On Friday, in a courtroom at Guantánamo Bay, a military judge halted the trial of the accused planner of the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole, in Yemen, with a passionate thirty-minute speech, in which he laid out unanswered legal questions that had brought the case to a “standstill” and his own frustrations with, among other things, the defense team’s clothes. The judge, Air Force Colonel Vance Spath, who has been presiding over the military commission (as the proceedings at Guantánamo are known) against the accused, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, since 2014, said that, in his twenty-six years of service, “I’ve never seen a judge advocate show up in Class B’s time after time.” Class B’s are less-than-dress uniforms; Spath had, apparently, spotted officers assigned to the Military Commissions Defense Organization, which manages the cases for defendants like Nashiri and five accused 9/11 plotters, wearing them in his courtroom. Spath continued, “I’m not oblivious. I know what that says. What little respect you have for the commission is obvious. A short-sleeve shirt, no tie, no coat; I get it. That’s the message. That’s been the message from the defense for five months.”

Last October was when Marine Brigadier General John Baker, who headed the Military Commissions Defense Organization, allowed three civilian lawyers assigned to defend Nashiri to quit. Two of them, Rosa Eliades and Mary Spears, were civilian Pentagon employees; the third, Rick Kammen, was the team’s “learned counsel,” required for commission death-penalty cases. (Seventeen sailors on the Cole died, and Nashiri is facing execution.) The exact sequence of events that led the lawyers to ask to be excused remains classified, but the basic issue appears to have been that they felt that attorney-client secrecy had been compromised, and that the rules at Guantánamo presented them with insuperable ethical conflicts, keeping them, for example, from discussing the case with their client. The present military commissions were created by Congress in 2009, in an attempt to try accused terrorists at Guantánamo, rather than in civilian courts, while working around a series of Supreme Court rulings that had rejected earlier post-9/11 approaches. In a statement made at the time of the lawyers’ exit from the case, Kammen called the military-commissions system a “failed experiment.”

Spath didn’t agree. To begin with, he argued that Baker was misreading the 2009 law, and that only he, Spath, had the power to excuse members of the defense team. He also ruled that there was not, in fact, an ethical conflict. When Baker didn’t back down—suggesting that he thought the lawyers’ complaints had merit—Spath found him in contempt of court and ordered the general confined to his quarters for twenty-one days. Harvey Rishikof, the Pentagon official then charged with overseeing the process, let Baker out early, but the contempt finding itself is now in federal court. And, as a measure of how mangled everything at Guantánamo has become, Secretary of Defense James Mattis fired Rishikof earlier this month. Charlie Savage, of the Times, reported that Rishikof had been exploring a possible plea deal for the alleged 9/11 planners. Is that why he was fired? No reason has been given publicly. When it comes to the Guantánamo military commissions, no one seems to know, or, rather, agree on, anything—not even the basics of who’s in charge or how the proceedings work.

This fundamental uncertainty is why Spath put the trial in indefinite abatement, “until a superior court orders me to resume.” In the preceding days, he had considered sending federal marshals to collect the absent lawyers, if only to have them appear before him by video link. But Spath realized that seizing them by force would create conflicts of the very sort which he had ruled didn’t exist. It might also endanger the lawyers’ security clearances. Meanwhile, the lone military lawyer still on the case, a Navy lieutenant named Alaric Piette, had protested that he was not qualified to handle it. This left the proceedings vulnerable to questions about their legitimacy; if Nashiri didn’t have a competent defense, Spath’s rulings, and any eventual conviction, might be overturned.

On an emotional level, Spath blamed the defense for the resulting deadlock. “They don’t follow orders; they don’t follow direction; they don’t obey commission regulations, or rules, or subpoenas, as we saw,” he said. They had exhibited “lawlessness” and “contemptuous behavior”; they had “scoffed at my authority.” He had been, it seemed, dismayed when a Pentagon bureaucrat whom he’d had testify, last Thursday, by video link, had mentioned that there might be a time when commission lawyers would defy an unethical order. Spath thought that the bureaucrat was conflating the idea that military officers could decline to follow unlawful orders with the obligation of lawyers to listen to judges. That confusion, it’s worth noting, is built into the military commissions—the relation between military and civilian rules has never been clear. But Spath found it out of proportion, in a way that he seemed to take personally. “I hope cool minds reflect on what my orders have been,” he said. “I’m not ordering the Third Reich to engage in genocide. This isn’t My Lai.” All he was doing was telling the lawyers to listen to him and get back in court, he said. “Those are the extent of my orders. Not war crimes, people.”

When a judge starts berating the courtroom to remember that he is not a Nazi, cool minds are not reflecting, on any side. Spath seemed to recognize this. The night before, he said, he had not slept. “I went to the gym. I thought maybe the treadmill would either calm me down—which it has, of course. Give me more—more reflection. It did. And I went back and looked again, and looked again.”

What he found is that, whatever his feelings about the defense, on a legal level the blame—and the solution—lay elsewhere. There were, he said, “questions that we need answered, frankly, from a court superior to me.” Spath thought that Baker’s reading of the Military Commissions Act could lead to absurd outcomes, because the defense could then bring the trial to a halt anytime it wanted to, by denying the accused representation. But, he said, maybe Baker was reading the law correctly; maybe Congress, in other words, had put together something that sloppy and absurd and ill-functioning. (It wouldn’t be the first time.) “We need somebody to tell us, is that really what that says, despite, obviously, every other court system in America thinking differently.” With that, Spath seems to have glimpsed what many critics of the military-commissions law have argued all along: the proceedings had revealed “significant flaws” in the military-commission process, Spath said. “We’re going to continue to spin our wheels and go nowhere until somebody who owns the process looks in and does something.” And, at another point, he said, “We need action. We need somebody to look at this process. We need somebody to give us direction. I would suggest it sooner than later.”

What was remarkable to him is that almost no one seemed as alarmed as he was. “I held a general officer in contempt. That should have stood out,” Spath said. He is right about that. (As is so often the case, Carol Rosenberg, of the Miami Herald, whose reporting from Guantánamo should be counted as a valuable national resource, was the only reporter there.) The Cole case is still at the pretrial-hearing stage. So is the 9/11 case, which sometimes has to compete with it for courtroom space. That case, as I’ve written before, ought to be our trial of the century: the conspirators who murdered more than two thousand people in Manhattan, at the Pentagon, and on United Flight 93, finally in front of a jury, albeit a military one. Is it also headed for a procedural train wreck?

On Friday, Spath said that he had seriously considered dismissing the Cole case, and only decided not to because he felt that that would reward the defense’s “clear misbehavior and misconduct.” (The defense would disagree with that assessment.) But the dismissal of both the Cole and 9/11 military-commissions cases, and the immediate reopening of the cases in normal, civilian courts, would actually be the wisest move, whatever the political barriers. Federal courts have an excellent record of convicting terrorists and sending them to maximum-security or, in some cases, supermax prisons. Military commissions do not, and it is looking as if they never will. Perhaps a plea deal of some sort, as Savage’s reporting suggested, is an option. But it is time to declare military-commission bankruptcy, and move on to the federal courts. Getting the 9/11 trial right is too important not to.