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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