Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Tuesday agreed with Fox News host Steve Doocy’s claim that had the Obama administration granted requests for additional security in Libya prior to the assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi last month, “four Americans may very well be alive right now”

DOOCY: Because you know so much about this, you know you’re the perfect guest to be talking about this because, you know, the big question is, what did the president know and when did he know it? But people in the administration –

GRAHAM: And what did they do about it.

DOOCY: Exactly because had they actually granted the requests for extra security, four Americans may very well be alive right now.

GRAHAM: Well Steve that’s a very good point.

Watch the clip:

Yet, according to State Department officials involved, the security requests were for the U.S. Embassy in the capital, Tripoli, not Benghazi, the New York Times reported last week:

In a stream of diplomatic cables, embassy security officers warned their superiors at the State Department of a worsening threat from Islamic extremists, and requested that the teams of military personnel and State Department security guards who were already on duty be kept in service.

The requests were denied, but they were largely focused on extending the tours of security guards at the American Embassy in Tripoli — not at the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, 400 miles away. And State Department officials testified this week during a hearing by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that extending the tour of additional guards — a 16-member military security team — through mid-September would not have changed the bloody outcome because they were based in Tripoli, not Benghazi.

Graham, along with Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) continue to politicize the Libya attacks even after the late Ambassador Steven’s father said it would be “abhorrent” to do so.

The controversy over Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) Islamophobic witch-hunt was kicked off by a series of letters from her and colleagues demanding that the Inspectors General of four government agencies investigate “deep penetration” by the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. government. But during an interview with Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported that two of the agencies have no intention of launching investigations.

During the interview, Cooper said:

We called the inspectors general involved here. Two of the five [sic] agencies, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, told us they had no plans to investigate. And both were clear that a request like this is outside the inspectors general mandate, saying that they look at the effectiveness of programs. They look for waste, fraud, abuse.

Watch the video:

Bachmann, though, isn’t backing down. Yesterday on Glenn Beck’s show, she doubled down on her allegations — despite a rising tide of Republican and right-wing repudiations of her Islamophobic attacks.

On the floor of the Senate Wednesday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) repudiated Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) McCarthyesque witch-hunt to root out the alleged Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the U.S. government. The flap started when Bachmann all but directly accused Secretary Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin of working on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood in a letter with four colleagues to the State Department’s Inspector General demanding an investigation.

While some Democrats have taken Bachmann to task for the charges, some Republicans, like House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers (MI), lauded her witch-hunt.

Enter McCain, who put his foot down today and chided his fellow Republicans for the accusations against Abedin. McCain brought up his personal relationship with Abedin, adding that she “represents what is best about America.” He noted Bachmann’s letter and its sourcing to a report from notorious Islamophobe Frank Gaffney‘s Center for Security Policy (CSP). He then said:

To say that the accusations made in both documents are not substantiated by the evidence they offer is to be overly polite and diplomatic about it. It is far better, and more accurate, to talk straight: These allegations about Huma Abedin, and the report from which they are drawn, are nothing less than an unwarranted and unfounded attack on an honorable citizen, a dedicated American, and a loyal public servant.

Watch the video:

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) lead the charge against Bachmann, demanding “credible, substantial evidence” to back up her accusations. Bachmann then penned a long letter responding to Ellison, which he rightly dismissed as “16 pages worth of repeated false allegations. Just regurgitated nonsense.”

But Bachmann’s response to Ellison did adjust her sources. While many of the 59 footnotes are still dubious — such as those linking to the Islamophobe Steve Emerson’s group, the Investigative Project — she dropped the sole source cited in her initial letter to the State Department: Gaffney‘s CSP. In his request for information, Ellison had noted that Gaffney — a sometime Bachmann adviser and booster — had been “widely discredited.” McCain, who said he had worked with CSP and considers Gaffney a “friend” nonetheless called the accusations in the report “scurrilous.”

When Rep. Keith Ellison (R-MN) asked his colleague Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) to produce “credible, substantial evidence” of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “deep penetration” into the U.S. government, she responded with a 16-page letter. In her new letter — a follow-up on letters she wrote with colleagues to the Inspectors General of four government agencies demanding they look into her chargers — Bachmann denied she had suggested Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin is linked to the Brotherhood and gave 59 footnoted sources for her claim.

On Anderson Cooper’s CNN show last night, Ellison responded to Bachmann’s latest salvo, saying her accusations were “simply scare-mongering” and compared her quest to root out Muslim Brotherhood infiltrators to Sen. Joe McCarthy’s infamous witch-hunt for Communist agents. Ellison went on::

COOPER: You asked for a full accounting of the evidence these members of Congress were using to make their claims. You got a 16- page letter back. Does their evidence hold up?

ELLISON: No, it’s 16 pages worth of nothing. It’s 16 pages worth of repeated false allegations. Just regurgitated nonsense. And, you know, it doesn’t — 16 pages doesn’t take nothing and turn it into something. It’s still nothing…

COOPER: Have you seen any evidence of “deep penetration” — that was the words that Congressman Bachmann used — “deep penetration” by the Muslim Brotherhood into the security apparatus of the United States?

ELLISON: No, it’s not true. It doesn’t exist. It’s a phantom.

Watch the whole interview here:

Cooper also related a statement from Abedin’s office responding to Bachmann’s allegations:

They are nothing but vicious and disgusting lies that have no place in reasonable political discourse. And anyone who traffics in them should be ashamed of themselves.

