CLOSE And these estimates don't even include combat zones.Video provided by Newsy Newslook 
 
 A frame grab from a video made available May 22, 2016 of the alleged scene of a drone strike site that killed Taliban's supreme leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, in the Ahmad Wal area of Balochistan in Pakistan. (Photo: STR, EPA) 
 
 WASHINGTON — President Obama has signed an executive order intended to better prevent non-combatants from being killed in drone strikes after releasing new figures showing that more than 64 civilians have been killed in 473 strikes he authorized since 2009. 
 
 The long-awaited report on U.S. airstrikes provides the most detailed official accounting to date on the number of civilian casualties caused by the controversial use of unmanned drones to target terrorists. But the numbers are still fuzzy — reported in a range of 64 to 116 — and don't include deaths in areas with active combat operations. 
 
 And the estimates are hundreds lower than estimates from independent groups, which generally range from 200 to 1,000. 
 
 “The numbers reported by the White House today simply don’t add up, and we’re disappointed by that,” said Federico Borello of the Center for Civilians in Conflict. He said civilian casualties will only increase as the technology develops. 
 
 “We’re concerned that as more countries gain access to armed drone technology, it’s more likely that drones will be used as a first response in conflicts and more likely civilians will pay the price,” Borello said. 
 
 That report was promised in March by President Obama's top homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco. She said increased transparency was "the right thing to do" and "the best way to maintain the legitimacy of our counter-terrorism actions and the broad support of our allies." 
 
 Monaco promised the report would be released within weeks, and the White House conceded that the effort has taken longer than expected. Underscoring the sensitivity of the issue, the White House released the report on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, when it would likely get less coverage, 
 
 White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Friday the report still reflects an unprecedented level of transparency. 
 
 “The president believes that our counter-terrorism strategy is more effective and has more credibility when we're as transparent as possible. There are obviously limitations for transparency when it comes to matters as sensitive as this,” he said. 
 
 The operations behind the report “are the kinds of operations that just a couple of years ago we wouldn't even confirm existed,” Earnest said. 
 
 In April, USA TODAY reported that the Pentagon had changed the rules of engagement to allow field commanders more leeway to order attacks — even where there's a risk of civilian casualties. 
 
 Obama has struggled with the proper use of drones since the beginning of his presidency, when he said he inherited a tremendous capacity to unleash the highly accurate weapons but not the legal or command structures to decide when they should be used. "Because the drone program was born in the intelligence community and not the military, Obama said, "it wasn’t subject to the same amount of democratic debate." 
 
 "And that's done a disservice not only to the public being able to examine where we made mistakes and create corrective action, it’s actually also done a disservice to the incredibly dedicated men and women in intelligence and in operations who perform these operations who are subject to accusations that somehow they're irresponsible and bloodless and going around blowing up children, which is not the case," he he said at the University of Chicago Law School in April. 
 
 "And our popular media I think has been able to just project a whole bunch of scenarios that are generally not accurate," he said. 
 
 The report released by the Director of National Intelligence Friday is unlikely to dispel those perceptions. 
 
 It provides a less-than-complete picture of how the U.S. military uses drones. It includes only strikes "taken outside areas of active hostilities," meaning it doesn't include data from active war zones like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. And it provides no detail on when or where those strikes happened. 
 
 The strikes were conducted mostly by drones but also manned warplanes. The Pentagon earlier this year acknowledged killing al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Somalia, for example, with piloted aircraft. 
 
 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 report fails to account for the number and amount of condolence payments the U.S. government has issued to families of civilians accidentally killed in the air strikes. 
 
 Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee and a California Democrat, called the release of data "an important step forward," but called for greater detail in subsequent reports. Obama's executive order directs future administrations to release annual numbers by May 1 of the next year. 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/296b5bn ||||| Senior aide says US will disclose the number of terrorism suspects and civilians killed since 2009 in bid to bolster public support for controversial operations 
 
 A senior White House aide has pledged to release how many terrorism suspects and civilian casualties the US has killed in its drone strikes since 2009, the first-ever disclosure surrounding the US’s most controversial lethal operations. 
 
 
 
 Lisa Monaco, Barack Obama’s counter-terrorism and homeland security adviser, said in a Washington speech on Monday that the expanded transparency would bolster public support for drone strikes and other counter-terrorism practices that she indicated would last “for years to come”. 
 
 The long-desired disclosure will cover strikes in undeclared US battlefields, such as Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and elsewhere, rather than the active war theaters of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. There was no specific date set for release, White House officials said, though Monaco said it will occur in the “coming weeks”. 
 
 “Not only is greater transparency the right thing to do, it is the best way to maintain the legitimacy of our counter-terrorism actions and the broad support of our allies,” Monaco told the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday. 
 
 As Monaco spoke, the Pentagon confirmed it had conducted a massive airstrike in Somalia that left 150 people dead, one the largest casualty totals in a US military attack of the post-9/11 era. 
 
 Monaco said the administration intends the disclosure to occur annually, though she and her colleagues have less than a year remaining in office and it is unclear if their successors will institutionalize the disclosure of what Obama aides have for years suggested was a highly classified assessment. A key congressional leader argued on Monday for codifying the disclosure in law. 
 
