64 Drone Bases Located On American Soil 234
MikeatWired writes "We like to think of the drone war as something far away, fought in the deserts of Yemen or the mountains of Afghanistan. But we now know it's closer than we thought, writes Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai at Danger Room. There are 64 drone bases on American soil. That includes 12 locations housing Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles, which can be armed. Public Intelligence, a non-profit that advocates for free access to information, released a map of military UAV activities in the United States on Tuesday. Assembled from military sources — especially this little-known June 2011 Air Force presentation (.pdf) — it is arguably the most comprehensive map so far of the spread of the Pentagon's unmanned fleet. What exact missions are performed at those locations, however, is not clear. Some bases might be used as remote cockpits to control the robotic aircraft overseas, some for drone pilot training. Others may also serve as imagery analysis depots."
The 3/5ths thing was an *anti*-slavery clause (Score:5, Interesting)
that black people could be bought and sold as property and counted as 3/5 of a human being
Just for the sake of accuracy -- Slaves were whole "persons" according to the Constitution, but it was only 3/5ths of their number that counted for determining a state's representation in the House.
The slave states wanted the full number of their slaves to count, because it would increase their influence in the federal government. It was non-slave states and abolitionists who argued against this, and reducing it to 3/5ths was the compromise.
So you see, it's not counting slaves as less than a full human being (which wasn't what they were doing) that is the problem with the 3/5ths clause. It's that people who were slaves and thus not represented by their government were being counted towards representation at all. It's not that it's less than 1, it's that it's greater than 0!
Just wanted to put that into perspective. It's kinda messed up that we had to make compromises like that just to form our nation. But you know, the Founder's reasoning about freedom and liberty were quite good. The only problem was that they didn't extend the concepts to everyone, which is a problem easily fixed -- logically, anyway.