GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA—“And there we go.”

With those words eight years ago, then U.S. president Barack Obama capped the pen he had used to sign one of his first executive orders: close Guantanamo. One year. America would regain the “moral high ground.”

The Oval Office erupted in cheers.

Well, here we are now, same place, different story.

The first Guantanamo hearings held under the Donald Trump administration are scheduled to start this week at the offshore prison the new president has vowed not only to keep open, but to load up with “some bad dudes.”

Who exactly those dudes may be or the legal justification for bringing them here is unclear.

But on Monday Guantanamo was open for business again as court staff, journalists, relatives of 9/11 victims and lawyers arrived on a flight from Maryland’s Andrews Air Force Base for pretrial hearings in the death penalty case against the alleged architects of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The historic war crimes prosecution has been called the “trial of the century,” although lawyers who are representing the five defendants often say it is more like a case that will take a century to try.

Not on the flight was defence lawyer Cheryl Bormann, lead counsel for Walid bin Attash. She broke her arm over the weekend and requires surgery, but the military judge for the case, army Col. James Pohl, denied a request to delay the proceedings.

Her absence may seem like just another minor stumbling block for a trial that gets pushed two steps back for every one forward. (Bormann was the lawyer who once delayed proceedings by claiming there were listening devices — hidden in smoke alarms in Guantanamo’s meeting rooms — undermining the sacrosanct principle of lawyer-client confidentiality. She was chided for peddling conspiracy theories until her claims were proven true.)

But without Bormann in court this week, bin Attash no longer has “learned counsel” for a capital murder case, one of the rules of Guantanamo’s controversial military commissions. He could waive that right, but not without consultation, the other defence teams argue.

“It’s like if you’re sitting in the doctor’s office and the nurse walked in and says the doctor’s not here but I and the janitorial staff have been talking and we really don’t think you need surgery,” David Nevin, who represents alleged 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, said in an interview Monday.

“We’re in la-la land again … in the largest criminal investigation and the most complex criminal investigation in the history of the country.”

The lead prosecutor on the 9/11 case, Brig.-Gen. Mark Martins, cautioned journalists in a Monday night briefing to stay tuned — this week’s hearings are more complicated, and a Wednesday morning session will shed more light on why the judge is pushing forward.

And yet in broad terms, la-la land has always been an apt description for this place of contradictions, Orwellian language and Kafka references; where the Geneva Conventions don’t apply until they do, and there are $10,000 fines for harming an iguana, but a history of detainee torture; where “interrogations” are called “reservations”; and where being convicted of a war crime is often a faster way off the island than being held without charges.

So much has defied logic here, and the fear for some is that in Trump’s “alternate fact” world, logic may matter even less now.

Since this prison opened 15 years ago, there have been more than 780 men and teenagers held here and only eight military commission cases concluded. Half of them have been partially or completely overturned in U.S. federal courts, and appeals for the others, including one by lawyers for Canadian Omar Khadr, are ongoing.

Go back to January 2009 during Obama’s inauguration, and the cast in Guantanamo was much the same; a planeload of court observers and journalists had come to observe the hearings for the 9/11 accused.

But just after midnight on Jan. 21, 12 hours after Obama was sworn in, everything changed and the tent city surrounding the courthouse known as “Camp Justice” was buzzing with activity as news leaked that Guantanamo hearings were all on indefinite hold.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The next day Obama signed that order to close the prison.

“And there we go” — as if it would be that easy.

Saturday Night Live didn’t wait long to spoof the camp’s closure. “Hoods! Blindfolds! Shackles! Chains! Dog bowls for people!” shouted the mock guard, holding up the prison paraphernalia. “If it’s used to humanely detain or interrogate prisoners, we’ve got it! We’re passing the savings on to you!”

There was some skepticism about Obama’s ambitious timeline, but little doubt he would shutter the prison that had become a worldwide symbol of abuse.

Like now, anything seemed possible then.

But Obama failed due to his own early missteps, and then was overtaken by the politics of a Republican-led Congress that blocked any detainees from setting foot on U.S. soil.

While the population today is only 41 — at a cost annually of more than $10 million per detainee to keep them here — Obama lamented his failure to close this prison right up to his final days in office.

While he famously said, “It’s not who we are,” he stopped short of exercising his executive power to unilaterally shut the prison and defy Congress.

Now Guantanamo belongs to Trump and no one knows exactly what this era will bring.

“There’s a saying that the left takes Trump literally but not seriously and the right takes him seriously but not literally,” says Nevin. “So when he says we’re going to bring back waterboarding and a hell of a lot worse, most people hear, ‘I intend to violate the Convention Against Torture.’ The other side hears, ‘I plan to get tough on terrorism.’”

“So what the hell is going to happen next?” Nevin says about the future of the Guantanamo or the 9/11 hearings. “I have no idea.”

Follow Michelle Shephard on Twitter @shephardm

Read more about: