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.

Late Wednesday evening, the White House announced it had ordered the Justice Department to release to two Congressional intelligence committees the memos containing the legal justifications for drone strikes against U.S. citizens. The announcement comes two days after NBC News released a confidential memo that detailed similar information, and one day before the Senate confirmation hearing of Obama's nominee for CIA director, John Brennan, who is considered the chief architect of the administration's escalated use of drones. Before today, neither the White House nor the Justice Department had acknowledged the memos's existence.

What is a secret drone base that's not actually a secret? The Washington Post and the New York Times revealed today that they were among a number of news organizations that participated in a blackout regarding the location of a "secret" CIA drone base in Saudia Arabia at the behest of the Obama Administration. But it turns out that base had already been reported months earlier—including by Fox News. In the case of the Saudi drone base, the Times and the Post weren't protecting a state secret: They were helping the CIA bury an inconvenient story.

We would all like to know as much as we can about the Obama Administration's top-secret program of assassinating U.S. citizens with drones, so we can figure out how best not to get assassinated. But don't look to the pages of U.S. newspapers like the Washington Post, which cooperated with the Administration to cover-up the location of a key drone base.

Touré (pictured above interviewing T.I.) is a fine writer — or at least he was at one point. Now he mostly spends his time as a helium-filled talking head, floating drably across MSNBC's midday airwaves. This is a pretty cushy job, seeing as you can say basically anything without anyone giving a shit since the only people watching cable news during the day are those being crushed to death by boredom in lobbies across the country. But there's a catch: when you get paid to talk in circles every day, sometimes you'll find yourself arguing a position you probably should not be arguing. And if you're stubborn enough and your argument is stupid enough — you are on cable news, after all — then you might find yourself in the center of a firestorm.

Last night, NBC news broke the story of an Obama Justice Department memo on extrajudicial assassination of American citizens that screams off the page with the self-delusion and pity of an abused child writing a fairytale. It is a story of calmly supervised adult violence buried under the story-time adventure of so many princes, swords nominally at their sides, who keep hitting and hitting, because they have to.

Late Monday evening, NBC's Michael Isikoff released a report detailing a confidential Justice Department memo obtained by NBC News. The memo, called the white paper, discusses the legal justifications for the use of drone strikes and other lethal attacks against American citizens believed to be members of al-Qaida, offering explanations that expand on public statements previously issued by Obama's nominee for CIA director John Brennan and Attorney General Eric Holder.

America's deadly flying war robots are in the hands of users of the popular geek message board Reddit. And as with any profession in which Redditors can be found, U.S. Army drone operators have apparently taken to Reddit to chat about their controversial jobs with fellow users in the site's popular "Ask Me Anything" section.

Teju Cole, the novelist, essayist, art historian and master tweeter, wrote seven short stories about drones — the unmanned aerial vehicles used by the U.S. for covert assassination in foreign countries — on his Twitter feed yesterday. Here they are.

The Times is now reporting that a U.S. drone strike has killed a major Al Qaeda leader in Pakistan.

Essam Attia is the New York street artist responsible for placing fake NYPD ads reading "Drones: Protection When You Least Expect It" around town. In September, he gave a video interview to Animal NY, with his identity and voice obscured, in which he discussed this project and his art in general. Wednesday morning, the NYPD arrested him at home.

TMZ today responded to a widely circulated report recently published in the San Francisco Chronicle claiming the gossip site was among the myriad public and private entities flooding the Federal Aviation Administration with applications for their own private drones.

This November's foreign policy debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney left many Americans realizing that the two candidate's policies were pretty similar, regardless of their thoughts about bayonets. But no matter how alike their policies seemed to the average citizen, President Obama apparently wasn't okay with the thought of a Romney kill list or having the former Massachusetts governor having free rein over America's army of unmanned drones.

Sound the war bells, grab your gear, and prepare to man the bombers, fellow Americans: the dirty nation of IRAN has wiped its shit-stained bootheel upon our national sovereignty, in the following manner: they shot at one of our spy drones. We say it was outside of Iranian territory; they dispute that. Either way, the strong, muscular foreign policy view of this must be: Hey, That Was Ours, And We Must Escalate Into All Out War, Or We Might Look Weak. From The Guardian:

Has America's fleet of deadly Predator drones been infected by some sort of anti-imperialist poltergeist force? That seems to be the only logical conclusion from today's Washington Post story (the last in an excellent series on America's "Secret War") about the activities and happenings at the US drone base in Djibouti. There's this:

There are multiple cases against America's international program of drone assassinations. There is the humanitarian case: the program has killed hundreds of innocent civilians, due to either bad intelligence or a simple lack of caring on the part of US officials. And, for the more heartless... er, hard-nosed pragmatists, there is the diplomatic case: the US is reportedly operating drones in Pakistan with only the flimsiest level of permission.

On January 23, 2009, shortly after President Obama took office, the U.S. military blew up two houses in Waziristan with missiles fired by drones. These were the first of nearly 300 drone strikes in Pakistan the Obama administration has carried out. Here is what it was like from the other side.

Remember the "There's an app for that commercial?" Well, that's still mostly true, I guess, unless, say, you wanted instant updates for the number of people killed by U.S. drones. Earlier this week, Apple rejected NYU student Josh Begley's "Drone+" app, which keeps track of drone strikes, including the approximate location and number of people killed. There was even an option for push notifications.

People have been making a fuss about the domestic use of drones recently. Now the drone industry has come up with a 'code of conduct' to ensure the public's safety and privacy. [Evil robot laugh drifts through the air.] Huh? What was that?

Last week, the New York Times ran a 5,000-word article on the Obama administration's "secret" drone assassination program that might as well have been accompanied by the cheery clip art that comes with brochures on STDs from the free clinic.