Matthias Schrader / AP

Sen. John McCain

Updated 12:52 pm ET. Always one to speak -- or Tweet -- his mind, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) Monday made a joke comparing Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a monkey, something one Republican congressman charged was “racist.”

“So Ahmadinejad wants to be first Iranian in space - wasn't he just there last week?” McCain said in a tweet that also linked to a story about Iran launching a monkey into space.

Some didn’t take so kindly to the not-so-diplomatic quip, prompting McCain, 76, to respond: “Re: Iran space tweet - lighten up folks, can't everyone take a joke?”

Seeing that, Michigan congressman Rep. Justin Amash, 32, shot back.

“Maybe you should wisen up & not make racist jokes,” Amash tweeted.

Not everyone on the right agreed with Amash. Conservative John Podhoretz, for example, Tweeted this: "How dare McCain say something demeaning & disparaging abt the foremost anti-Semite on the planet." And this: "So...it's defend-the-Jew-hater-from-the-war-hero day." 

It’s not the first time McCain’s made a joke about Iran that landed him in some hot water. During his run for president in 2007, McCain sang about bombing the country.

Asked by a GOP primary voter when the U.S. would send an “air-mail message to Tehran,” McCain said, “That old Beach Boys’ song, ‘Bomb Iran?’ Bomb, bomb, bomb—, anyway.”

McCain’s response then as now? It’s just a joke -- "get a life.”

“When veterans are together, veterans joke,” McCain said at the time. “And I was with veterans and we were joking. And if somebody can’t understand that, my answer is, ‘Please, get a life.’”

Updated at 2:20p.m. ET: In a hearing marked by sometimes sharp and pointed exchanges, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee she took responsibility for not adequately protecting U.S. personnel in the Sept. 11 attack on a diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya that resulted in the killing of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. 

Defending the administration’s immediate handling of the attack, Clinton clashed at times with Republicans over the account the administration gave in the initial days after Sept. 11.

Clinton said the Obama administration did not try to mislead the American people about the cause of the attacks. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” she said as she sparred with Sen. Ron Johnson, R- Wisc.

She angrily told Johnson that at this stage it did not really matter what the precise origins or motives of the attack were: “What difference at this point does it make?”

She told Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican, “we did not have a clear picture” of all that was going on in Benghazi although she did acknowledge that senators had “legitimate questions” about the administration’s account.

Sen. John McCain, R- Ariz., -- after telling Clinton “we are proud of you” and that all over the world “you are viewed with admiration and respect” -- delivered a blistering criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of the events in Libya.

“There are many questions that are unanswered and the answers you’ve given this morning are frankly not satisfactory to me,” McCain told Clinton. He added “the American people and the families of these four brave Americans still haven’t gotten the answers they deserve.”

He asked Clinton whether she was aware of numerous warnings from Stevens and other Americans in Libya that the facility in Benghazi was not capable of resisting a sustained assault. He also said there had been other warning signs such as an attack on the British ambassador to Libya.

He angrily asked Clinton why Defense Department forces were not nearby to defend the Benghazi facility.

Last month a report issued by the Accountability Review Board (ARB) appointed by Clinton, blamed State Department officials for “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies” that led to protection for the Benghazi facility that was “grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.”

In her response to McCain, Clinton said, as she did to other senators on the panel, that some additional information on the causes and circumstances of the attack is in the classified portions of the report issued by the ARB. Senators and Senate staff can read the classified portions of the ARB report, but the public cannot.

And she blamed members of Congress for holding up additional aid to Libya that might make the country more secure and less chaotic. 

Clinton was testifying Wednesday afternoon on Benghazi before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

In his questioning of Clinton Wednesday morning, Sen. Rand Paul, R- Ky., told her, “I’m glad that you’re accepting responsibility. I think that ultimately with your leaving, you accept the culpability for the worst tragedy since 9/11, and I really mean that. Had I been president at the time and I found that you did not read the cables from Benghazi, you did not read the cables from Ambassador Stevens, I would have relieved you of your post.”

He added, “It’s a failure of leadership” which cost the Americans in Benghazi their lives. “I think it’s good that you’re accepting responsibility-- because no one else is.”

