9 July 2011

Watching Live Kill from the Situation Room

This shows the White House Situation Room's small conference room where Obama and his team watched the OBL-kill operation, along with views of the Situation Room complex location under the West Wing. This suggests CIA drone-kills are piped into the Situation Room via live feed through CIA and DoD. No reports yet of reporters working the CIA and White House beats being shown live kills like Congress members and national security supporters but that is likely to happen.

CIA offers an artfully anodyne description of the Situation Room's diverse capabilities for centralizing US snarling internal squabbles over policy and dominance:

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/
97unclass/whithous.html

Compare to the White House soothing video of the finger-on-the-megadeath-button facility:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009/12/18/inside-situation-room

Small conference room looking north. (WhiteHouseMuseum.org)

Small conference room looking south. Doors at right are to a closet. Door to the room is to right of photo, see plan below. (White House, Pete Souza)

Small conference room in red. (WhiteHouseMuseum.org).

Situation Room in red (2005). It is not wholly underground as often reported, the top is landscaped. Windows are blocked inside. (WhiteHouseMuseum.org)

Situation Room in red (2009). Building at right has not been publicly identified. (NY Times via WhiteHouseMuseum.org)

Source

Below, the most commonly published large conference room is expansively termed the Situation Room. Louvered shutters cover window openings. It is not clear if the windows are fully blocked or remain operable despite a security risk and acoustical surveillance. Based on the floor plan, emergency exits from the Situation Room appear inadequate and operable windows could serve that purpose. (White House, Pete Souza)

Earlier views of the window openings show screen coverings, below. (White House, Pete Souza)

The Situation Room Watch Center below, from the White House video of the facility.

Below, Obama in the lobby outside the Situation Room, at red dot of plan. A Secret Service agent observes in the distance. (White House, Pete Souza)