A large majority of Israelis oppose a unilateral military attack on Iran over its nuclear program, according to a recent poll conducted by the Brookings Institute. A scant 20 percent of Israelis would approve of striking Iran without American support, and when the question is asked without the American qualifier, a majority of all Israelis and a plurality of Israeli Jews still oppose bombing Iran. What’s more, 46 percent of Israelis would support Iran’s production of “low level nuclear fuel that could only be used for producing electricity” — a circumstance some say could be an outcome of a negotiated deal on Iran’s nuclear program.

The poll results also show that just 23 percent of Israelis conclude that a hit on Iran’s nuclear facilities would set back Iran’s nuclear program by more than five years. A small percentage of Israelis, 24 percent, think America will join an attack on Iran if Israel has already done so. And not surprisingly, 88 percent of Israelis believe that it is very or somewhat likely that Iran “will eventually develop nuclear weapons.” Overall, 58 percent of Israeli citizens either strongly or somewhat support a nuclear-free Middle East.

The result on what Israelis think of war with Iran is in line with many other polls taken on the subject. Indeed, many former high-level Israeli officials have come out against a unilateral attack on Iran, echoing the Obama administration’s preference for a diplomatic solution. They have argued that an attack would only delay, not end, Iran’s nuclear program, could hasten Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon and also inspire support from the Iranian people toward the Iranian government. Other high profile former Israeli officials support direct discussions between the U.S. and Iran.

International Atomic Energy Agency director Yukiya Amano said earlier this week that a diplomatic solution on the Iran issue must be pursued “with a sense of urgency,” a position that the Obama administration appears to agree with. The White House, while stressing the threat an Iran with a nuclear weapon poses, has favors diplomacy to solve the stand-off while keeping all options on the table to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. The fact that U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies believe Iran has not yet made a firm decision to build a nuclear weapon has allowed the administration to point out that there is time to allow a diplomatic approach to succeed.

Despite constant noise from the right wing in this country that President Obama is not sufficiently pro-Israel, the same Brookings poll also found that Israelis themselves appear to think otherwise. The survey found that 60 percent of Israelis have a “very” or “somewhat” positive view of the president, which is actually somewhat higher than the percentage of Americans that feel the same way.

Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera criticized a claim made by Republicans that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is partly responsible for the attacks that killed four Americans at a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11 this year because of her experience with the terror bombings at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania 14 years ago.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) lobbed the criticism on Wednesday saying that the Benghazi attack “echoes the attacks on those embassies in 1998,” and that Rice “was head of the African region for our State Department. In both cases the ambassadors begged for additional security.”

But Rivera, who said he covered the attack in Kenya at the time, said that assessment is off the mark:

RIVERA: I think though to blame Susan Rice is kind of like blaming FEMA for 9/11. There is an undersecretary of state who is in charge of facilities and that is the group that deemed the terrorist threat there to be medium: it really wasn’t Susan Rice. It’s like scapegoating Susan is the affliction that’s sweeping Washington right now.

Watch Geraldo’s remarks here:

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) joined in the new attack shortly after Collins’ statement, telling MSNBC that Rice needed to answer “questions” about her role in protecting the embassies. But two officials from a board that Huffington Post says investigated the 1998 terrorist bombings said that Rice had nothing to do with embassy security at the time. One official said, “I don’t remember any inference or allegation that Susan Rice had been negligent.” Yesterday, Mother Jones tracked down the State Department Accountability Review Board’s reports of both bombings and came to a similar conclusion:

“The reports noted numerous security failures and oversights that preceded the bombings. But they don’t back up Collins’ characterization. Neither mentions Rice, who was a policy person who would not be in charge of embassy or security operations. The report on the Tanzania attack says nothing about the US ambassador there begging for additional security. It notes that “the security systems and security procedures” at the embassy “were in accord with, and in some ways exceeded, Department of State standards for overseas posts assessed as having a ‘low’ threat rating for political violence and terrorism.”

Republicans, led by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), have been trying to deligitimize Rice in anticipation of her Secretary of State nomination and the attempt to link the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings to Benghazi and Rice is just the latest baseless salvo.

Collins said she asked about the 1998 embassy bombings in her meeting with Rice this week but was disappointed that Rice said “she wasn’t expecting a question on that and that she would have to refresh her memory and go back and think about it.” Of course, it’s perfectly reasonable that Rice wasn’t prepared for the question, as the topic has nothing to do with her role in disseminating the intelligence community’s talking points on Benghazi.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said on Wednesday that it is “meaningless” that al-Qaeda’s core leadership — including presumably, Osama bin Laden — has been wiped out over the last four years. Why would McCain make such a claim? Probably because U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice recently said the opposite.