 Cori Crider, an attorney for drone strike victims at Reprieve, said that though this was a step in the right direction, “it doesn’t go nearly far enough”. 
 
 “In every region where we have pursued an aggressive, secret drone policy, militancy has gotten stronger. It’s not enough to tally up the drones’ body count – we need a thorough reassessment of the program itself.” 
 
 Human rights groups have for years called upon the administration to release hard data about its lethal counter-terrorism strikes and interpreted the administration’s reluctance as an indication that the strikes kill vastly more people than US officials – who rarely speak for the record – acknowledge. 
 
 In February 2013, Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican on the armed services committee, stated that drone strikes had killed approximately 4,700 people. Administration officials have over the years obfuscated whether the CIA and the US military have compiled data on how many people – including civilians – their overlapping strikes have killed, particularly considering that the CIA’s so-called “signature strikes” kill people without prior knowledge of their identities if they fit presumed terrorist behavioral criteria. 
 
 A senior senator on the intelligence committee, Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, said in 2013 that the CIA’s drone strikes were killing “single digits” of civilians each year, a claim made earlier by the CIA director, John Brennan. That figure has come into question, as Feinstein has accused the CIA of lying to her on an unrelated inquiry, and documents published by the Intercept last year indicated that the US military retroactively defines people killed in drone strikes as combatants. 
 
 Monaco indicated the casualty assessments will reflect “the latest in intelligence across all sources” and might take into account the informal tallies compiled by non-government organizations, the vast majority of which rely on media reports. 
 
 While the administration claims its drone strikes are the state of the art in precision, some of those outside accounts call the unverified claims into question. An analysis by the group Reprieve in 2014 found that the US killed 1,147 people in Pakistan and Yemen in the course of targeting only 41 men. 
 
 Peter Cook, the Pentagon spokesman, confirmed on Monday the US military strike, which occurred on Saturday targeting what he described as an al-Shabaab camp in Somalia. The strike, using drones as well as piloted warplanes, has killed a reported 150 people, although Cook said the military was still “assess[ing] the results of the operation”. 
 
 Cook said the strike, yielding one of the largest-ever casualty totals of the war on terrorism, was intended to thwart “fighters who were scheduled to depart the camp [and who] posed an imminent threat to US and African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom) forces in Somalia”. 
 
 Monaco’s address came days after the Justice Department agreed to disclose additional information about how the administration conducts lethal drone strikes. 
 
 Late on Friday, in response to a transparency lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, US attorney Preet Bharara and a senior department official, Benjamin Mizer, agreed to release “a much more detailed explanation of the standards and procedures employed in both capture and lethal targeting counter-terrorism operations”, according to a letter the officials sent to US federal judge Colleen McMahon. 
 
 It is unclear when the documents – authored by the Justice Department’s powerful office of legal counsel and the Defense Department – will be released, as disclosure will follow a review to excise classified information. A February ruling from McMahon indicated that the judge wished to reach a resolution “by the end of March”. 
 
 But the ACLU hailed the acquiescence as a victory for additional transparency around the drone strikes, beyond a 2013 overview provided to Congress. 
 
 The main document, known as the Presidential Policy Guidance, is “long overdue”, said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, who also challenged the administration to disclose further material. 
 
 “We hope that the administration’s decision to release this critical document reflects a broader commitment to make the lethal drone program more transparent. In that spirit, the administration should also release the legal memos that are the foundation for the program, basic information about those killed in past drone strikes, and detailed investigative files relating to strikes that killed bystanders”, Jaffer said. 
 
 Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, praised the forthcoming casualty assessment as a method to combat “propaganda” about drones and indicated that Congress ought to require the disclosure by law. 
 
 “There is still value in considering a statutory requirement to make this executive action permanent, ensuring that our commitment to transparency extends beyond the term of the current administration,” Schiff said.
– After years of pressure, the White House has released details about the number of civilians accidentally killed by US drone strikes—though the information comes with plenty of asterisks. The official estimate is that between 64 and 116 civilians have been killed in such strikes since 2009, reports USA Today. Some of those asterisks: That range is much lower than estimates by independent groups—their figures go from about 200 to more than 1,000—and the White House doesn't specify when or where the fatalities occurred except to say they were in non-war zones. That means strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria were not counted, but those in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and LIbya were, reports the Washington Post. The US also says that it killed about 2,500 enemy militants in those same non-combat zones. As part of the release—most coverage notes that the White House did this on a Friday before a holiday weekend—President Obama made a significant policy change: He issued an executive order requiring that future presidents make this information public in an annual list, notes the New York Times. "This is a remarkable shift, even if you’re skeptical of numbers this reports," writes Naureen Shah at the Guardian. But Shah also sees a downside: "The drone data could be completely misleading—and provide a veneer of legitimacy to unlawful killings." The reaction from Human Rights Watch: “Unless details are provided on specific incidents, it’s not possible to determine if individuals killed were civilians, and thus whether the US is complying with its own policy and with international law."