In an executive order issued Wednesday, Donald Trump revoked former President Barack Obama’s 3-year-old Executive Order 13732 that required U.S. intelligence officials to publish an unclassified report on May 1 every year the combatant and civilian deaths from U.S. drone and other air strikes outside of major combat areas. These include, for instance, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Pakistan, but not Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. No report was released last year.
While other reports catalog most military air strikes, they don’t include those by the Central Intelligence Agency as the now-canned report had done. Wesley Morgan reports:
“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.
The State Department told Congress Wednesday that the other reports made the Obama-era mandate redundant. But Joshua Geltzer, the Obama National Security Council's former senior director for counterterrorism, told Politico in an interview that "they're not redundant. They don't cover the same things. This one added real value."
Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, issued the following statement in response:
"President Trump has already weakened rules that sought to limit civilian deaths caused by this country’s illegal and immoral lethal force program, in which it kills suspects in places where we are not at war. This order now shrouds those killings in even greater secrecy.
“Trump’s decision to increase secrecy about the United States’ killing of people abroad is deeply wrong and dangerous for public accountability. Trump revoked a transparency order that provided an imperfect but still important official record of deaths caused by the military and, critically, the CIA. This decision will hide from the public the government’s own tally of the total number of deaths it causes every year in its lethal force program. Now, the government is also no longer committed to providing reasons why its total death count is different from independent credible reports by media and rights groups.”
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“Astronomy may be revolutionized more than any other field of science by observations from above the atmosphere. Study of the planets, the Sun, the stars, and the rarified matter in space should all be profoundly influenced by measurements from balloons, rockets, probes and satellites. ... In a new adventure of discovery no one can foretell what will be found, and it is probably safe to predict that the most important new discovery that will be made with flying telescopes will be quite unexpected and unforeseen.”
~~Lyman Spitzer, Jr., “Flying Telescopes,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1961)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2012—Companies still suspending their ads on Limbaugh's show, but they need to make it permanent:
The netroots campaign to get companies to stop advertising on Rush Limbaugh's show is going great guns. Despite the hate-radio maven's pathetic "nopology" to Sandra Fluke, the list of local, regional and national advertisers who have signed off now totals 33, and there are more to come.
But this is just Round One. Because, as Jeff Bercovici points out, this isn't the first time advertisers have left Limbaugh.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Technical difficulties couldn't stop us... technically. Greg Dworkin and Joan McCarter saved the day, rounding up the various TrumpWorld explosions & slow leaks. Fixing this will mean rules will just have to change. But were they ever really so hard & fast?