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Each drone system includes four aircraft, a ground station, a satellite link, and launch site maintenance crew, keeping UAVs ready to use round-the-clock on a moment's notice. Like America's wars, moreover, drone technology is a growth business, Insitu's Steven Sliwa saying the industry is well positioned like the aeronautical one during WW II - up-up-and-away for big profits.
America's Drone Command Centers
Two currently operate, the CIA's at its Langley, VA headquarters, the Pentagon's at Nevada's Creech Air Force Base, about 35 miles from Las Vegas.
Look-alikes, they're sterile, insular, secure computer rooms manned by "combat commuters." By day, they wage war, then drive home for dinner, relaxation, and family time, dismissive of killing for a living like mafia hit men, except they do it daily on a global scale against nameless, faceless targets.
Working in pairs, a pilot sits at one end of a computer station, a sensor operator at the other, controlling visual surveillance, able to zoom in for closer views, capturing images from drone cameras and satellites.
The Pentagon's team maintains constant radio contact with its Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) Qatar headquarters and US Kandahar, Afghanistan base where UAVs take off and land.
ACLU National Security Project director Hina Shamsi calls Predator drones "targeted international killings by the state." On February 8, 2010, she and Law Professor Philip Alston's London Guardian article headlined, "A killer above the law?" saying:
Sanitized killing on the cheap leaves disturbing issues unanswered, including a program shrouded in secrecy, no accountability, and dubious "no reports" of civilian casualties despite "credible (ones) that hundreds of innocents have died."
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