President Donald Trump Tweets Inaccurate Gitmo Info He Saw on Fox News
Photos by Drew Angerer/Getty Politics News Donald Trump
122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 7, 2017
That tweet, right up above there, is factually inaccurate.
As pointed out by The Washington Post, it’s a factual inaccuracy likely based on a misreading of a Fox and Friends story about Gitmo detainees that aired 31 minutes before President Trump aired his latest grievance with former-President Barack Obama.
In the Fox and Friends story, it was reported that 122 detainees released from Guantanamo Bay had re-engaged on the battlefield. And based on 2016 data from the Director of National Intelligence, that’s correct. There have been 122 detainees, released from Gitmo, that have returned to fighting.
What’s patently false, however, is that those 122 detainees who returned to the battlefield were all released under President Obama. They weren’t.
In fact, of the 122 detainees who have been verified as returning to the battlefield after release, only nine Gitmo prisoners released under President Obama re-engaged. Nine. 113 re-engaged under President George W. Bush. 113. That’s 12.5555 times as many as under President Obama.
Even if the numbers for those who might have re-engaged are included, the numbers under President Bush outsize those under President Obama by quite a bit. 75 may have re-engaged under President Bush, compared to 11 under President Obama. That’s 6.8181 times as many.
There’s simply no available metric to corroborate President Trump’s claim that 122 Gitmo detainees, released by President Obama, returned to the battlefield.
But rather than correct the factual error, the @POTUS Twitter account doubled down on the inaccuracy.
122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!
— President Trump (@POTUS) March 7, 2017
The team had almost an hour to right the wrong and didn’t. Like the tweetstorm about President Obama’s alleged wiretaps from over the weekend, they didn’t provide any further evidence for the claims.
Of course, a White House staff’s de facto job is to stick up for the president. Still, it’s hard to see how reaffirming inaccurate info helps the boss in any real way, other than to further denigrate the previous administration.