Obama Pundit

by C. William Chattin

Byron York had a very interesting piece up over the weekend on how Gitmo has, or may have (depending on your p.o.v.), served as a rallying cry for jihadists.  I suggest everyone read the entire piece, but I’ll summarize the major points below.

Of all the arguments advanced for closing the $200 million Gitmo prison facility, by far the most compelling is that it has served, and continues to serve, as a major recruitment tool for al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups.  When asked this Sunday on Meet the Press, Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), who joins the President’s position on Gitmo, identified only one source in support of that claim: Major Matthew Alexander.

For those unfamiliar, Matthew Alexander is the pseudonym for a former Air Force officer, who lead an interrogation team assigned to a Special Operations task force in Iraq in 2006.  According to his bio, Maj. Alexander personally conducted more than 300 interrogations in Iraq, supervised more than 1,000 others, and was involved in the interrogations that led to the killing of al Qaeda-in-Iraq chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.  His experiences and conclusions about what drove the foreign fighter insurgency are detailed in this Washington Post op-ed and his book, How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brain, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest man in Iraq. 

In sum, Maj. Alexander opines that “the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”  The Major’s conclusions, taken at face value, present a troubling dilemma: while abuses at Abu Ghraib are well documented with incriminating photography on display for the entire Muslim world, evidence of “abuse” at Gitmo is far more elusive.  The only celebrated allegation was a May 2005 story in Newsweek alleging that U.S. operatives had flushed a Koran down a toilet.  However, the report, based on a single anonymous source, was eventually retracted and Newsweek ultimately apologized.

Thus, while Maj. Alexander may be 100% correct that Gitmo has been used as a recruitment tool for terrorists, the stories of abuse at Gitmo don’t seem to have a factual predicate, and Newsweek apparently served as a propagandist for al-Qaeda and other Muslim terrorists.