CLOSE And these estimates don't even include combat zones.Video provided by Newsy Newslook 
 
 A frame grab from a video made available May 22, 2016 of the alleged scene of a drone strike site that killed Taliban's supreme leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, in the Ahmad Wal area of Balochistan in Pakistan. (Photo: STR, EPA) 
 
 WASHINGTON — President Obama has signed an executive order intended to better prevent non-combatants from being killed in drone strikes after releasing new figures showing that more than 64 civilians have been killed in 473 strikes he authorized since 2009. 
 
 The long-awaited report on U.S. airstrikes provides the most detailed official accounting to date on the number of civilian casualties caused by the controversial use of unmanned drones to target terrorists. But the numbers are still fuzzy — reported in a range of 64 to 116 — and don't include deaths in areas with active combat operations. 
 
 And the estimates are hundreds lower than estimates from independent groups, which generally range from 200 to 1,000. 
 
 “The numbers reported by the White House today simply don’t add up, and we’re disappointed by that,” said Federico Borello of the Center for Civilians in Conflict. He said civilian casualties will only increase as the technology develops. 
 
 “We’re concerned that as more countries gain access to armed drone technology, it’s more likely that drones will be used as a first response in conflicts and more likely civilians will pay the price,” Borello said. 
 
 That report was promised in March by President Obama's top homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco. She said increased transparency was "the right thing to do" and "the best way to maintain the legitimacy of our counter-terrorism actions and the broad support of our allies." 
 
 Monaco promised the report would be released within weeks, and the White House conceded that the effort has taken longer than expected. Underscoring the sensitivity of the issue, the White House released the report on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, when it would likely get less coverage, 
 
 White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Friday the report still reflects an unprecedented level of transparency. 
 
 “The president believes that our counter-terrorism strategy is more effective and has more credibility when we're as transparent as possible. There are obviously limitations for transparency when it comes to matters as sensitive as this,” he said. 
 
 The operations behind the report “are the kinds of operations that just a couple of years ago we wouldn't even confirm existed,” Earnest said. 
 
 In April, USA TODAY reported that the Pentagon had changed the rules of engagement to allow field commanders more leeway to order attacks — even where there's a risk of civilian casualties. 
 
 Obama has struggled with the proper use of drones since the beginning of his presidency, when he said he inherited a tremendous capacity to unleash the highly accurate weapons but not the legal or command structures to decide when they should be used. "Because the drone program was born in the intelligence community and not the military, Obama said, "it wasn’t subject to the same amount of democratic debate." 
 
 "And that's done a disservice not only to the public being able to examine where we made mistakes and create corrective action, it’s actually also done a disservice to the incredibly dedicated men and women in intelligence and in operations who perform these operations who are subject to accusations that somehow they're irresponsible and bloodless and going around blowing up children, which is not the case," he he said at the University of Chicago Law School in April. 
 
 "And our popular media I think has been able to just project a whole bunch of scenarios that are generally not accurate," he said. 
 
 The report released by the Director of National Intelligence Friday is unlikely to dispel those perceptions. 
 
 It provides a less-than-complete picture of how the U.S. military uses drones. It includes only strikes "taken outside areas of active hostilities," meaning it doesn't include data from active war zones like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. And it provides no detail on when or where those strikes happened. 
 
 The strikes were conducted mostly by drones but also manned warplanes. The Pentagon earlier this year acknowledged killing al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Somalia, for example, with piloted aircraft. 
 
 The figures do not include commando raids with troops on the ground, such as the 2011 mission that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. 
 
 The report fails to account for the number and amount of condolence payments the U.S. government has issued to families of civilians accidentally killed in the air strikes. 
 
 Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee and a California Democrat, called the release of data "an important step forward," but called for greater detail in subsequent reports. Obama's executive order directs future administrations to release annual numbers by May 1 of the next year. 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/296b5bn ||||| The Situation Room, a commander-in-chief with rapidly graying hair, a cluster of grim-faced men and women debating the ethics and the legality of a killing. This is how the Obama administration has for years sought to portray its notorious global drone killing program: cautious, calculated and as conscientious as possible. 
 
 The Obama administration just released numbers suggesting this depiction is closer to reality than fiction. It announced that drone strikes in countries excluding Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have resulted in between at least 64 and 116 noncombatant deaths during his administration. The president also issued an executive order effectively directing his successor to do as he is doing, and publish this data going forward. 
 
 This is a remarkable shift, even if you’re skeptical of numbers this low. Human rights groups and media have been seeking this information for years. The administration had always refused, citing national security. Instead of openly providing numbers, the administration leaked details about President Obama’s personal involvement in decision-making. The public was asked to trust its law professor president. He was no mere mortal, deigning to play judge, jury and executioner. 
 
