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In his last year in office<\/strong>, President Obama has\u00a0submitted<\/a>\u00a0to Congress a plan to achieve what he\u00a0had promised<\/a>\u00a0to do in his first: Close the facility housing terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the interim, Obama and a series of other officials, including former CIA<\/span> Director\u00a0David Petraeus<\/a>, have called the prison a propaganda tool for terrorists. Shuttering the detention center, Obama\u00a0argues<\/a>, would eliminate that\u00a0tool.<\/p>\n There are other reasons to close Guantanamo. In 2008, then-candidate Obama campaigned against what he portrayed as the excesses of the Bush administration in its zeal to fight terrorism, including the\u00a0harsh interrogation techniques<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0indefinite detentions<\/a>\u00a0that Guantanamo came to symbolize. On Tuesday, Obama listed several more reasons: things like saving taxpayer money, upholding \u201cthe values that define us as Americans,\u201d and removing an irritant in relationships with close allies. There\u2019s also the matter of reputation: The prison, Obama said, \u201cundermines our standing in the world. It is viewed as a stain on our broader record of upholding the highest standards of rule of\u00a0law.\u201d<\/p>\n But some of those who study jihadist propaganda say Guantanamo actually isn\u2019t all that important as a recruitment tool, and doesn\u2019t feature especially prominently in jihadist materials. Mentions of it, moreover, have declined in recent years as the prisoner population at the facility has declined and as ISIS<\/span>, which\u00a0tends to emphasize<\/a>\u00a0Islamic utopia and conquest in its propaganda, has\u00a0risen.<\/p>\n This is not to say the prison doesn\u2019t appear in jihadist texts. It does,\u00a0repeatedly<\/a>, whether the propagandists in question belong to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. But according to Charlie Winter, a senior research associate at Georgia State University\u2019s Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative, it\u2019s seldom as part of a straightforward call to arms. Rather, Guantanamo fits into a broader motif of Muslims unjustly imprisoned and under assault by the West, whether that\u2019s in Cuba, Afghanistan, Iraq or, hypothetically, in some new prison in the United States where the Obama administration proposes to send the 40-odd Guantanamo detainees\u00a0currently deemed<\/a>\u00a0too dangerous to try or release. As Bloomberg View\u2019<\/em>s Eli Lake\u00a0pointed out<\/a>\u00a0on Tuesday, \u201cIt\u2019s true that Obama has winnowed the pool of Guantanamo detainees to 91 and he plans to transfer 35 of these prisoners to third countries. But for those remaining, Obama does not propose an end to their indefinite detention\u2014which, let\u2019s face it, is what troubles their supporters in the Muslim\u00a0world.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And the jail is not a major theme relative to others in any case, said Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who has tracked jihadist propaganda for more than a decade. In the 13 issues so far of ISIS<\/span>\u2019s English-language magazine\u00a0Dabiq<\/em>, for example, \u201cthere have been something like four references in more than 700 pages of propaganda from ISIS<\/span>,\u201d he said. (ISIS<\/span> execution videos\u00a0do feature<\/a>\u00a0captives wearing orange jumpsuits, which Winter sees as an overt reference to those worn by Guantanamo detainees. For his part, Joscelyn is skeptical of the symbolism, given thatISIS<\/span> videos feature\u00a0numerous different colors<\/a>\u00a0of jumpsuits. \u201cOrange jumpsuits are used all over the world,\u201d Joscelyn says. \u201cAnd they don\u2019t mention Guantanamo in those\u00a0videos.\u201d)<\/p>\n In a review of English-language and translated jihadist propaganda published on\u00a0Lawfare<\/em>\u00a0last year<\/a>, Cody Poplin and Sebastian Brady of the Brookings Institution found that Guantanamo \u201chas grown far less salient over the last few years, playing a much bigger role in the words of al-Qaeda and [its Yemen affiliate] AQAP<\/span> a few years ago than it does now.\u201d Members of those groups cited Guantanamo for a variety of reasons that become clear in context. For example, Osama bin Laden himself\u00a0cited<\/a>\u00a0the \u201cugly crimes\u201d committed by the United States at Guantanamo and the\u00a0Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq<\/a>\u00a0in a 2010 essay for AQAP<\/span>\u2019s English-language magazine\u00a0Inspire<\/em>\u2014crimes that \u201cshook the conscience of humanity.\u201d Still, Joscelyn noted, the remark is \u201ca throwaway line\u201d in an essay blaming the West for, of all things, climate\u00a0change.<\/p>\n Joscelyn also mentioned a simple reason for Guantanamo\u2019s presence in AQAP<\/span> propaganda: The group had a lot of members imprisoned there. In AQAP<\/span>\u2019s weekly Arabic newsletter, Joscelyn said, the group refers to Guantanamo, but not in the context of recruitment: \u201cSome of the articles are basically, \u2018We want our guys back.\u2019\u201d While the newsletter\u2019s authors criticize the facility, Joscelyn added, they don\u2019t do so as an exhortation to others to come fight on their behalf. \u201cDoes that have some recruiting effect? Maybe, I mean, I doubt it. I think that newsletter is basically designed for people who are already in the\u00a0fold.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cThey\u2019re still prisoners,\u201d Winter told me. \u201cI think jihadis don\u2019t really care about the legal implications of being in Cuba or in the\u00a0U.S.\u201d<\/div>\n