As it is well known by now, McCain has been throwing everything and anything at Rice in an attempt to derail her potential nomination as the next Secretary of State. And now that all of his attacks have been debunked or discredited, the Arizona Republican is picking at every little detail of Rice’s Sept. 16 remarks in which she explained what the Obama administration knew at that time about the Sept. 11 Benghazi attacks.

On CBS’s Face the Nation that day, Rice said that the U.S. has “decimated al Qaeda” since President Obama took office. But Rice has since said she wished she chose her words more carefully, saying she would rather have said the “core” of the terror group has been decimated not the entirety of al-Qaeda. But McCain isn’t having it, here’s what he said on Fox News last night:

MCCAIN: She said, well, maybe I should have said “core,” that we have decimated core Al Qaeda. Well, first of all, that’s a directly — vastly different from what she actually said. And number two, is that really is kind of meaningless to take out core Al Qaeda.

Also during the same Fox segment, McCain complained that the Obama administration doesn’t know as much about the Benghazi attack as it did about the raid that killed bin Laden. “After the raid that took out bin Laden, we knew every single detail, as you know, within 24 hours, absolute total details,” he grumbled, adding, “But yet here we are 10 or 11 weeks later, and we still don’t know the basics of what happened [in Benghazi].” Watch the clips:

Al-Qaeda’s “core” leadership has indeed been decimated. Dozens of al-Qaeda leaders have been killed in drone strikes, bin Laden is dead, and as a result, one terror expert Peter Bergen explained, “al Qaeda has one senior leader left, Ayman al-Zawahiri” who “inherited the Blockbuster Video of global jihad and has done nothing to resuscitate it”:

Al Qaeda hasn’t conducted a successful attack in the West since the bombings on London’s transportation system seven years ago that killed 52 commuters. And the terrorist group, of course, hasn’t carried out an attack in the States since 9/11.

And the Obama administration does not portend to have eliminated al Qaeda. “The goal that I set — to defeat al Qaeda and deny it a chance to rebuild — is now within our reach,” President Obama said in May.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta backed up Rice’s comments last week at an event in Washington, D.C. “Over the last few years, Al Qaeda’s leadership ranks have been decimated. This includes the loss of four of Al Qaeda’s five top leaders in the last two and a half years alone — Osama bin Laden, Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman and Abu Yahya al-Libi,” Panetta said.

And of course the Obama administration knows more about the bin Laden raid than it does about the attacks in Benghazi. The United States government conceived of, led and executed the assault that killed the al-Qaeda leader. And as such, the White House probably knows more about that than it does a seemingly half-baked terror operation in Benghazi it had nothing to do with.

Two physics experts say a document obtained by the Associated Press on Tuesday, which the news organization said “suggests” that Iran is “working on” a nuclear weapon, contains a “massive error” and might be a “hoax.” The AP’s publication of the document generated headlines on Tuesday because the graph, according to the AP, showed that Iran was running “computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.” But Yousaf Butt and Faronc Delnaki-Veress, writing in the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists, say that the massive error contained in the document is “unlikely to have been made by research scientists working at a national level.” To Butt and Dalnaki-Veress, the document “does nothing more than indicate either slipshod analysis or an amateurish hoax.”

In the AP article, titled “Graph suggests Iran working on bomb,” the news organization claims that the document was obtained from officials of “a country critical of Iran’s atomic program.” The AP also states that a “senior diplomat” confirmed that the International Atomic Energy Agency “cited” the diagram in a report from last year. Butt and Delnaki Veress, however, say the graph contains key errors and that “the level of scientific sophistication needed to produce such a graph corresponds to that typically found in graduate or advanced undergraduate-level nuclear physics courses.” If the IAEA did indeed use the graph, it couldn’t have revealed much because, according to Butt and Delnaki-Veress, “the image does not imply that computer simulations were actually run” and the graph’s findings are “neither a secret, nor indicative of a nuclear weapons program.”

“The diagram leaked to the Associated Press this week is nothing more than either shoddy sources or shoddy science. In either case, the world can keep calm and carry on,” the Bulletin article summarizes.

Glenn Greenwald, a columnist at the Guardian, points out that similar documents were brandished in the early 2000s:

“The case for the attack on Iraq was driven, of course, by a mountain of fabricated documents and deliberately manipulated intelligence which western media outlets uncritically amplified.”

When it comes to the nuclear issue in Iran, the Obama administration continues to pursue a diplomatic solution, which they believe is the “the best and most permanent” way to end the stand-off. Indeed, former Israeli officials have said that a strike on Iran could potentially accelerate Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon. The U.S. finds a nuclear armed Iran to be unacceptable, but the window for diplomacy remains open as U.S. and Israel intelligence believe that Iran has not decided to build a nuclear weapon.

Today, however, the head of the IAEA, Yukiya Amano, said that he could not confirm that Iran’s nuclear work was peaceful with “credible assurance.” And Reuters reports today that “the United States effectively set a March deadline…for Iran to start cooperating in substance with a U.N. nuclear agency investigation, saying it would otherwise urge reporting the issue to the U.N. Security Council.”

