An editorial in today’s Washington Post gives Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu credit for the Iranian government’s decision to stop short of accumulating enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon.

Back in September 2012, Netanyahu made a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in which he used a cartoon bomb to illustrate Iran’s nuclear progress, using a red magic marker to draw a line beyond which he believed Iran should not be allowed to progress.

According to the Post’s editors, Netanyahu’s “explicit setting of a ‘red line’ for the Iranian nuclear program… appears to have accomplished what neither negotiations nor sanctions have yielded: concrete Iranian action to limit its enrichment”:

A host of commentators both in the United States and Israel scoffed at what they called Mr. Netanyahu’s “cartoonish” picture of a bomb and the line he drew across it. The prime minister said Iran could not be allowed to accumulate enough 20 percent enriched uranium to produce a bomb with further processing, adding that at the rate its centrifuges were spinning, Tehran would cross that line by the middle of 2013.

Iran, too, dismissed what its U.N. ambassador called “an unfounded and imaginary graph.” But then a funny thing happened: The regime began diverting some of its stockpile to the manufacture of fuel plates for a research reactor. According to the most recent report of international inspectors, in February, it had converted 40 percent of its 20 percent uranium to fuel assemblies or the oxide form needed to produce them. As a result, Iran has remained distinctly below the Israeli red line, and it probably postponed the earliest moment when it could cross that line by several months.

The flaw in this argument: According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran began diverting its stockpile to the manufacture of fuel plates in late 2011, nearly a year before Netanyahu’s speech.

Back in June 2012, IAEA inspectors “verified that Iran converted about 33 percent of its 20 percent-enriched uranium stockpile, according to two senior international officials. Iran used about 49 kilograms (108 pounds) of the 145 kilogram stockpile to make fuel in the form of metal plates for the Tehran Research Reactor.”

This was again confirmed in the IAEA’s August 2012 report, which stated that, “Between the start of conversion activities on 17 December 2011 and 12 August 2012, Iran has fed into the process 71.25 kg” of its stockpile 20 percent enriched uranium. The Arms Control Association’s Greg Thielmann called this “One of the most significant and underreported developments in the August 30 report of the International Atomic Energy Agency.”

Underreported, perhaps. But you’d expect the editors of one of the U.S.’s leading newspapers to be aware of it.

In the wake of President Obama’s choice of Chuck Hagel as the next Secretary of Defense, opposition to the nomination appears to be dissipating, reduced to a core of right-wing activists arrayed around neoconservative don Bill Kristol. The Washington Post’s editors, whose earlier opposition to the nomination was reflective of their own neoconservative-leaning approach to foreign policy, have now taken a more accommodating tack, writing in today’s paper that there’s “nothing disqualifying” about Hagel or Obama’s nominees for Secretary of State, John Kerry, and CIA Director, John Brennan. The confirmation hearings for the three nominees, the Post writes today, “could provide a needed debate on the direction of U.S. national security policy — provided that senators can avoid distractions”:

Chief among the distractions would be charges that Mr. Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, is hostile to Israel or even anti-Semitic. There is no serious evidence to support either allegation.

The real issues raised by Mr. Hagel’s nomination are his past support for a quick-as-possible withdrawal from Afghanistan, a further downsizing of what he described as a “bloated” Pentagon and his resistance to foreign interventions.

On the latter point, I completely agree. The upcoming confirmation hearings provide an important opportunity to have a serious discussion on the direction of U.S. foreign policy, and I’m looking forward to hearing Hagel explain how his views on these issues are broadly consistent with those of the president, the American people, and the U.S. military leadership, if not the Post’s editors.

As to the issue of “distractions,” while it’s nice to see the Post admit what I think has been obvious from the start — the “anti-Israel, anti-Semite” charge against Hagel is baseless — it’s worth noting that this charge has appeared repeatedly under the Washington Post’s banner, indeed on its own op-ed page as recently as two days ago, courtesy of (who else?) neocon blogger Jennifer Rubin.

We’ve noted before that, when it comes to trafficking false claims, Rubin seems to enjoy a special dispensation from the Post’s editors. The question now is whether, having acknowledged that there’s no evidence to support the claims that Chuck Hagel is either hostile to Israel or anti-Semitic, they’ll leave Rubin to continue making those claims.

Over the past few weeks, the Israeli government has received an enormous amount of criticism for its ramp-up of settlement projects in retaliation for the Palestinians’ successful effort to upgrade their status at the United Nations. It’s apparently gotten so serious that, at an Israeli Foreign Ministry conference last week, Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N. Ron Prosor reportedly received a round of applause from his colleagues when he questioned the head of Israel’s National Security Council over the policy.

So it was a bit odd to read the Washington Post’s editorial today suggesting that criticism of the settlements is as much of a problem as the settlements themselves:

The criticism is appropriate, in the sense that such unilateral action by Israel, like the unilateral Palestinian initiative to seek statehood recognition in November from the U.N. General Assembly, serves to complicate the negotiations that are the only realistic route to a Middle East peace. But the reaction is also counterproductive because it reinforces two mistaken but widely held notions: that the settlements are the principal obstacle to a deal and that further construction will make a Palestinian state impossible. [...]

But it is also harmful, because it puts pressure on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to make a “freeze” on the construction a condition for beginning peace talks. Mr. Abbas had hinted that he would finally drop that demand, which has prevented negotiations for most of the past four years, after the General Assembly’s statehood vote. If Security Council members are really interested in progress toward Palestinian statehood, they will press Mr. Abbas to stop using settlements as an excuse for intransigence — and cool their own overheated rhetoric.

There are a couple of seriously flawed moral equivalences on display here. First, let’s recognize that, the practical impact of the settlements on negotiations aside, there’s a strong international consensus that they are illegal. While people can disagree over the wisdom of Mahmoud Abbas’ decision to seek an upgrade in the Palestinians’ status at the U.N., there’s really no comparison between the Palestinians “unilaterally” seeking relief through international bodies and the Israelis unilaterally violating their commitments to those bodies.

Second, it’s quite true that settlements are not the only obstacle on the road to Israeli-Palestinian peace. Political divisions among Palestinians are also a serious problem. But it’s important to understand how continued settlement growth completely undermines moderate Palestinian leaders and empowers extremists who insist that the non-violent path is a dead end. “Each time he [Abbas] goes to the negotiating table, or appears to go to the negotiating table, he gets weaker,” Palestinian scholar Khaled Elgindy explained recently, “because he’s participating in a process that the vast majority of Palestinians consider to be a sham, they consider it to be a cover for ongoing settlement activity… [and] a way to perpetuate this occupation.” It shouldn’t be too hard to grasp why Abbas feels that he can’t re-enter negotiations in the absence of a settlement freeze, and the inability of some to do so speaks to an ongoing problem in U.S. media, wherein the limiting effects of Israeli domestic politics are granted enormous deference, while Palestinian domestic politics are barely recognized as existing at all.

As for the idea that criticizing settlements emboldens the Palestinians to hold out for a settlement freeze, I’d argue that the reverse is true: Downplaying the negative impact of settlements emboldens the Israelis to keep building them. (The Jerusalem Post has already posted its own editorial hailing the Washington Post’s editorial.) As Israeli settlement expert Danny Seidemann tweeted earlier today, “Ignoring [the] devastating impact of settlements on potential agreements is ‘Flat Earth Society’. [It's] taking the Zionist enterprise to [the] territorial cliff.” Today, the Washington Post helped push it a little further toward the edge.

(Photo: Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)

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.”