Paul also argued that U.S. personnel ought to never have been sent to Benghazi “in a war zone” without a military guard. “You shouldn’t send them in with the same kind of embassy staff that you have in Paris,” he added. 

Clinton replied that all four State Department officials criticized in the ARB report for their roles on the Benghazi events had been removed from their jobs and placed on administrative leave. “The ARB (report) made very clear that the level of responsibility for the failures that they outlined was set at the assistant secretary level and below.”

The furor over the Benghazi attack helped derail one possible nominee to replace Clinton at the State Department, UN ambassador Susan Rice, whom Republicans assailed for using administration talking points that portrayed the incident as a spontaneous response to an inflammatory anti-Islamic video.

But Clinton told the committee that in the hours and days after the attack, “I was not focused on talking points” and “I wasn’t involved in the talking points process.”

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In her opening statement, Clinton told the committee, “As I have said many times since September 11, I take responsibility.  Nobody is more committed to getting this right.  I am determined to leave the State Department and our country safer, stronger, and more secure.”

Clinton's voice choked with emotion as she recalled the return of “those flag-draped caskets” from the Americans killed in Benghazi and put her arms “around the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters” of those killed. 

Clinton also used her testimony to deliver a vigorous call for continued U.S. involvement in the North African nation of Mali where the Obama administration is aiding French efforts to defeat Islamic jihadist forces.

She told the committee that the United States cannot allow Mali to become a safe haven for the group Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), warning of the risk of AQIM attacks on the United States itself.

Clinton also said she could not confirm reports that some of the terrorists involved in last week’s Algeria hostage taking were also involved in the Benghazi attack but called it a "new thread" to follow.

She did say that there is no doubt that Algerian terrorists have weapons they obtained from depots in Libya that were opened up and “liberated” after the dictator Moammar Gadhafi was toppled, with U.S. and NATO help, in 2011.

Gary Cameron / Reuters, file

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks about the hostage situation in Algeria during a joint news conference with Japan's Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida (not pictured) after their meeting at the State Department in Washington Jan. 18, 2013.

Clinton said she had accepted the ARBs recommendations for improvements in security procedures and had asked her subordinates “to ensure that all 29 of them are implemented quickly and completely.” She said these changes are designed to “reduce the chances of another Benghazi happening again.”

On Thursday the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold its confirmation hearing for Clinton’s successor, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who is the committee’s chairman and is likely to be confirmed without any opposition.

Updated 3:00 pm ET -- Former CIA Director David Petraeus testified Friday before congressional intelligence panels telling members that he had believed from the outset that the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was an act of terrorists.

NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell reported that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee said after hearing from Petraeus that Obama administration officials made a decision to hold back as classified information an explicit depiction of Benghazi incident as an act of terrorists -- therefore that description did not make it into the “talking points” that the administration prepared for officials when they went on TV talk shows and spoke to reporters.

Instead, the initial talking points focused on spontaneous reactions to an anti-Islamic video as a spark for the attack. Five days after attack, the administration dispatched U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to speak on the Sunday news shows to offer a preliminary explanation of the attack, which she attributed to an anti-Islamic video that was circulated on YouTube.

In the attack Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans – Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods and Sean Smith – were killed.

Keeping as classified the determination that the Benghazi attack was the work of terrorists may have been done in order to help pursue those very same terrorists.

“There might have been two tracks happening all along: the public statements that were reflecting part of what they may have known” and the classified information that terrorists had been the ones attacking the consulate. “The real question is if they knew it was terrorism all along – was there too much suggestion that a video or demonstrations may have been involved?” said O’Donnell.

House Intelligence Committee member Peter King, R-N.Y., told reporters Friday after Petraeus testified that the initial “talking points” from the Obama administration to prepare officials for what they should say publicly in the first days after the attack had been changed to delete references to any al Qaida involvement in the event.

King said he and his colleagues now needed to hear testimony from officials in the State Department, the Defense Department “and also people at the White House – to see if anyone at the White House changed the talking points.”

