White House to Release Drone Casualty Report

The White House in the coming weeks will release the first in a set of annual reports on the number of people killed in US drone strikes, a move an Obama Administration official said is a step toward “greater transparency.” Lisa Monaco, an assistant to the President for homeland security and counterterrorism, said during a Monday speech at the Council on Foreign Relations that the yearly report will aim to increase the “legitimacy” of US counter-terrorism actions in the Middle East. The report will likely include numbers from both intelligence reports and open-source reporting. “The President’s view is that the American public and the world can have greater confidence in the successes and the effectiveness of these programs to fight terrorism if we’re more transparent about them,” White House spokesman Joshua Earnest said Monday. “There are obviously limitations on that, but there’s more that we can do, particularly when it comes to assessing the outcomes of these operations.”