President Donald Trump has promised to keep Guantanamo Bay’s detention facility open and stop the release of detainees from it. | Getty Trump attacks Obama for releasing 'vicious' Gitmo prisoners

President Donald Trump attacked his predecessor once again Tuesday morning, lashing out at his “terrible decision” to release prisoners from the detention center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay only to have them return to terrorist activities.

“122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!” Trump wrote on Twitter, referring to the Guantanamo Bay naval base by its nickname.


The figure cited by Trump on Twitter comes from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which released a report last September stating that 122 of the 693 prisoners transferred out of Guantanamo Bay are confirmed to have returned to terrorist activities. An additional 86 former detainees are suspected of returning to terrorist activities.

The report states, however, that 113 of the 122 former detainees who returned to terrorist activities were released before Jan. 22, 2009, two days into Obama's first term.

Closing the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was a goal of former President Barack Obama’s before he even took office, a promise he campaigned on in 2008 but was ultimately unable to fulfill. Obama did successfully reduce the detainee population at Guantanamo Bay, often by extraditing prisoners to other nations. Fewer than 100 detainees remained there when Obama left office last month.

Trump, by contrast, has promised to keep Guantanamo Bay’s detention facility open and stop the release of detainees from it. At one point, the president promised to “load it up with some bad dudes.”