King told reporters after Petraeus testified that “his testimony today was that from the start (immediately after Sept. 11) he had told us that this was a terrorist attack, that terrorism was involved from the start.”

But King said that he himself “had a very different recollection" of what Petraeus had told the panel in the initial aftermath of the attack. 

"The clear impression that we (members of the House Intelligence Committee) were given (in the initial days after the attack) was that the overwhelming amount of evidence was that it arose out of a spontaneous demonstration and it was not a terrorist attack,” King said. 

Rep. C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts after hearing from Petraeus that “I can’t agree that there was entirely an intelligence failure” in the days leading up to the attack.

He said, “The intelligence community did put people in the area of Benghazi and in Libya generally. It was a hot spot, it was an area where you had to be on high alert – they did not pick up the actual attack itself. So we’re evaluating whether or not it was or was not an intelligence failure.”

Another House Intelligence Committee member, Rep. Tom Rooney, R–Fla., told MSNBC’s Roberts that he’d learned from the Petraeus testimony how inadequate the protection at the consulate was on Sept 11.

“We had less than a handful of security there for the ambassador,” Rooney said. “First of all, I don’t know why the ambassador was there on 9/11 to begin with, but that’s a whole other story. Second we were relying really on local Libyan militia who – if there was anything coordinated about the two attacks, at the compound and at the annex, it is that there was a coordinated absence by the people who were supposed to be protecting us.” He said the Libyan militia “were nowhere to be found” when the assault occurred.   

Rooney added that President Barack Obama has said “he did everything he could” to protect the consulate. “He may have done everything he could, but it wasn’t enough because our people are dead.” 

The investigation into the Benghazi events has become a major focus for members of Congress returning to the Capitol after last week’s elections. The episode has political implications not only for Obama but for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who may run for president in 2016.

Petraeus resigned one week ago after the revelation of his adulterous affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell.

Rice told NBC’s David Gregory on Meet the Press Sept. 16 that “putting together the best information that we have available to us today – our current assessment is that what happened in Benghazi was, in fact, initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo – almost a copycat of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, which were prompted, of course, by the video.”

She added that in Benghazi “opportunistic extremist elements came to the consulate as this was unfolding. They came with heavy weapons, which, unfortunately, are readily available in post-revolutionary Libya, and that escalated into a much more violent episode.”

Rice is said to be in the running to be Obama’s nominee to be secretary of state once Clinton departs.

Slideshow: Petraeus case: Cast of characters

ISAF via Reuters file

Meet the people who have been pulled into the scandal that caused Gen. David Petraeus to resign.

Launch slideshow

But Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and other Republican senators have made clear they will use any means they can to block her nomination if Obama does select her.  

“I don’t trust her,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said of Rice, calling her “more a political operative than she is anything else when it comes to Benghazi.”

Obama defended Rice Wednesday, saying she had “represented the United States and our interests in the United Nations with skill and professionalism and toughness and grace… Should I choose, if I think that she would be the best person to serve America in the capacity of the State Department, then I will nominate her.”

McCain on Wednesday introduced a resolution to create a special eight-member select Senate committee to examine the attack on the consulate. But McCain’s proposal got a mostly chilly reception Wednesday from Chambliss and other senators.

NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

With President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta not ruling out military action against Iran and Syria, Congress is once again trying to figure out its role in war making.

The House last June found itself in the paradoxical position of voting to defeat a resolution authorizing Obama to use force in Libya -- but also defeating a proposal to cut off funding for the operation. In effect, the House said it would keep paying for a war it did not authorize.

J. Scott Applewhite / AP

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday March 7, 2012, before the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the crisis in Syria and the risks for U.S. involvement.

Although Obama has warned Congress and the Republican presidential contenders against talk of a precipitous war against Iran, he hasn’t ruled out ordering military action to stop the Tehran regime from developing nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile Sen. John McCain, R- Ariz., called this week for air strikes on Syria. And Panetta said Wednesday “potential military options, if necessary” are being considered by the Obama administration against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Sometimes, as in the case of Libya, Congress votes too late on a resolution authorizing the president to use force. By the time the House voted on a resolution authorizing Obama to use force against Libya, he’d already ordered U.S. forces, as part of a NATO mission, to attack targets in that nation three months earlier.

