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Trump Revokes Obama-Era Rule on Disclosing Civilian Casualties From U.S. Airstrikes Outside War Zones

Graffiti protesting American drones in Yemen in 2016.Credit...Yahya Arhab/European Pressphoto Agency

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Wednesday weakened a rule that required the government to annually make public its estimates of civilian bystanders killed in airstrikes outside conventional war zones — increasing the secrecy that cloaks one of the most contentious aspects of the fight against terrorists.

In an executive order, Mr. Trump revoked a disclosure requirement that President Barack Obama imposed in July 2016. The change was the latest in a series of ways that Mr. Trump has dismantled the architecture that Mr. Obama built over time to constrain the use of drone strikes and commando raids targeting Islamist militants in places like tribal Pakistan and rural Yemen.

But Mr. Trump’s executive order noted that since 2016, Congress has enacted a law that separately requires the Pentagon to issue annual reports about bystander deaths from all of its operations, including in conventional war zones like Afghanistan and Syria.

Citing that law, the National Security Council said in a statement that the Obama-era rule amounted to “superfluous reporting requirements, requirements that do not improve government transparency, but rather distract our intelligence professionals from their primary mission.”

Still, the law requiring disclosure of bystander deaths covers only the Defense Department’s operations. It does not extend to airstrikes by the C.I.A., which has carried out its own drone campaign targeting terrorism suspects in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen.

Rita Siemion, the international legal counsel at Human Rights First, a nonprofit advocacy group, criticized the Trump administration’s move.

“It’s a major step backwards that’s out of touch with what the D.O.D. is doing and what Congress has been focused on,” she said, referring to the Defense Department.

The revocation of the disclosure rule joins other steps Mr. Trump has taken since becoming president to dismantle constraints Mr. Obama had imposed on counterterrorism operations.

Soon after taking office, Mr. Trump quietly deemed large sections of Yemen and Somalia to be “areas of active hostilities” subject to war-zone rules. In battle, it can be lawful to carry out a strike at a military target, knowing that some nearby civilians may die, so long as the collateral damage is deemed to be necessary and proportionate.

And later in 2017, Mr. Trump rescinded a set of rules, known as the Presidential Policy Guidance, that the Obama administration had imposed on counterterrorism operations away from hot battlefields. Those limits included a requirement that targets of kill missions by the military and the C.I.A. be limited to high-level militants rather than foot-soldier jihadists without any special training or leadership role, and a requirement for high-level, interagency vetting of proposed attacks.

Still, Mr. Trump’s changes in 2017 left in place a requirement that strikes away from conventional war zones take place only when military officers had “near certainty” that no civilians would be killed. Similarly, his executive order on Wednesday left in place other aspects of Mr. Obama’s directive that require the government to make a priority of preventing civilian casualties.

“The United States government is fully committed to complying with its obligations under the law of armed conflict, minimizing, to the greatest extent possible, civilian casualties, and acknowledging responsibility when they unfortunately occur during military operations,” the National Security Council statement said.

In a sense, Mr. Trump’s revocation of the disclosure rule amounted to a belated acknowledgment that his administration had already changed the Obama policy in practice: The director of national intelligence never put out a report about bystander casualties in 2017, even though the Obama-era order requiring one remained on the books last year, when the report was due out.

Several other factors somewhat lowered the stakes of Mr. Trump’s move. First, the C.I.A. appears to be carrying out fewer drone strikes than it did during the height of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism operations.

The last drone strike was reported more than a year ago in the tribal area of Pakistan, where the C.I.A. took the lead in handling airstrikes, according to Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who has tracked airstrikes for more than a decade on his Long War Journal. While Yemen is still being bombed, it is hard to determine whether the American government or the Saudi-Emirati coalition battling the Houthis, an Iran-allied rebel faction, are conducting the strikes, he said.

Moreover, even when the Obama administration revealed the official assessment of how many civilians had died, those numbers were merely a vague range and lower than estimates by outsiders like the Long War Journal, the Washington-based security policy organization New America and the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The Obama administration estimated that from its start in 2009 until mid-2016, 64 to 116 civilian bystanders were killed in such strikes. Outside groups’ estimates ranged from roughly 200 to 800. But because the official statistics did not break numbers down by location and date, it was difficult to make sense of the discrepancy.

“I think we will never truly know the number of civilians killed in airstrikes in these areas away from active battlefields,” Mr. Roggio said. “The reality is that these strikes take place where the government, news organizations and human rights groups have limited visibility, and the enemy has shown a propensity to attempt to manipulate the information.”

Joshua Geltzer, who served as the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2015 to 2017, acknowledged that the disclosure rule did not go as far as human rights groups wanted. But he said it was nevertheless a major step forward whose loss may create security risks, not just increase secrecy.

“This is a bad move not just for transparency, but also for those who believe that tools like drone strikes need to remain available to the government for countering terrorism,” he said. “The continued availability of that tool rests in part in confidence in how it is being used, and this was an important step in giving the public some insight into that.”

Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting.

Follow Charlie Savage on Twitter @charlie_savage.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Order Limits Report of Deaths From U.S. Airstrikes. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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