In the next few days, you’re going to see an increasingly intense debate on the question of whether the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay is a major factor in terrorist recruitment. In that debate, you’re going to hear a name you might not have heard, Matthew Alexander. And you’re going to learn that what you’ve been told about Guantanamo and terrorist recruitment is not the whole story.
In his speech on Thursday, President Obama gave two reasons for his decision to shut down Guantanamo. The first was that it has lowered American standing in the world, and the second was that it is a recruitment tool for terrorists. “Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al-Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause,” the president said. “Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.” While Obama certainly views America’s standing in the world as important, it is the charge that Guantanamo is a terrorist recruitment tool that is the real foundation of the decision to shut the detention center down. Absent that allegation, it is unlikely that Guantanamo would be slated for closing.
But where does the charge come from? Much, although not all, of it comes from one person. On “Meet the Press” Sunday, when Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin was asked for evidence to support his claim that Guantanamo has been a terrorist-recruitment tool, Durbin answered: “Major Matthew Alexander, who interrogated the al-Qaeda suspects in Iraq. And it was his conclusion that half of them had been recruited and were fighting, trying to kill Americans because of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.” Alexander was the only authority Durbin cited.
Alexander first entered the terrorist recruitment debate on November 30, 2008, when he published an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled, “I’m Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq.” Although Sen. Durbin didn’t mention it, “Matthew Alexander” is a pseudonym; a note at the end of the Post piece said, “Matthew Alexander led an interrogations team assigned to a Special Operations task force in Iraq in 2006. He is the author of ‘How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.’ He is writing under a pseudonym for security reasons.”
Whatever his real name, “Matthew Alexander” is a former Air Force officer who, according to his biography at publisher Simon & Schuster, “personally conducted more than 300 interrogations in Iraq and supervised more than 1,000.” He was involved in the interrogations that led to the killing of al Qaeda-in-Iraq chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
In the Post op-ed, Alexander wrote, “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…It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse.” Since the publication of that op-ed six months ago, Alexander has become Exhibit A for the notion that Guantanamo is a major terrorist recruitment tool. He has promoted his book, written other op-eds, and blogged at the Huffington Post. He has appeared on television, including several appearances on MSNBC, as well as “The Daily Show” and Fox. He has participated in several panel discussions and other public forums as well.
I talked to Alexander Sunday afternoon. First things first: It seems odd that a man living under a pseudonym would appear so prominently in public. Alexander told me he originally had not intended to make high-profile media appearances when his book came out but that the issue of torture was so important that he changed his mind. “I’ve weighed the risk to me and my family, and I’m willing to put my face out there, but not my name,” Alexander said. Keeping his real name a secret, he explained, gives him a layer of protection even though millions have seen him on TV.
Alexander told me that when he interrogated foreigners who came to Iraq to fight Americans, the reason they most often gave for joining the battle was their outrage over abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Tales, and in the case of Abu Ghraib, photos from the two prisons deeply affected the fighters, Alexander explained. “Very high-ranking members of al Qaeda told me they didn’t really believe in suicide bombing, but we left them with no choice,” he said.
What’s striking in the Guantanamo terrorist-recruitment debate is the lack of a definitive text, a study done that shows in detail how the prison has become an engine for terrorist recruitment around the world. In the place of that definitive document, there is Alexander’s experience, and there is a statement from former U.S. Navy general counsel Alberto Mora, who in 2008 submitted testimony to Congress saying that, “There 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.” But there is no big report, no treasure trove of documents, that supports the terrorism-recruitment argument. “We didn’t need documents,” Alexander told me. “Just ask anybody on my interrogations team.”
I asked about the relative damage done by Abu Ghraib and by Guantanamo. The Abu Ghraib photos were a complete disaster for the United States; they were devastating evidence of U.S. mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq. But what about Guantanamo? There weren’t provocative pictures from there. “One of the bigger things that wasn’t torture or abuse was the desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo,” Alexander said. “Things like that were extremely inflammatory, even more so than torture and abuse.”
Alexander pointed to a 2008 report by the inspector general of the FBI which found that one U.S. military officer, when interrogating the so-called “20th hijacker,” Muhammad al-Qahtani, “got up on the table in the room to yell at al-Qahtani in a more intimidating fashion, at which point he squatted over a Koran that had been provided to al-Qahtani. This action incensed al-Qahtani, who lunged toward the [officer] and the Koran.” The FBI report mentioned other rumors of mistreatment of the Koran at Guantanamo, but conceded they were mainly allegations that had been passed on by detainees.
Of course, the most spectacular allegation of abuse of the Koran was a May 2005 story in Newsweek, which alleged that U.S. operatives had flushed a Koran down a toilet in Guantanamo as part of an effort to intimidate prisoners. The report was based on a single anonymous source, and Newsweek later retracted it and apologized. But the report was absolutely explosive, sparking riots around the world. It would be hard to deny that the Newsweek report had a more detrimental effect on Muslim opinion about Guantanamo than any inspector general’s report.
So if Guantanamo must be closed because it is a symbol of America’s abuse of Muslim detainees, and if the example of abuse in Guantanamo that most outraged Muslims worldwide was a story of alleged mistreatment of the Koran, and if that story was later retracted, then are we going through the enormous effort to close Guantanamo because of a bad story in Newsweek? The situation is more complicated than that, but the fact is, that’s part of it.
In an follow-up email exchange with Alexander, he warned against trying to “make the point that the media created the resentment of Americans from false reports about Koran desecration.” But he conceded that “the truth lies in the middle” — that is, those reports were part of a bigger whole. “The resentment of Americans from foreign fighters was due to the totality of torture, abuse and offenses against their religion, all of which were preventable,” Alexander wrote.
The president and Congress will have to make a lot of decisions about Guantanamo in coming weeks and months. Learning the whole story on why the prison is notorious should be part of the debate.
