Is This The CIA's Secret Saudi Arabia Drone Base?
The CIA's secret Saudia Arabia drone base was finally revealed this week (again, after having been revealed in 2011 a couple times) to much controversy. Now Wired's Danger Room blog appears to have located this base, which was used in the 2011 killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born radical Muslim cleric in Yemen.
You can see the base on Bing Maps, and Wired's Noah Schachtman lists a number of reasons to believe it's the drone base, including the three "clamshell" hangers which are similar to other drone storage facilities, and the opinions of former intelligence officers.
The discovery has prompted a lot of close looking at satellite maps, and already another possible drone base has been discovered using Bing maps, by the Australian information activist Asher Wolf and Foreign Policy's John Reed in the Yemeni desert, near the border.
One odd thing is that, while the base is clearly visible on Bing, it's censored in Google Maps, as pointed out by Cryptome. Google has a history of censoring its map data at the request of the U.S. government. Spying on secret U.S. military facilities may be the single reason to use Bing over Google.