Even PolitiFact admits that Guantanamo Bay is not a 'key' recruiting tool for terrorists

Brett T. | 11:17 PM on December 30, 2015

Donald Trump wasn’t about to let Hillary Clinton get away with her claim that terrorist groups were using footage of him in their recruitment videos. “They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslim in order to recruit more radical jihadists,” she claimed during the most recent Democratic debate, despite there being no evidence that Trump was “becoming ISIS’s best recruiter.”

The Clinton camp declined to apologize, despite Hillary Clinton’s demonstrated tendency to lie about YouTube videos and their effects.

Likewise, setting aside his own executive order to close Guantanamo Bay in his first year in office, President Obama has long maintained that the terrorist detention center in Cuba serves little purpose other than to be used as a recruiting tool for extremist groups. Weekly Standard editor Stephen Hayes said on “Fox News Sunday” that Gitmo has “never been a key component of ISIS or al-Qaeda propaganda.”

Obama: Guantanamo is a key part of jihadist propaganda.
Politifact: GTMO is not a key part of jihadist propaganda.https://t.co/4OrP11uxyk

— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) December 31, 2015

PolitiFact, certainly no right-leaning organization, rated Hayes’ claim true, based on nearly non-existent mentions of Gitmo in material analyzed by counterterrorism experts. “Analyses of jihadist propaganda materials show that Guantanamo is rarely mentioned, especially compared to other grievances against the United States, like military airstrikes,” concluded PolitiFact.

If PolitiFact needs something to do over the New Year’s break, it could fact-check President Obama’s claim that only a “handful” of the hundreds of prisoners released from Gitmo have rejoined terrorist cells. Hayes called that one “not just false, but aggressively and brazenly and stunningly misleading.”