Marathon Pundit: Karl Rove: Gitmo not a recruiting tool for terrorists

Last week in a press conference President Obama once again elevated the importance of the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facility in the eyes of terrorists, calling it "probably the No. 1 recruitment tool" for them. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said something similar on Sunday, as I wrote earlier this week.

Karl Rove, the the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff under President George W. Bush, disagrees:

Tom Joscelyn, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, reviewed 34 statements and interviews of top al Qaeda leadership since January 2009. Writing for the Weekly Standard, he reported only seven references to Guantanamo in just three public pronouncements.

In the same period, however, Mr. Joscelyn found top al Qaeda leaders mentioned Crusaders (their label for Western leaders and military) 322 times, Palestine 200 times, Gaza 131 times, Jews 129 times, Israel 98 times and Zionists 94 times. Al Qaeda leaders also talked more about Afghanistan (333 mentions), Pakistan (331), Iraq (157), Somalia (67), Yemen (18) and even Chechnya (15) than they did about Guantanamo.

New York Daily News reporter James Gordon Meek obtained similar results last January. U.S. government officials told him that al Qaeda and its affiliates "griped" about Guantanamo in only 58 out of hundreds of public statements and interviews between 2003 and 2009.

Far more numerous and more extensive in these documents are complaints about the existence of Israel, the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, Western notions of democracy and freedom, Western culture, and the fact that al Qaeda's leaders see America as the obstacle to their achieving a restoration of the Golden Age of Islam.