The White House said Monday that efforts to produce a U.S. drone strike civilian casualty report have run into some cultural hurdles within the U.S. intelligence community, but said the administration intends to provide “additional information” on the topic “pretty soon.”
“What [President Obama’s] national security team and the intelligence community is attempting to do is break some old habits in bringing transparency to this element of our national security strategy and counterterrorism strategy,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Thursday when asked if the report would be forthcoming.
While Earnest acknowledged that producing the report has been “difficult,” he said there will be an update from the White House soon on the sensitive topic.
“That work is ongoing … I do anticipate we’ll have some additional information on that pretty soon,” he said.
The White House announced in March that it would release a first public accounting of deaths due to U.S. drone strikes since President Obama took office.
During a speech in New York City before the Council on Foreign Relations, Deputy National Security Adviser Lisa Monaco announced that the White House would publicly release an assessment of “combatant and noncombatant casualties” resulting from drone strikes since 2009.
At the time, Monaco said the White House would release the report in the “coming weeks” and would be the first in an annual release of drone strike details.
The CIA considers any movements, not to mention bombing, by U.S. unmanned aircraft in different parts of the world as covert. Other parts of the U.S. government consider drone operations as overt, creating a dichotomy that has created disclosure headaches across the federal government, even though CIA-run drone operations in places like Pakistan and Yemen have been well known for years.