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said on Wednesday that she would have a hard time supporting U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice as the next Secretary of State because she is concerned about Rice’s credibility in the aftermath of presenting what turned out to be an inaccurate portrayal of the Sept. 11 Benghazi terror attacks. Yet, Collins was not at all concerned about President Bush’s decision to nominate Condoleezza Rice as the nation’s top diplomat, despite her role in presenting false information that provided the justification for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Appearing on CNN, Collins hammered home various GOP talking points about concerns that Rice may have acted overly political in providing an overview of the Obama administration’s knowledge in the aftermath of the attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, and said that damaged Rice’s credibility to be the top State Department official:

COLLINS: It’s important that the secretary of state enjoy credibility around the world with Congress and here in our country as well. And I am concerned that Susan Rice’s credibility may have been damaged by the misinformation that was presented that day. That’s one reason, as I said, that I wish she had just told the White House no, you should send a political person to be on those Sunday shows.

Watch it:

Collins’ statements throughout the day on Wednesday, on CNN and elsewhere, leave several questions unanswered. The first is why the focus on a nominee’s judgement is so much more important now than in 2004 and 2005. Shortly after President Bush nominated Condoleezza Rice to be the next Secretary of State in November, 2004, Collins praised the move, saying Bush “made a very good choice.” Collins, in turn, voted for her confirmation along with almost all of her Republican colleagues.

Condoleezza Rice had spent many months prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq convincing the public of the threat that Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction program presented to the United States, including famously stating that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Her statements led the U.S. into a war in Iraq that will end up costing the U.S. trillions of dollars and leaving tens of thousands dead or wounded. We knew by the time Condoleezza Rice was nominated that there were no WMDs in Iraq.

Another question to ask is why Rice’s name is now being brought up in relation to a set of Embassy bombings from 14 years ago. Collins earlier on Wednesday said, “What troubles me so much is the Benghazi attack in many ways echoes the attacks on those embassies in 1998, when Susan Rice was head of the African region for our State Department.”
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Not letting up on the GOP attack on Ambassador Susan Rice, Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) today wondered on MSNBC why Rice did not augment the unclassified talking points provided to her on the Benghazi attacks with classified information to which she had access.

Speaking with MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell, Ayotte pointed out that Rice had reviewed classified intelligence related to the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya which contained previously unreleased information. This access, in Ayotte’s opinion, should have been disclosed on live television during Rice’s now infamous Sunday news show appearances on Sept. 16:

AYOTTE: That’s one of the questions I have, and one of the questions that didn’t feel I get a satisfactory answer to. Which is if you knew that even though the classified version obviously had references to Al Qaeda in it — being involved or individuals with ties to Al Qaeda involved in it — then how could not know that when you go on every Sunday show and not include that fact that it would leave a very different impression to the American people. Particularly on two of those networks where she also said in an answer to another question that Al Qaeda had been decimated.

Watch Ayotte’s full statements here:

Counter to Ayotte’s accusations, had Rice revealed classified information during her Sept. 16 interviews she would be in much more of a position to be scolded by the Republican Party. Leaking classified information is punishable by law, and while she does have a high-level clearance, Rice is not in a position to arbitrarily declassify the items that she has the ability to access. “If Rice had gone beyond her unclassified talking points,” CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen noted today, “[there's] no doubt she would now be being hounded for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”

Ayotte also focused on Rice’s statement that “al Qaeda is decimated,” implying that Rice was attempting to frame the Benghazi issue in a favorable political light in line with President Obama’s re-election efforts. Rice has since said that she regrets her choice of words, saying to Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) that she would have instead emphasized that al Qaeda’s leadership had been vastly weakened, a status that independent analysts agree with.

Rice, who has not yet been nominated but is considered the front runner to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, has been taking meetings on the Hill for the past two days. With some of those face-to-face talks, she has managed to convince several GOP Senators to not preemptively block her potential nomination, including Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Bob Corker (R-TN) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA). Democrats would need at least five Republicans to break a filibuster of Rice in the Senate.

Republican Sens. Susan Collins (ME) and Bob Corker (TN) said after their meetings with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice on Wednesday that they will wait to judge her potential nomination for Secretary of State and will give any nominee a “full hearing” without making any “premature” statements. The senators’ comments stand in contrast to those made by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), who on Tuesday pledged to place a hold on Rice bid for Secretary of State should she be nominated.

