Situation Room Up Close
Just below the Oval Office, in the basement of the West Wing, is the White House Situation Room. It's one of the most secure conference rooms in the world, used for national security strategy sessions and the president's classified briefings. Only a few people ever get to see the room in action. But the now-iconic series of photographs of President Obama watching the raid on Osama bin Laden's secret hideaway in Pakistan offers a rare look inside the highly secure complex. A tour through the Sit Room's most intriguing items:
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's binder includes the label NOFORN, or "Not for Release to Foreign Nationals." The classification is used in scores of White House documents that under no circumstances can be shared with personnel of other countries. For example, word about the raid in Abbottabad was intentionally, and carefully, kept from the Pakistani government.
All of the computers are made by HP, which won a major contract with the Department of Defense and several other federal agencies in 2006 following a brouhaha over the use of computers made by Lenovo. That company's links to the Chinese government led politicians to challenge the State Department's
$13-million equipment purchase for use on classified networks. The State Department eventually agreed that the computers would only be used in unclassified settings. Today, most computers in the Sit Room use the classification SCI, or "Sensitive Compartmented Information." In other words, you can't just throw a laptop under your arm and walk out of the building.
There's a cardboard-colored laundry bag in every major room of the White House, but the burn bag in the situation room gets the most use. It's designed for documents that can't just be thrown away or shredded, but need to be destroyed. Each evening, the Secret Service collects all of the bags in the building to destroy the contents. Despite the name, few White House officials know if the contents actually get burned.
Atop one of the visible documents is a logo from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency—a large but quiet department of the military that provides advanced mapping for on-the-ground planning during wars, and also for national crises like the BP oil spill or Hurricane Katrina. That blurry image on top: a close-up satellite image of bin Laden's Abbottabad compound.
)- I guess you prefer looking at Newts/Ensigns unzipped Zipper chasing married women ?? :???: 
