Insider reveals the secrets of the Situation Room — where high drama and low farce collide

nypost.com:

watched the raid to on Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound while crowded tightly together in the Situation Room, the sequestered complex in the White House basement.

Official White House photographer Pete Souza captured the iconic moment, but it only happened because of technical difficulties.

Obama was originally alone as the mission took place, getting updates in a large conference room — despite its singular name, the Situation Room is actually several conference rooms and offices.But, the tech crew couldn’t figure out how to patch in a live video feed of the mission to that particular room, so the president watched history unfold with the rest of those assembled.

That’s “how you end up with this rather clown-car-like image of everyone trying to cram into the small room — because no one can quite figure out how to move the video over to the big room,” former National Counterterrorism Center director Mike Leiter tells George Stephanopoulos in his fascinating new book “The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis” (Grand Central Publishing), out May 14th.When most people think of the Situation Room, they imagine something full of grandeur and mystique, like the epic war rooms depicted in movies such as “Dr.