Ellison was right: Bachmann’s response simply rehashed the same charges against Abedin and others. Salon, which initially reported the letter, spelled out the absurdity of the allegations.

Bachmann denied the clearly implied charge that Abedin worked on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood. But in her first letter to the State Department, she named Abedin’s torturous and distant family connections to the group and said, “Her position affords her routine access to the Secretary and to policy-making.” She added, in the next sentence, that the Obama adminisrtation has “taken actions recently that have been enormously favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and its interests.”

Responding to Ellison, Bachmann denied she was accusing Abedin directly and said her concern was simply about the security clearance process. She wrote that family members are already examined as “potentially disqualifying conditions for obtaining security clearance, which undoubtably Ms. Abedin had to obtain to function in her position.” In other words, the process she’s concerned about is already in place, but not to her liking, leaving one with little else to assume but that she is indeed making sordid implications about Abedin. Ellison called this “the worst of guilt by association.”

In an interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former George H.W. Bush Secretary of State James Baker discussed a potential strike on Iran’s nuclear program. Both told Rose that they think the U.S. should keep all options on the table to deal with a potential Iranian nuclear weapon — a policy adopted by the Obama administration.

But Clinton and Baker had no illusions about the possible consequences of an attack by Israel or the U.S. against Iran’s nuclear program. After Baker highlighted a growing consensus of former top Israeli security officials against an attack and his view that Israeli capabilities could only cause a delay — not put an end to — Iran’s nuclear progress, he said that sanctions against Iran are “having an effect” and “you don’t want to lose all of that.” (Former top Israeli officials also share this view.)

Baker also discussed how an attack could serve hard-liners in Iran. “There are a lot of unanticipated consequences that could follow from [an attack], not least of which is — well, not least of which is strengthening the hand of the hard-liners in Iran.”

Clinton then said Baker’s assertion was “an important point,” adding what she sees as two schools of thought among Iran’s leaders:

CLINTON: There are those [among Iran's leadership] who say, “Look, you know, these sanctions are really biting. We’re not making the kind of economic progress we should be making. We don’t give up that much by saying we’re not going to do a nuclear weapon and having a verifiable regime to demonstrate that.”

And then, frankly, there are those who are saying, “The best thing that could happen to us is be attacked by somebody. Just bring it on because that would unify us. It would legitimize the regime.”

[The regime] doesn’t represent the will of the people. It’s kind of morphed into kind of a military theocracy. And, therefore, an argument is made constantly on the hard-line side of the Iranian government that, you know, “We’re not going to give anything up. And in fact we’re going to provoke an attack because then we will be in power for as long as anyone can imagine.”

Watch a clip of the exchange between the current and former Secretaries of State:

A potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, as well as the nuclear non-proliferation regime. U.S., U.N. and Israeli intelligence estimates give the West time to pursue a dual-track approach of pressure and diplomacy to resolve the crisis. Questions about the efficacy and potential consequences of a strike have led U.S. officials to declare that diplomacy is the “best and most permanent way” to resolve the crisis.

Yesterday, a tribal court in Pakistan handed down a 33-year prison term for treason to the doctor who helped the CIA locate Osama Bin Laden in a Pakistani army garrison town. The verdict drew widespread attention in Washington, but Congress and the State Department are having very different reactions.

After Capitol HIll collectively expressed considerable outrage, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted unanimously to cut $33 million from Pakistan’s foreign aid package — $1 million for each year of the sentence against the doctor, Shakeel Afridi. The reduction comes on top of the more than 50 percent of the aid a Senate panel cut earlier this week.

But the U.S. State Department didn’t ramp up its rhetoric so dramatically, maintaining its position that Afridi is detained without basis. A spokesperson said the U.S. will continue to let the Pakistani government know about that position. The softer line might reflect the possibility that Afridi’s verdict could easily be overturned.

Afridi, who ran a vaccination drive to collect data that the U.S. has credited with helping to find Bin Laden, was tried under a British colonial-era law that does not carry a death penalty, according to the New York Times. (The L.A. Times reported that “Afridi could have been given the death penalty.”) Having never approved of his detention, however, the U.S. still objected to the sentence. Asked about the issue yesterday, spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said:

We will – we continue to see no basis for Dr. Afridi to be held….

I think we’ve said that we don’t see any basis for what’s happened here, and so we will continue to make those representations to the Government of Pakistan.

Watch the video:

In February, Clinton said of Afridi: “His work on behalf of the effort to take down Bin Laden was in Pakistan’s interests as well as in America’s.” On CBS’s 60 Minutes in January, Panetta was more outspoken on the matter, calling actions against Afridi a “real mistake on their part” and crediting his help and making a case similar to Clinton’s:

This was an individual who in fact helped provide intelligence that was very helpful with regards to this operation. He was not in any way treasonous towards Pakistan, he was not in any way doing anything that would have undermined Pakistan. As a matter of fact, Pakistan and the United States have a common cause here against terrorism.

A Pakistani lawyer speaking to CNN said it was likely the case could be overturned — something Nuland subtly alluded to in the briefing when she said the legal process wasn’t necessarily complete. The lawyer, Shahzad Akbar, said that the tribal court is not based in Abbottabad, the site of the bin Laden raid. He told CNN: “If this punishment is challenged by Dr. Afridi’s family in the Superior Court of Pakistan, there is a good possibility that the sentence will be turned around.“