The case of the mystery button began like a story about a poltergeist. On Monday, a preliminary hearing in the military commission trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other accused 9/11 conspirators convened at Guantánamo. The courtroom is set up so that spectators behind sound-proof glass can listen to an audio feed with a forty-second delay. As Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald describes it, “A red emergency light spins in court when a censor at the judge’s elbow hits the mute button to prevent someone from spilling national security secrets.” At just before 2:30 P.M., David Nevin, one of the defense lawyers, who was addressing a brief having to do with C.I.A. secret prisons, said he understood that “we are going to do this in a 505 and that some portion of this will turn out to be closed or secret.” As he pronounced “secret,” the light began to flash and white noise filled the audio feed, as if it had been a trigger word—even though neither the security officer or the judge had touched the button. That’s when the judge, James Pohl, realized that he was not, as he’d thought—given the trappings and the job title—running his own courtroom. Some unknown person in another room was, and was apparently able to turn the audio off or on, or, for all anyone knew, pipe in the soundtrack to “Zero Dark Thirty.”

Judge Pohl, who is also an Army colonel, was confused and angry.

“If some external body is turning the commission off under their own view of what things ought to be, with no reasonable explanation because I—there is no classification on it, then we are going to have a little meeting about who turns that light on or off,” the judge said.

One of the prosecutors said that she thought she could explain—just not in open court. A defense lawyer said that, without knowing who was “turning that light on and off,” he and his colleagues could “only assume that maybe they are monitoring additional communications, perhaps when we are at counsel table.” The judge’s “little meeting” lasted three hours.

On Tuesday, Pohl had no public explanation of who the Button Men might be, though there was a reference to “original classifying authorities.” (According to the Washington Post, that “almost certainly” meant the C.I.A.). And there would not, as expected, be an expert witness to talk about how the whole audio-visual system worked, since, the judge said, “I’m not sure what guy or gal to call.”

This is Guantánamo, where following the proceedings can be a bit like watching over someone’s shoulders when they play SimCity and forget an essential utility, causing the whole grid to crumple. The military-tribunal system has undergone a few revisions since the early Bush years, mostly thanks to the Supreme Court, but the government is still pretty much making it up as it goes along, in a way that is painful to watch. Hilarity would ensue were this not a solemn session in which we are supposed to be impressing the world with our ability to bring mass murderers to justice while maintaining not only the rule of law but also a shred of dignity.

The tragedy in this is that the United States has a perfectly good civilian-court system with extensive experience trying terrorists. When the Obama Administration, under pressure from everyone from Lindsey Graham to Lower Manhattan residents worried about traffic, decided that K.S.M. and his co-defendants, who had killed thousands of people in New York, would not be tried there, they all but guaranteed day when the judge would find himself asking, as he did on Tuesday, “You want to sleep with your client?” This was in response a request from defense lawyers, who have not yet seen the defendants in their cells, that they be allowed forty-eight hours in their detention area. (They wanted to sleep in cells next door to their clients’.) At another point, Judge Pohl threw out the question, “What technology is being used in this courtroom?” Better ask what theory of law is being used there. (When the defendant Walid bin Attash answered a question with a mini-rant, Pohl said, in a phrase that looks plaintive on the transcript page, “Please stop.”)

The failure to think through some basic parameters produced, for example, an epistemological debate about how defense lawyers can properly give notice that their clients may be about to say something classified, when the lawyers, absent psychic powers or staged proceedings, can’t always know what the defendants will say. (The defendants themselves aren’t supposed to know what is and isn’t classified—another rabbit hole.) Assertions about the surveillance of the defendants and the confidentiality of attorney-client conversations have not been reconciled.

There was one thing that Pohl was clear about: what Nevin had been saying when he was cut off was not secret at all. That someone apparently thought it should be is likely due to its proximity to the question of torture—a subject that has distorted the proceedings profoundly, the white noise reverberating through it all, cutting off a moral as well as legal conversation.

Add to all that one of the questions hanging over the military tribunal: Is the prosecutor in made-up proceedings in a slapped-together courtroom allowed to tell the government that he doesn’t want to pursue made-up crimes?

As Charlie Savage explained in an Op-Ed in the Times over the weekend, Brigadier General Mark Martins, the lead prosecutor at the K.S.M. trial, is caught in a strange fight with the Obama Administration over whether the defendants can be charged with crimes that are not war crimes in international practice. A recent appeals-court case suggests that they cannot. Martins wants to drop the questionable charges—he wrote a memo citing “significant litigation risks”—but the Pentagon doesn’t, even though there are plenty of others in the indictment. What is maddening is that the charge in question—conspiracy—is a relatively straightforward one to prosecute under civilian law. It is as though the government, having stamped its feet to make sure that everyone went to a certain restaurant, was dismayed to find that the things it liked weren’t on the menu. (Savage also reported Monday that the office devoted to closing Guantánamo had itself been closed.)

The petty absurdities at Guantánamo are hard to separate from the grand ones. And so we are left with proposals for prison sleepovers, second-guessed secrets, and an unseen audio-visual club, even as the majority of the prisoners have never been charged with anything. Those questions, like that of the conspiracy charges, will certainly be the subject of more arguments and motions as the pretrial hearings continue this week. Someone may even say something that casts some light on what we hope to accomplish at this point in Guantánamo— that is, just as soon as the court figures out who is pushing all the buttons.

Illustration by Janet Hamlin/AFP/Getty.