Sala Situacional White House

good evening, Mr. Prime Minister, it'll be one moment for President Obama. Introducing the Prime Minister. Mr. Harley: We're here in the West Wing of the White House inside the White House Situation Room. We host about 25 conferences a day here in the Situation Room and some 250 guests attending the different meetings throughout the day. In a month, that's over 5,000 visitors and attendees to the different meetings that we have here. It's a state of the art facility -- the ability to conduct video teleconferences with 1,700 or 1,800 entities throughout the world. Mr. Reed: This is an interagency meeting on the H1N1 pandemic, so it has interagency representatives from the Executive Branch -- departments and agencies. They have the technology here and the capability to bring in other departments and agencies electronically as apposed to having folks face to face. Mr. Harley: The White House Situation Room was created in May of 1961 by the then National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. They had a voracious appentite for information, particularly President Kennedy. in response to that need, they felt the desire to create a communications center here within the White House. In 2007, the White House Situation Room underwent a major renovation which greatly expanded the square footage and the capabilities of the White House Situation Room. It went from one principal conference room the three principal conference rooms. This is the large conference room where the President Holds the National Security Council meetings. This is the President's chair. He controls the video options, including the microphones. Now, the traditional lineup of seats is baased on the seniority of the different Cabinet members attending the meeting. Tied to the Executive Conference Room is a small breakout room designed to enable the President to take one or two people into a conference room to have a small one-on-one session with them. And all of the feel that you see here -- the types of wood -- are designed to replicate the other entities at which the President would participate; places like Air Force One and Camp David, so that wherever the President is, the feel is the same -- having the same texture and sound around him One of the cool features of this particular room in the White House Situation Room is the opportunity to provide privacy for the President if he's making a Head of State phone call from the Situation Room itself. And what we'll do is we'll be able to fog the windows to give him that level of privacy. So throughout the White House Situation Room, you have a number of phone tubes -- or we call them "Superman tubes" -- with the capability to have unclassified telephones as wall as top secret telephone capability. This is the "watch floor" of the White House Situation Room and the watch floor's commodity is situational awareness. We're a fusion center, meaning that we fuse approximately 2,000 pieces of information every day. We produce three daily reports directly for the President and it's basically a situational awareness update, perhaps since the last time the President had an opportinuty to assimilate any additional information. The room that you see behind me is called the "surge room" and that's where we literally surge personnel in a crisis. We keep the phones and the computers always on so that we can provide instant access and start fusing information to provide a summary for the decision makers in the White House so that they can make the decisions in response to that situation or crisis. And hence the clever name, Situation Room. One-third of the personnel come from the Intelligence community, one-third come from the Department of Homeland Security and the remainder como from the U.S. military. We are sent here because we're apolitical we're not Democrats, we're not Republicans; we're here to support our nation and the President of the United States and the institution of the presidency. And all of the people who work in the White House Situation Room are simply the best and the brightest that this nation can offer and they do the very best job that they can do. Wolf Blitzer sits about a mile away, i think, in his Situation Room, but not the White House Situation Room.