It’s as if he wants to be impeached

Trump told a new defamatory lie about Obama today.

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

The official POTUS account retweeted the lie.

122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!

— President Trump 45 Archived (@POTUS45) March 7, 2017

113 of the 122 were released by the Bush administration.

There’s also of course the complicated discussion about legality and rights and preventive detention and the possibility or impossibility of knowing what people are going to do in the future. We could just imprison all human beings because they might do something bad in future, but it wouldn’t be a good plan. But in any case he lied on the facts.

The Times has more.

According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, of the 693 former Guantánamo Bay detainees who were transferred to other countries by July 2016 — dating back to when the Bush administration opened the prison in Cuba in January 2002 — 122 are “confirmed” to have engaged in militant activity after their release.

However, the overwhelming majority of those 122 men, 113 of them, were transferred under President George W. Bush, not President Barack Obama.

Notably, about half of the men deemed recidivists are dead or in custody.

Ok so why is Bush’s number so much higher? The answer should interest Trump.

One reason is that most of the former Guantánamo detainees in the world departed the prison under Mr. Bush: 532 of the 693 former detainees who left the prison alive departed under Mr. Bush. That is because Mr. Bush decided in his second term that, as he wrote in his memoir, “the detention facility had become a propaganda tool for our enemies and a distraction for our allies,” and he started trying to close it.

But it is also true that in terms of percentages, Bush-era releases have been more likely to cause problems than Obama-era releases: About 35 percent of Bush-era transfers are confirmed or suspected of causing problems, while about 12 percent of Obama-era transfers fall into one of those two categories, according to the intelligence director’s office.

The difference is because the Bush administration struck diplomatic deals to repatriate large batches of prisoners to countries like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan in bulk, and many recidivists come from those batches. By contrast, the Obama administration developed an individualized review process by six agencies to determine whether to recommend transferring each detainee. Over time, it also developed more careful diplomatic and monitoring plans with receiving countries to ease their reintegration into society that reduced, but obviously did not eliminate, the risk of recidivism.

So what they’re saying is that the Obama admin did a better job of vetting each detainee. Huh.