Memo to Chris Wallace: Military officials say Gitmo has been a "recruiting tool" for terrorists
SUMMARY: Ignoring statements from military officials and reports, Chris Wallace suggested that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has not been used by terrorists as a "huge recruiting tool."
During the May 22 edition of Fox News Radio's Brian & The Judge, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace said, "I'd love to know the specific proof that the Obama administration or anyone has that Guantánamo is a recruiting tool" for terrorists and added: "I have never felt that Guantánamo was this huge recruiting tool and the main reason for -- that -- the reason they hate us." Wallace also claimed, "I think on the list of things that gets people, you know, so crazy that they want to blow up bombs and kill themselves and kill innocent people, I think Guantánamo is about 10th on the list." However, as Media Matters for America has documented, military officials and reports have stated that terrorists have successfully used the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay as a major recruiting device.
For instance, using the pseudonym Matthew Alexander, an Air Force senior interrogator who was in Iraq in 2006 wrote in The Washington Post: "I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq."
Moreover, as the blog Think Progress noted, in June 17, 2008, testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Alberto Mora, former Navy general counsel, said: "[T]here are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq -- as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat -- are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo."
Indeed, the Center for Strategic & International Studies concluded in a September 2008 study that "the United States has been damaged by Guantánamo beyond any immediate security benefits. Our enemies have achieved a propaganda windfall that enables recruitment to violence, while our friends have found it more difficult to cooperate with us."
Further, a June 17, 2008, McClatchy Newspapers article reported, "A McClatchy investigation found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantanamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam -- thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them -- and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists."
