iStock/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) — President Trump tweeted Tuesday morning about 122 former detainees from the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who U.S. officials say returned to terrorist activity, but he missed a key fact.
Trump said the former prisoners had returned to terrorist activity after being released by the Obama administration.
“122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield,” he wrote. “Just another terrible decision!”
But the vast majority of those 122 former detainees — about 93 percent — were released before former President Obama even took office.
According to a September 2016 report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 113 of those 122 detainees who have been confirmed as “re-engaging” were released from Guantanamo Bay under the Bush administration.
Only nine of them were released during the Obama administration.
The tweet came less than an hour after a segment on Fox and Friends about Mohammed Tahar, aka Yasir al-Silmi, a former Guantanamo detainee who was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Yemen last week. Tahar had been transferred from Guantanamo to his home country of Yemen Dec. 17, 2009, during the Obama administration.
Trump also calls Obama’s releasing of detainees a “terrible decision,” but the percentage of Obama-released prisoners returning to terrorist activity is lower than Bush-released prisoners. Only 6 percent of Obama-released prisoners returned to terrorism vs. 21 percent of Bush-released prisoners, according to Director of National Intelligence data.
Not all of the 122 former detainees are still on the run. The data shows 30 of them are now dead and 25 are in custody, leaving 67 of the 122 former detainees still on the loose. An additional 86 former detainees are “suspected of re-engaging” in terrorist activity.
The detention center at Guantanamo Bay has been a controversial site since its formation in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It was originally created for suspected terrorists in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Former President Obama promised during his campaign to shut it down, but 41 detainees still remained in detention at the end of Obama’s term.
It has been widely criticized by human rights organizations for alleged indefinite detention of prisoners and torture.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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