Sometimes as in the case of invading Iraq in 2003, Congress votes to authorize an action the president made clear he was going to take anyway, no matter what Congress did.

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This week Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell came up with a new approach to the congressional role in war making. In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, McConnell said that if U.S. intelligence agencies presented Congress with an assessment that Iran had begun to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels, “or has taken a decision to develop a nuclear weapon” he would consult with Obama and then introduce an authorization for the use of military force.

He said passage of an authorization would ensure that “we have a coherent, unified policy toward Iran and that we not take on another military action without bipartisan support.”

But even with the kind of vote McConnell envisions, no Congress can force a president to launch a military strike he does not choose to launch.

Instead of being too late, as in Libya, would McConnell’s idea be a case of Congress moving too soon?

“I think the Israelis have avoided drawing lines so he probably should not draw red lines at this time either,” said Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D- Mich. Thursday. “I think it’s better to kind of keep them guessing. That’s what the Israelis are doing. The prime minster of Israel specifically said he’s not specifying what they may do under what conditions, so I think that McConnell would be wise not to specify at this time either” – other than reiterating that “all options are on the table.”

Sen. Susan Collins, R- Maine, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said, “I think he (McConnell) was trying to send a signal to the Iranians that there is a red line here and if the Iranians cross it, there would be support in Congress for strong action. I think he was trying to send a signal to the administration that it needs to be tougher in its approach with the Iranians.”

But, she added, “I think it’s a long way from actually authorizing the use of force.”

Collins thinks presidents should get authorization from Congress in order to launch military actions.

In Libya, she said, Obama “should have received congressional authorization and I felt the president violated the War Powers Act in not doing so.” Collins said it isn’t simply a matter of congressional authorization ensuring that a war will have public backing: “It’s a matter of following the law and respecting the Constitution.”

As for Syria, McCain said Thursday a congressional authorization to use force “would be useful, but I think right now you’d have to have the president ask for it” and there would need to be more public support. “But, believe me; momentum is building in our direction: look at the lead editorial in the Washington Post this morning.” That editorial called for Obama to build an international consensus to use force against Assad’s regime.

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Sen. Lindsey Graham, R- S.C., a believer in robust presidential war-making powers, said, “I think the president could deploy military force in this situation without an authorization from Congress.”

Graham said he wants Obama to lead an international coalition which would provide humanitarian aid to Syrians under attack from the Assad regime and which might impose a no-fly zone “to give breathing space to the people about to be slaughtered and create a sanctuary where they re-group, organize and be trained.” He emphasized that he did not want the United States to act unilaterally.

But even if there were a congressional resolution to use force in Syria, unintended consequences might follow.

Louis Fisher, a war powers scholar at the Constitution Project, a Washington think tank said that a congressional resolution is not in itself an insurance policy against misguided presidential action.

“My first thought is the disaster of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution” by which authorized use of force against North Vietnam in 1964, he said. “Yes, it featured Congress ‘authorizing’ a war but the resolution was carelessly drafted and permitted (President Lyndon) Johnson to escalate the war the next year. The Iraq Resolution of 2002 is another example of a misconceived effort to authorize war. Congress is supposed to make the decision. Instead the resolution left the question of military action to (President) Bush.”

As for McConnell’s idea, Fisher said “This legislation seems to give the intelligence community a trigger to authorize military action against Iran.” Based on how the intelligence agencies performed in the run-up to the Iraq war, he said, that might be a grave error.

Even though Graham doesn’t think Obama needs a vote by Congress to act against Syria, he did say that a congressional authorization “always bolsters your case, it’s always good to have the country behind military action.”

But in fast-moving situations the president cannot and should not wait: “When the president hits these guys in Somalia, go get ‘em. We’ve given the authorization to use force against al Qaida (in the 2001 congressional vote).”

Yet, 11 years after the congressional vote to give Bush the power to fight al Qaida and allied groups, Graham said there are murky post-9/11 cases in which it is not clear how far congressional authorization reaches: “What about these spin-off groups, al-Shabaab (in Somalia) and these other groups that are just beginning to spin off? AQIM (an Algerian-based jihadist group), what about them? So we need to think this thing through.”

