The Guantánamo Bay war court is now costing US taxpayers over $7,600 per minute, according to new Pentagon figures.



Carting the necessary personnel and support to the remote Cuban base has escalated costs for the military commissions, a memo from the top Pentagon commissions official indicated. The controversial tribunals at Guantánamo have attracted criticisms over their inefficiency from their inception, in addition to international concerns about their capacity to distribute justice.

The Pentagon estimates come as the chief prosecutor in the commissions proposed relaxing major secrecy restrictions preventing defense lawyers from addressing torture inflicted on defendants by the CIA and its international allies – the first suggested classification changes for the war court after the Senate released portions of its landmark inquiry into CIA torture.

Vaughn Ary, the retired marine two-star general who oversees the commissions as the chief convening authority, declared his dissatisfaction with the tempo and cost of the tribunals in a December memo.

Crunching the numbers behind the commissions’ performance in 2014, Ary found that the tribunals met for only 34 days last year, sitting in session for an average of five hours per day and costing $78m.

While the detention facility and its associated military tribunal attract the lion’s share of international focus on Guantánamo, the tribunal itself is a decidedly part-time affair. Every participant in the war court, from the prosecution team to the defense bar to the officer-judges presiding over it, must travel to and from the base, a cumbersome process that has contributed to the ongoing delays in trying defendants accused of war crimes.

According to Ary, the cost of the lethargic commissions reached $7,647 per minute, $458,823 per hour and $2,294,117 per day for the month-plus that the commissions met in 2014.

“I believe the status quo does not support the pace of litigation necessary to bring these cases to a just conclusion,” Ary wrote in the memo, obtained by Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald.

The high cost of detaining the 122 men still held at Guantánamo – estimated at around $3.5m per detainee – has emerged as a talking point for the Obama administration in its arguments for closing the facility. But the administration has not often emphasized the cost of the military commissions, which it embraced in 2009 as a legitimate alternative to civilian courts, to the disappointment of its civil-libertarian supporters.

Robert Work, the deputy defense secretary, has ordered judges in the few ongoing commissions to relocate to Guantánamo for the duration of their judgeship to expedite the process. But travel is not the only issue slowing the process; there is a vast backlog of pre-trial hearings, and unexpected issues derail the procedures, such as concerns around the FBI’s apparent attempted infiltration of the defense counsel or the CIA’s ability to remotely mute court proceedings.

On Monday, for instance, a pre-trial hearing for the 9/11 conspiracy case went into abrupt recess after detainees accused a courtroom translator of working with the CIA at its black-site secret prisons where, the recent Senate report declassified and confirmed, the agency tortured captives, including the defendants. While much about the accusation is unclear, it comes after months of concerns about the US security services infiltrating the courtroom, which the defense lawyers argue all but forecloses the possibility of a fair trial in a case that carries the death penalty.

But the chief prosecutor in the tribunals, army Brigadier General Mark Martins, signaled that he is open to greater courtroom disclosure around the torture the US and its allies inflicted on the detainees.

Martins’ proposals remain under seal, and so their details are unclear. But he said in a statement on Sunday that he was prepared to propose that the commissions relax restrictions on discussing in court “enhanced interrogation techniques that were applied to an Accused from on or around the specified capture date through 6 September 2006, including descriptions of the techniques as applied, the duration, frequency, sequencing and limitations of those techniques,” as well as “the Accused’s confinement conditions”.

The 6 September 2006 cutoff is the date that 14 detainees, including the accused 9/11 conspirators, arrived at Guantánamo from CIA custody, and so Martins’ mention of it indicates that the alleged conspirators will now be able to raise their brutal treatment as a courtroom issue in at least some form. Lawyers for the detainees have sought to do that in pre-trial hearings to argue against the admissibility of statements made to their torturers or to remove the death penalty as a possible sentence.

Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights First, a frequent human-rights observer at the Guantánamo commissions, said it appeared the detainees would still be barred from speaking about where they were held or which countries assisted in their confinement. Eviatar said it amounted to a belated recognition that aspects of the torture the detainees experienced are now a matter of public record, thanks to the Senate intelligence committee.

“While this is a step forward for transparency, I guess, it’s one that was essentially forced on the commissions by the Senate committee, not one that was voluntarily undertaken by the commissions, the prosecution or the administration,” Eviatar said.

“I therefore don’t see it as a sign of real progress or any new commitment to transparency by the military commissions. The fact that we can’t even see the motions and orders addressing this issue attests to the continued lack of transparency of this whole process.”

In his statement on Sunday, Martins, the chief prosecutor, said he could “identify with the frustration” of those who feel the military commissions are unfolding at an unsatisfactory pace.

“This is the process our government, across two different administrations and multiple sessions of Congress acting with guidance from the courts, has chosen again and again. Since 2011, reformed military commissions are the only legally available forum for US criminal trials of Guantánamo detainees,” Martins said.