 Today’s announcement may simply reflect that Obama doesn’t trust his successors to be as scrupulous as he believes he has been. And no matter how one views the credibility of this data, that’s a good thing: no president should have the authority to kill in secret. Obama set a harmful precedent of doing just that, carrying out strikes on a kind of global battlefield, spanning Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and perhaps places unknown to us. Now, he’s starting to dismantle his own dangerous legacy. 
 
 The new executive order means it will be harder for the next president to kill in total secrecy. After Obama leaves, it will stay in effect unless his successor withdraws it. But to go backward on this commitment to disclose casualties annually, the next president would have to explain why – to a Congress that could be hostile, or simply thirsty for information about how the administration is handling counter-terrorism operations. 
 
 The announcements could also have a ripple effect on the dozens of governments currently seeking to acquire drone technology. Obama’s use over the last seven years set a disastrous global precedent: using a new weapons technology as an excuse to kill in secret and without regard for international law. Today’s developments are an incremental but important step away from the notion that new technology is a license for secrecy – one that was all the more frightening because lethal autonomous robots and weaponized artificial intelligence, though still smacking of science fiction, are actually on the horizon. 
 
 The downside, though, is that the drone data could be completely misleading – and provide a veneer of legitimacy to unlawful killings. While Amnesty International has not compiled overall data on drone killings, we know that the law professor president depiction is, at best, only a part of the truth. There are reports of hundreds of unidentified people killed in apparent “signature strikes,” where targeting decisions were made on the basis of patterns of behavior rather than identification of a specific individual. Amnesty International and other groups have also documented so-called rescuer strikes, where the US killed or injured individuals who were trying to help the victims of an initial strike. 
 
 We don’t know how the US counted individuals killed in these strikes, or the basis for those decisions. But if the US presumptively counted all of them as “noncombatants”, its data could be dramatically skewed. Indeed, without more information about the government’s standards, it’s impossible to reliably assess this data – or know whether it includes potentially unlawful killings like those we documented, such as the 2012 killing of a woman who was gathering vegetables in her family’s mostly vacant field. If the Obama administration is serious about transparency, it should finally confirm or deny the killings we documented, and say whether it counted these individuals as “noncombatants”. 
 
 The drone numbers could also wrongly obscure how entrenched and systematic impunity has become. The CIA, an agency with an extremely poor record of accountability to the public, is still conducting strikes. Indeed, it is remarkable that on the heels of its abusive program of torture and secret detention under former president Bush, the CIA was entrusted with the authority to conduct hundreds of drone strikes, killing thousands of people. Its continued role is likely one reason we aren’t getting fuller answers to our questions about drones. 
 
 Today’s disclosures aren’t enough to guard against future abuse by the CIA or other government agencies. Congress, while welcoming the transparency, should scrutinize the drone casualty numbers. And the drone data should not be the government’s last word on the impact of drone strikes: it should acknowledge, apologize and compensate civilian victims. 
 
 The communities that live at the other end of drone fire already suffer a peculiar invisibility in the US public’s understanding. Media reports use sanitized terms like “compound” and “convoy”. Raw numbers, like today’s, could contribute to this process of erasure: we have numbers to assign to the people who were killed, and now the government has assigned categories to them, but no names. Without more, theirs are just the lives of others.
– After years of pressure, the White House has released details about the number of civilians accidentally killed by US drone strikes—though the information comes with plenty of asterisks. The official estimate is that between 64 and 116 civilians have been killed in such strikes since 2009, reports USA Today. Some of those asterisks: That range is much lower than estimates by independent groups—their figures go from about 200 to more than 1,000—and the White House doesn't specify when or where the fatalities occurred except to say they were in non-war zones. That means strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria were not counted, but those in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and LIbya were, reports the Washington Post. The US also says that it killed about 2,500 enemy militants in those same non-combat zones. As part of the release—most coverage notes that the White House did this on a Friday before a holiday weekend—President Obama made a significant policy change: He issued an executive order requiring that future presidents make this information public in an annual list, notes the New York Times. "This is a remarkable shift, even if you’re skeptical of numbers this reports," writes Naureen Shah at the Guardian. But Shah also sees a downside: "The drone data could be completely misleading—and provide a veneer of legitimacy to unlawful killings." The reaction from Human Rights Watch: “Unless details are provided on specific incidents, it’s not possible to determine if individuals killed were civilians, and thus whether the US is complying with its own policy and with international law."