President Donald Trump's executive order doesn't affect the requirement to send an unclassified report to Congress, which was mandated by the fiscal 2018 defense policy bill. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Defense Trump scraps requirement to report some air strikes

President Donald Trump has overturned an Obama-era requirement for intelligence officials to publish an annual report on air strikes in places like Yemen, Libya and Pakistan — a document that experts called the main means for publishing official information about CIA drone strikes.

In an executive order signed Wednesday, Trump canceled a three-year-old requirement for the director of national intelligence to release an unclassified report on May 1 every year tallying U.S. air strikes outside of specified major conflict zones, as well as estimates of militant and civilian casualties caused by those strikes.


The report — which the administration failed to release last year — was required to include not just military strikes but strikes conducted by other government agencies. The only non-military agency known to conduct air strikes is the CIA, whose drone program is reportedly active in Pakistan and Syria.

Other official reports will still account for most air strikes by the military, but experts and former government officials bemoaned both the loss of a rare official glimpse of the CIA's activities and what they saw as broader move away from transparency in counterterrorism operations.

“Strikes by other government entities like the CIA were included under this requirement. That was the intention of the wording,” said Rita Siemion, international legal counsel for the group Human Rights First.

Morning Defense newsletter Sign up for Morning Defense, a daily briefing on Washington's national security apparatus. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

The provision Trump is revoking, which was part of a 2016 executive order by President Barack Obama, mandated that the annual report include both military and non-military strikes in places like Yemen, Pakistan, Libya and Somalia. The report did not cover countries where larger U.S.-led military efforts are underway, such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, although the military separately reports similar estimates for those countries to Congress each year and military commands publicly report most of their strikes and civilian casualty estimates soon after they happen.

Explaining the administration's action, the State Department told Congress on Wednesday that the other mandatory reports on strikes and casualties made the 2016 requirement redundant.

But "they're not redundant," said Joshua Geltzer, the Obama National Security Council's former senior director for counterterrorism, in an interview. "They don't cover the same things. This one added real value."

“The administration’s stated rationale is that it was a redundant reporting requirement,” said Daniel Mahanty, a former State Department official now with the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “The less generous interpretation is that they are removing the requirement because it covers non-military strikes, and they don’t want to be obliged to publicly report on CIA strikes.”

The White House ignored the reporting requirement last year, and in 2017 removed Somalia from the list of covered countries by declaring it an area of active conflict akin to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. But the administration is taking matters a step further by canceling the requirement altogether.

“They’re doing away with a requirement to make public the total number of strikes we’re taking and the toll in terms of both enemies and civilians killed,” said Luke Hartig, another former Obama administration counterterrorism official. “That’s a real backslide in terms of the American public being able to know what actions are being undertaken in their name.”

Both the military's special operations forces and the CIA conduct strikes in some of the same countries against militant groups associated with al-Qaida or the Islamic State. The reporting requirement “is important for helping us understand the scope of the strikes outside areas of active hostilities, even aside from the civilian casualties piece,” Siemion said. “Without it we just don’t know the scale.”

Geltzer agreed. "Beyond the value of being transparent about civilian casualties, this report showed you the level of strike activity outside hot battlefields like Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, and there's value to the public knowing that," he said. "Transparency and accountability make assertive counterterrorism actions sustainable over time, and this was a reporting requirement that could be met without endangering operations."

Since the Trump administration was already ignoring the reporting requirement, it’s difficult to know in which countries the CIA has active drone programs, Siemion added. “We don’t even really know what countries the reporting requirement applies to.”

It’s unclear why the administration is revoking the reporting requirement now, since it had already been ignoring it. “Why now?” asked Rachel Stohl, a defense expert at the Stimson Center. “Could this represent a new line of effort or expansion of strikes that we now aren’t going to know about?”

While the military headquarters responsible for Africa and the Middle East routinely report the majority of their strikes, the CIA does not officially acknowledge that it even conducts drone strikes, let alone report their results.

The CIA has recently set up a branch of its drone program in West Africa, the New York Times reported last year, and NBC reported in January that the agency may be preparing to begin strikes in Somalia, where previously only the military ran such missions.

But other important provisions in the 2016 executive order remain in place, said Hartig, citing one that requires the U.S. government to incorporate more reporting from human rights organizations, the media and other outside groups as it tallies civilian casualties. A Pentagon study conducted last year at the behest of Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford also recommended that the military incorporate such outside inputs in its civilian casualty estimates and seek to be more transparent about civilian deaths in air strikes.

David Brown contributed to this report.