Obama to reveal civilian deaths from drones

The White House says that’s because the military conducts those strikes and it has its own reporting system.

The investigation, which included a cache of secret military documents, suggested that strikes are often carried out on “thin evidence” and the majority of those killed are not the intended targets.

Senior Obama administration officials stressed that the United States goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties and refrains from making strikes due to such concerns.

For example, U.S. Central Command reported in May that the DOD’s airstrikes in Iraq and Syria had killed 41 civilians since beginning Operation Inherent Resolve in August 2014. The executive order also demands the government to reveal annually civilian casualties from strikes. The London-based group credited the administration’s release as a welcome step toward greater transparency, but said more information on specific strikes was needed to reconcile different assessments.

Obama issued an executive order on Friday requiring annual disclosure of such strikes, which fall outside America’s conventional wars.

While sketchy details often emerge about individual drone strikes, the full scope of the US drone program has always been shrouded from view.

The president believes our counterterrorism strategy is more effective and has more credibility when we’re as transparent as possible.

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said the total number of drone strikes outside Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria was 473 during the first seven years of Mr. Obama’s presidency.

“President Obama’s willingness to comprehensively assess the impact of [the] drone program and to apologize and compensate victims, will ultimately influence his human rights legacy and set a clear benchmark for the next administration and the one after that”, said Amnesty’s Dr. Shah. The report also counts between 2,372 and 2,581 “combatant” deaths from the attacks. Critics of the targeted killing programme questioned whether the strikes created more militants than they destroyed. Opponents of the military use of drones have said that the uncertainty of targets leaves citizens vulnerable and that authorities can not be positive that those killed are in fact terrorists.

Commenting on the report, the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism said civilians have always been at greater risk from the U.S. airstrikes, adding that a 2014 study by legal charity ‘Reprieve’ suggested that USA drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan had killed as many as 1,147 unknown people in failed attempts to kill 41 named targets.

“President Obama is anxious about his legacy as a president who ordered extra-judicial killings of thousands, which resulted in a high number of civilian deaths”, Akbar said.

Federico Borello, Executive Director of Center for Civilians in Conflict praised Obama’s executive order.

The government had previously admitted to a handful of civilian casualties, but it considers any military-age men killed in drone strikes to be combatants, rejecting the “innocent before proven guilty” pillar of U.S. domestic law and reducing the total of “innocents” killed.

Several news outlets reported, citing leaks from United States officials, that the number is expected to be just 100, a tiny fraction of those estimated by investigative journalists and human rights groups who track the “violations of worldwide law”.

The US has admitted killing up to 116 civilians with hundreds of drone strikes in countries where it is not officially at war, but the number is a fraction of that recorded by human rights organisations.

The figures do not include commando raids with troops on the ground, such as the 2011 mission that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

The information was released as part of an effort by Obama to introduce more transparency into a controversial military tactic that he has defended as necessary to fight terror.

Feinstein, the former head of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, ‘I’ve been calling on the administration to release drone strike data for years.