Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler today again criticized his Post colleague and American Enterprise Institute fellow Marc Thiessen for continuing to promote the debunked claim that President Obama is not sufficiently concerned about U.S. national security.

In a Sept. 10 Washington Post opinion piece, Thiessen — citing a recent “study” finding that Obama has attended about half his personal daily intelligence briefs (PDBs) — claimed that “national security has not necessarily been” Obama’s “personal priority.” Obama’s right-wing critics picked up the attack and on Monday, Kessler wrote a scathing article, calling the claim “bogus” and “misleading.” “Obama reads his PDB every day, but he does not always require an in-person briefing every day,” Kessler noted.

This particular practice has precedent with previous commanders-in-chief, including Ronald Reagan, whom Kessler noted chose to forgo the CIA in-person brief 99 percent of the time (Thiessen had compared Obama’s practice to President Bush’s, claiming Bush “almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.”)

Instead of accepting the obvious defeat, Thiessen dug in, responding on the Post’s website today saying basically, “Yeah, well. … 9/11!”:

Kessler ignores one giant difference between then and now: Sept. 11, 2001.

Comparing lax presidential briefing habits before and after 9/11 is like comparing lax presidential security habits before and after the Kennedy assassination. After terrorists killed 3,000 people in our midst, everything changed — and the president’s daily intelligence meeting took on dramatically increased importance. President Bush made it a priority to sit down with his senior intelligence advisers every day to discuss overnight intelligence on threats to the country. President Obama has not.

Hopefully putting the matter to rest, Kessler was again forced to debunk his colleague, calling Thiessen’s response “an interesting, if not very factual argument. (Reagan, for instance, suffered the loss of 241 servicemen in Beirut as a result of a terror act.).” But Kessler also noticed something else. In his original piece, Thiessen claimed he received his data on Obama’s PDBs from a “conservative” research organization. But in his response to Kessler, that story changed:

We also find it curious that he now discloses the study was done at his request, by his business partner, and that he now describes the Government Accountability Institute as “nonpartisan” whereas in his earlier column he had called it a “conservative investigative research organization.”

Upon reflection, we now realize that the GAI report had a bit of a math problem. The White House public schedule does not list meetings on weekends, so Obama automatically loses 28 percent of the “meetings” because of that fact. Thiessen had earlier claimed Bush had oral intel briefings six days a week–though no actual schedule is available to confirm that–so at the very least GAI should have subtracted one a day week from Obama’s numbers to make a valid comparison.

“We had nearly given this data Four Pinocchios and in restrospect we were perhaps too generous with Three,” Kessler wrote, adding in a tweet today at Thiessen, “9/11 is not excuse to wipe out history.”

American Enterprise Institute fellow and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen has been pushing a recent finding that President Obama has not attended about half of his daily intelligence briefings as evidence that “national security has not necessarily been” Obama’s “personal priority.” Theissen based his claim on a recent study by the conservative Government Accountability Institute, which said that Obama has attended only 43.8 percent of his Presidential Daily Briefs, or PDBs. “By contrast,” Thiessen wrote, “Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.”

This particular statistic, however, doesn’t mean a whole lot. President Obama may not physically get briefed by intelligence officials every day but he does receive and read the PDBs, a point Theissen himself acknowledged when reporting the White House’s response to the charge.

“This is how it was done in the Clinton administration,” Thiessen’s Post colleague Dana Millbank noted, “before Bush decided he would prefer to read less.”

Yet Dick Cheney, John McCain, the right-wing blogs and others picked up on Thiessen’s hook anyway, not seeming to care that the charge has little credibility. The claim eventually made its way to an attack ad by Karl Rove-led SuperPAC American Crossroads which caused Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler to get involved. Kessler called the attack “misguided,” noting that President Reagan rarely attended daily intelligence briefings:

Clearly, different presidents have structured their daily briefing from the CIA to fit their unique personal styles. Many did not have an oral briefing, while three — two of whom are named Bush — preferred to deal directly with a CIA official. Obama appears to have opted for a melding of the two approaches, in which he receives oral briefings, but not as frequently as his predecessor.

Ultimately, what matters is what a president does with the information he receives from the CIA. Republican critics may find fault with Obama’s handling of foreign policy. But this attack ad turns a question of process — how does the president handle his intelligence brief? — into a misguided attack because Obama has chosen to receive his information in a different manner than his predecessor.

As it turns out, no president does it the exact same way. Under the standards of this ad, Republican icon Ronald Reagan skipped his intelligence briefings 99 percent of the time.

It should come as no surprise that Thiessen is hawking “bogus” claims, as his own newspaper described the daily intel charge, and it’s unlikely he will show any signs of remorse. And while the Post should be commended for publicly calling out one of its own and shaming Thiessen, the paper is ultimately responsible for publishing his false claims and baseless attacks. As former Washington Post writer Dan Froomkin said in response to Kessler’s article today on Twitter, the Post op-ed page “is a facts-optional zone. Shame on them.”

Conservative outrage over the WikiLeaks release of secret State Department cables has reached a fever pitch, with Rep. Pete King (R-NY) — who will chair the Homeland Security Committee in the new Congress — demanding the group be declared a terrorist organization. Former GOP Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum echoed King yesterday, saying WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is guilty of “terrorism,” while a number of Republican lawmakers have called for treason charges against suspected leaker Bradley Manning. Meanwhile, a number of conservative figures have fantasized about committing bodily harm to Assange.

But former Bush speechwriter-cum-leading torture advocate Marc Thiessen took this outrage to comic heights last night on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show. Proving that neoconservatives never miss an opportunity to call for war, Thiessen suggested that if diplomacy fails to capture Assange, the U.S. should “go and get him” — with or without his host country’s permission:

THIESSEN: There are plenty of tools at our disposal. … But failing that, we can act unilaterally. We can go and get him without another country’s permission. We did it with General Noriega — there’s authority within the Office of Legal Counsel and that we can go and take anybody anywhere in the world.

Watch it:

Assange has said he travels constantly to avoid arrest, but WikiLeaks’ base of operations is in Sweden — a close ally of the U.S. — and Assange is believed to spend some time there. Thiessen also mentioned Iceland, a NATO member, which considered offering asylum to Assange, as did Switzerland, another U.S. ally. More recently, Assange, a citizen of U.S. ally Australia, has been living in London and traveled to Berlin. But today, Ecuador offered Assange residency “with no problems and no conditions.” Perhaps Thiessen would be more comfortable invading Ecuador than England or Germany.

It’s worth noting that going and getting Gen. Manuel Noriega, the former narco-dictator of Panama, as Thiessen suggested, involved a full-scale invasion of the country with 25,000 American troops. Former President George H.W. Bush “broke both international law and [U.S.] government policies” in ordering the invasion in 1989, which resulted in the loss of 23 American servicemembers and the wounding of another 325, the death of hundreds of Panamanians, and major lasting damage to Panama’s economy and capital city. “There was a lot of euphoria because we got rid of Noriega,” Julio Sosa, a former Panamanian diplomat who now lives in Houston, told the Houston Chronicle last year. “But the people have preferred not to remember it. It’s a painful passage for a lot of people. There were a lot of innocent lives lost.”