CNN

Watch Rice and Rubin debate foreign policy issues on Late Edition.

(CNN) - While the overall tone between campaign surrogates was tranquil on the Sunday morning talk shows, the argument between foreign policy advisers was anything but calm.

Sparked by Hillary Clinton's quote from earlier this week in which she said that "we will attack Iran" and that the U.S. would be able to "totally obliterate" Iraq's controversial neighbor, two Democratic foreign policy experts passionately defended their candidate's positions on CNN's "Late Edition."

Barack Obama adviser Susan Rice and Clinton adviser Jamie Rubin, both former members of the Clinton administration, came into the interview well-researched and armed with criticism of the opposing candidate. Rubin repeatedly cited a New Yorker article from 2006 in which Obama said he did not know how he would have voted on the war had he been in the senate, while Rice maintained that Obama had always felt that the war was a mistake.

Neither surrogate would accept the other's claims. It got pretty heated.

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Two days after Barack Obama called for the administration and Congress to investigate the breach of the presidential candidates’ passport data, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s senior Republican said he agreed with the Illinois senator.

“There are federal criminal statutes involved. I think that ought to be a very intense investigation. I think privacy is a very fundamental matter,” Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter told Gloria Borger on CNN’s Late Edition Sunday. "I think it ought to be something for Attorney General Mukasey, and I think that it may well be something for the Senate Judiciary Committee, where I’m the ranking member."

Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon agreed with Specter, adding that the Government Accountability Office had been warning about this problem for a decade, and that the White House deserved a share of the blame for fostering a “a culture of disregard for privacy.”

Thursday night, the State Department confirmed that Obama’s passport file had been improperly accessed three times this year. On Friday, they revealed that the passport files of the rest of the presidential field – Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain – had been similarly breached.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday publicly apologized for the actions of the three contract employees, and said the State Department inspector general would investigate the matter. State Department officials also briefed Senate staffers for the three candidates and for Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Joseph Biden of Delaware.

–CNN's Jessica Rummel