INTELLIGENCE/MILITARY/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “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 [3-6-19], 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.”
–Wesley Morgan, “Trump scraps requirement to report some air strikes,” Politico, March 6, 2019 5:25 pm