Collins told reporters today that it would be “premature” to reach a “judgment now” on Rice. The Republican from Maine, who rebuffed Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) request to create a Watergate-style investigative committee on Benghazi, said she still needs “additional information” before she “could support her nomination” for Secretary of State. Corker said in a separate press conference that whomever is nominated as the nation’s top diplomat, he’ll “give that person a full hearing, as I always do.” Watch clips from the press conferences here:

This isn’t the first group of Republican Senators to separate themselves from McCain’s plan to block Rice, or any nominee, and instead promise to grant a full and fair hearing. Indeed, Sens. Marco Rubio (FL) and Rand Paul (KY) stated that they would not pre-judge any potential nominee for Secretary of State and would instead focus on a full hearing.

A Republican senator on Wednesday praised U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice during an interview on CNN, saying Rice is a “very smart, very intelligent woman” and that she shouldn’t be held responsible for the misleading information she presented on the Benghazi terror attacks during her Sept. 16 Sunday show appearances.

Republicans led by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) had led an all out assault on Rice over the past several weeks, suggesting that she deliberately misled the American people when she said the attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans was sparked by a demonstration against an anti-Islam video (Rice said yesterday that there was no demonstration). Because of the dust-up, McCain called Rice “not very bright” and a group of House Republicans called her “incompetent.”

But Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) doesn’t believe that to be the case. While Isakson told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien this morning that the administration needs to answer questions about what happened in Benghazi, he added, referring to Rice, “what you don’t want to do is shoot the messenger.” Rice “is a very smart, very intelligent woman. I know this Ms. Rice, I think she’s done a good job as Ambassador to the U.N.,” Isakson said:

ISAKSON: Well if she is then she come before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. We’ll get the answers to questions and quite frankly, if we don’t get some resolution for the questions regarding Benghazi and the death of Chris Stevens, then I doubt very seriously that she would be confirmed but if we get the truth – what you don’t want to do Soledad is shoot the messenger. She read what she was told to read on those days and those five interviews on that Sunday right after Benghazi. …

She’s become the focal point because she was put on the tip of the spear by the administration. She is a very smart, very intelligent woman. I know this Ms. Rice, I think she’s done a good job as Ambassador to the U.N.

Watch the clip:

Indeed, on Sept. 16, Rice presented information given to her by the intelligence community, talking points that were approved by the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA and she consistently made it clear that what she was presenting were only initial conclusions and could still change. While some of those talking points turned out to be inaccurate, there is no evidence she intentionally gave false information. “Neither I nor anyone else in the administration intended to mislead the American people at any stage in the process,” she said.

Isakson isn’t the first Republican senator to stray from McCain’s attack lines on Susan Rice. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) pushed back against McCain’s call for a Watergate-style committee to investigate the Benghazi incident.

And McCain’s top Senate ally Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) agreed with Chambliss and yesterday had differed with the Arizona Republican after conducting separate private meetings with Rice. While McCain and his allies said the meeting left them more “disturbed” about Rice and Benghazi, Lieberman offered a more favorable opinion. “I felt that she was telling me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” he said.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on Tuesday blasted three key Republicans who are attacking U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice over the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi incident. After facts trickled out about the Benghazi attacks trickled out in prior weeks that undermined their attacks on Rice, the senators, John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), seemed to back away from going after Rice.

But after their private meeting with the U.N. Ambassador, McCain, Graham and Ayotte came out swinging, claiming that Rice should have either disregarded talking points the intelligence community gave her for her Sept. 16 Sunday show appearances, or not said anything at all about the attacks given that some of the information given her turned out to be inaccurate.

Reid, in a statement released yesterday evening, shot back:

“The personal attacks against Ambassador Rice by certain Republican senators have been outrageous and utterly unmoored from facts and reality. I am shocked that senators would continue these attacks even when the evidence – including disclosures from the intelligence community about the information she presented – have made it clear that the allegations against Ambassador Rice are baseless, and that she has done absolutely nothing wrong.

“Ambassador Rice’s service as United States Ambassador to the United Nations has been impeccable. She has answered all questions raised in relation to the Benghazi attacks completely and repeatedly. The Senate committees of jurisdiction are in the midst of examining the events leading up to the Benghazi attacks, and I agree with those – including the ranking Republican members of both the Intelligence and Homeland Security committees – who have said we should let the committees do their work. There should be no place for such blatant partisanship in oversight of our nation’s intelligence community.

“The election is over. It is time to drop these partisan political games, and focus our attention on the real challenges facing us as a nation.”

Reid warned McCain earlier this month to quit politicizing the Benghazi attacks after Arizona Republican called for a Watergate-style special committee to investigate the administration’s response. “There is no evidence that any crime was committed,” Reid said.

McCain, his Republican allies and Fox News have been pushing baseless conspiracy theories on the Benghazi attacks, primarily that Rice and other Obama administration officials were involved in a “cover up.” Senior intelligence official debunked McCain’s latest charge — that the White House had changed Rice’s Benghazi talking points for political purposes — and it seemed like he would back off. But now McCain is back at it and even some of his best friends in the Senate refuse to sign on.