests all over, and we need to be very careful how we're saying this" -- and basically chided this member of Congress.'

Kinzinger, a military veteran, angrily imagined himself as one of the four U.S. casualties in Benghazi.

'If I do happen to die in service to my country,' he said, 'I'd think that my country would not deny me the honor of having died in service in the war on terror, versus service in defense of a YouTube video.'

'And in essence, that's where we were leading at the beginning, until all the evidence stacked up that they knew from the very beginning this was an organized terror attack.'

In January when Clinton testified before a House panel about Benghazi, Kinzinger challenged her on her insistence during that briefing that the YouTube video was to blame.

'When you briefed us, you said unequivocally this was a result of a video,' he said during the January 23 hearing. 'I remember in fact, you got pretty upset when somebody suggested this was a terror attack. This was our briefing that we had. But we find out now it wasn’t a video, it was this terrorist attack.'

Clinton remembered things differently.

'I did not say that it was video, that it was about the video for Libya,' she insisted. 'It certainly was for many of the other places where we were watching these disturbances.'

But at the Aspen Security Forum in June, General Carter Ham – the commander of U.S. forces in Africa when the Benghazi attack took place – said that on September 11, 2012, 'it became apparent to all of us quickly that this was not a demonstration. This was a violent attack.'

Responding to a question about what the initial intelligence suggested, he said it clearly pointed to terrorism.

'I don't know if that was my first reaction,' said Gen. Ham, 'but pretty quickly as we started to gain understanding within the hours after the initiation of the attack, yes.'

The video of Kinzinger was published online by Illinois conservative activist Ulysses S. Arn on his personal blog. 

'Hillary’s attitude towards that still unidentified member of Congress is very telling,' Arn wrote, 'for in the months that have followed the deadly attack in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty we have learned that the entire Obama administration knew that Benghazi was a terrorist attack as it was going on.'

'With any luck,' he added, 'hopefully congressman Kinzinger’s comments and my video of them will dog Clinton for the remainder of her time in the public spotlight.'

Arn said that he and Kitzinger 'don’t see eye to eye,' and that he was helping other candidates who would try to defeat him in a Republican primary next year.