If these satellite images indeed show the US’s clandestine drone base in remote Saudi Arabia, they suggest that not only did a handful of top-tier media outlets long keep mum on the existence of the place at the behest of the Obama administration, but that the desert airstrip—and thus in theory, the US’s counterterror drone program writ large—is expanding.
You can see a trio of airstrips in the images, which were picked up by Bing. (Perhaps intriguingly, the place doesn’t show up in Google’s cache of satellite imagery.) Two of them appear large enough to handle drone and light-aircraft traffic; the third, which looks to run considerably longer and wider than the others, appears to be under construction. The place is very much growing, in other words, to eventually allow for bigger and bigger aircraft flying more and more spy- and kill- missions throughout the Middle East and Horn of Africa.
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It’s been a rapid growth, according to Wired‘s Danger Room. Digital Globe, a commercial imaging service, cruised one its sattelites over the tract in mid-November 2010, but saw nothing; just over a year later, when the same satellite flew over the same tract, the outpost appeared.
