Prior thesis examiners as potential future journal article referees?
Is seems to me that what you are caught on is one of the key tensions in reviewing:


The more knowledgeable the reviewer, the more likely they are to have some sort of conflict of interest regarding a manuscript.
The more independent a reviewer, the less qualified they are likely to be for a deep review of a manuscript.


Different journals and different editors have different places where they draw the line on the range of acceptable tradeoffs between knowledge and conflict of interest.  

As such, I would recommend simply providing the information to the editor in your list of recommended referees, along the lines of what you have suggested but with less assumptions regarding the appropriate course of action:


  X would be a good reviewer, but was one of the reviewers of my thesis.


The editor will then be able to make the call as best they judge (which they will do in any case), and will not be likely to feel that you are pushing them to either use or not use the person as a reviewer.