He said, “These are really good questions; I don’t know the answers to them all.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta reaffirmed Tuesday the Obama administration’s determination to persist in seeking a stable government in Afghanistan after the murder of two U.S. military officers by an Afghan soldier inside the Interior Ministry building in Kabul.

Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP

'The reason we are there, senator, is because our mission is to dismantle, destroy, and defeat al Qaida and their terrorist allies,' Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said.

The weekend murders were the latest in a wave of “fratricide” attacks by Afghan soldiers and policemen on American soldiers in Afghanistan.

At a Senate Budget Committee hearing Sen. Lindsey Graham, R- S.C., asked Panetta, “When it comes to Afghanistan … is it worth it? What is winning? What’s the benefit of winning? What’s the cost of losing?”

See related: Panetta applauds Karzai statement on peace talks

“The reason we are there, senator, is because our mission is to dismantle, destroy, and defeat al Qaida and their terrorist allies,” Panetta said. “Our ultimate goal here has to be an Afghanistan that can control and secure itself and make sure that it can never again become a safe haven where terrorists can plan attacks,”.

He added that “the cost of losing” is that the Taliban would regain control of Afghanistan and that terrorist groups would regroup there “and their sole goal is to attack this country.”

No senators asked Panetta whether the fratricide attacks call into question the Obama administration’s strategy of training Afghan military forces so that they can take responsibility for keeping order in the country once most U.S. forces are withdrawn in 2014, as Obama has promised.

Separately, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D- Mich., told reporters Tuesday that if there’s no repeat of the inadvertent burning of Korans in Afghanistan -- which may have triggered the murders of the two Americans -- then “we will not see a repeat of this kind of violence. I don’t believe the Afghan people want us to leave. I don’t think that most of the Afghan army or police are willing to attack us, or want to attack us any way. I think it’s a very small minority.”

What’s more important, Levin said, is that “the Afghan police and army are the ones who are putting down the violence” --  the riots and demonstrations which followed the Koran burning.

With one exception, other members of the Armed Services Committee said they were worried about the weekend attack and the pattern of fratricide incidents, but didn’t indicate they’d support a quicker drawdown of American forces or an earlier exit date.

Sen. Kay Hagan, D- N.C., said, “It certainly raises a huge issue if people that we are helping and entrusting then kill our own soldiers.”

Sen. Jack Reed, D- R.I., said Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his cabinet needed to block infiltration and to prevent fratricide attacks. They now face “a test of their commitment to partnering with NATO” and a chance to “to demonstrate their seriousness” about taking steps to stop fratricide attacks.

He said, ”You want to be very careful and deliberate in this process, but I think it raises a significant issue of the willingness and capacity of the Afghani forces to partner with us.” But he said the “trajectory has already been set” by President Obama for exit of U.S. forces in 2014.

The certainty of that exit date probably defuses the opposition to the Afghanistan deployment among some members of Congress.

Calling the weekend killings “horrible” and saying American forces would need to be “much more vigorous in vetting our partners,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R- N.H., said she did not think the weekend’s events should lead to a change in American strategy.

“We still have a very important interest in Afghanistan,” she said, “We cannot allow Afghanistan to become a launching pad and a haven for terrorism again. And if we suddenly withdraw from Afghanistan based on these events, we will actually empower those who are committing these acts of terrorism right now in Afghanistan and further encourage additional acts of terrorism.”

But another Armed Services Committee member, Democratic dissenter Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, said the murder of the U.S. officers “reinforces what I have always said: that’s an extremely dangerous place. I don’t believe we should be there trying to nation build, trying to change the culture of people – we shouldn’t, and I don’t think we can do that.”

He added, “We should get out of there immediately and leave no doubt that we will go after terrorism wherever it may be. Everyone says, ‘when you leave, they will all come back.’ Well, if they come back with intent to do us harm, we’ll be back.”

But he said he didn’t want to put “our sons and daughters in a situation where the people they trained are going to be turning their guns on them. It’s ridiculous.”