Trump ends civilian deaths report requirement

By Michael Hernandez

WASHINGTON (AA) - U.S. President Donald Trump ended Wednesday a requirement for American intelligence agencies to report annually the number of civilians believed to have been killed in intelligence operations airstrikes.

Trump's executive order cancels the annual declassified report released by the director of national intelligence May 1 each year, which detailed the intelligence community's assessment of civilians assessed to have been killed outside of active warzones.

The report was to catalogue "the number of strikes undertaken by the United States Government against terrorist targets outside areas of active hostilities, as well as assessments of combatant and non combatant deaths resulting from those strikes, among other information."

That includes theaters such as Somalia and Libya where the U.S. is not actively engaged, but excludes warzones such as Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan where it is party to ongoing hostilities.

Former President Barack Obama established the reporting requirement in 2016, but the Washington Post reported last year that the Trump administration chose to ignore it in 2018.

Obama's order was intended to increase transparency and accountability for the air war he inherited from his predecessor and greatly expanded.

In his executive order Trump pointed to requirements in the Pentagon's 2019 appropriations bill, known as the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, which expanded reporting requirements for military operations.

But that provision does not appear to apply to civilians killed in strikes carried out by the CIA, which stands apart from the Defense Department.

Ned Price, a spokesman for Obama's National Security Council, lashed out at Trump's decision saying the reporting requirement "was an important tool that we're again without.

"And the 'context' that the administration is providing is disingenuous," Price said on Twitter. "The Obama-era requirement applied to operations outside areas of active hostilities. The NDAA reporting requirement the administration is pointing to applies only to DOD operations in active war zones."