Portable courthouse rises in Guantanamo Bay

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba - If everything goes according to plan, trials of detainees could begin soon in a court building now under construction next to an unused runway set against the glittering sea.

But in the five-year effort to prosecute detainees at Guantanamo, very little has gone according to plan. So, to be ready for all eventualities, the Pentagon's new judicial complex is portable - a prefabricated but very high-technology court building surrounded by trailers, moveable cells, concertina wire, and a tent city - all of which has been shipped in pieces that could be disassembled and put back together somewhere else.

"You can pick it up and move it," Lieutenent Colonel James Starnes, the commander of the Air National Guard unit doing the work, said recently over the din of construction equipment cutting into the sun-baked coral.

The complex, including the tent city dubbed Camp Justice, may be the perfect architecture for the limbo that is Guantanamo. Officials from President Bush on down have said they would like to close Guantanamo, yet the administration is just as eager to show progress in trying some of the 330 detainees.

"If there's a policy decision to move the trials somewhere else, we want to be up and running," said Colonel Wendy A. Kelly of the Office of Military Commissions at the Pentagon.

This year, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates rejected as "ridiculous" a plan to erect a $100 million permanent federal-court look-a-like here. The $12 million "M*A*S*H"-like set for the age of terror was born.

The centerpiece will be the courthouse, a squat, windowless structure of corrugated metal. Though it will hardly be much to look at, it will be outfitted with the latest in trial technology: a computerized system for digital document display; wiring for hidden translators working in as many as five languages; and a 10-camera automated system to beam video of the proceedings to a news media center in a hangar nearby.

One new feature for trials expected to involve classified evidence is a plexiglass window separating the small news media and spectator gallery from the floor of the courtroom. At the touch of a button, the military judge will be able to cut off the sound in the spectator section.

The tent city, complete with military cots and a recreation tent, is where some 550 court officials, lawyers, security guards, and journalists from around the world are to live for weeks at a time once military commissions get under way, perhaps as soon as this spring.

"I guess we'll get to see everybody's bathrobe," Kelly said. Diesel generators supply the electricity. The toilets, even for the military judges, are to be of the outdoor chemical variety, emptied periodically by truck.

Showers will be fed by 3,000-gallon water tanks, and food will be shipped in three times a day from kitchens on the base.

"If you're an avid camper, it'll be great," said Major Chad Warren, the operations officer of the construction unit, the 474th Expeditionary Civil Engineering Squadron.

There is already talk about whether investigators, lawyers, or even perhaps reporters, will be permitted alcoholic beverages inside the wire.

While these discussions are under way here, weightier debates about Guantanamo's future are playing out in Washington.

At the Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Sept. 26, Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, of Iowa said Congress had just learned about the construction of what the Pentagon calls the Expeditionary Legal Complex at Guantanamo.

"The building that's currently occurring," Harkin said, "is not consistent with the idea of closing the detention center."

Gates said that while he would like to close the detention camp, "I've run into some obstacles from a variety of lawyers." He said efforts to find a way to close the camp were under way, but added, "I was unable to achieve agreement within the executive branch on how to proceed in this respect."

In an interview, Brigadier General Thomas W. Hartmann, an official in the Office of Military Commissions, which supervises the war-crimes trial system, said the construction "shows the continued commitment to try the cases."

Lawyers involved in the Guantanamo proceedings are left to read the tea leaves.

The flapping tents and the outdoor plumbing seem to be sending a signal of ambivalence, said Charles D. Swift, a retired Navy lawyer and visiting professor at Emory University School of Law who has been involved in the Guantanamo cases from the start.

Swift said the construction showed that some people in the government were pushing to move the military commissions along at a faster pace, more than five years after the first detainees arrived here. But, at the same time, he said, "you could walk away from this at any moment."

Neal R. Sonnett, a Miami lawyer and observer at Guantanamo for the American Bar Association, said given the have-court-will-travel aspect of the construction, "I would read it that there is not a high level of confidence that Guantanamo is going to be around as a detention facility."