Thousands of miles from Ground Zero, the alleged masterminds of the September 11, 2001, attacks appear before a judge in an ultra-modern bunker, which looks as if it were assembled from Lego pieces.
Sitting in a gallery behind a triple-glass wall, which blocks the slightest sound, a handful of journalists are watching the proceedings as if they were a reality show with a bad playback.
The judge speaks, but one hears only the lawyer. And for good reason: the feed is delivered from the courtroom with a 40-second delay, creating confusion among members of the media, representatives of human rights groups and a dozen relatives of the victims of the attacks, who are separated from the rest by a curtain.
National security requires a “security court officer” to control all exchanges during the hearing and press a block-button which blurs the sound instantly if some information deemed sensitive escapes.
On Wednesday afternoon, for the second time since the indictment of the five suspects in May, a red light went on next to the judge.
Silence descended abruptly on the gallery and the press room on the other side of the barbed wire, as well as on the four locations on the US East Coast where the hearings could be monitored by the families.
“Malfunction,” concluded one of the relatives of the victims.
One of the lawyers continued to gesture as if in a silent film.
Pakistani Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the main suspect, turned to his nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi, and spoke to him from a distance.
Perched on a big black leather chair, Judge James Pohl explained that the commotion had been caused by someone mentioning a “classified interrogation technique.”
Kevin Bogucki, a Yemeni lawyer for Ramzi Binalshibh, told incredulous families that the government could not classify “experience, thoughts and knowledge” of defendants, who had been abused during their detention at a CIA prison.
On May 5, the use of the word “torture” led to censoring a portion of the exchange.
This time, however, the government recalled without being censored that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the attacks, “has been waterboarded 183 times.”
His prayer rug folded on the back of the chair, KSM, as Sheikh Mohammed is known, was pulling on his long beard dyed with henna. He wore a white turban and camouflage jacket he had received from the judge in memory of his years of resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Around him, translators and even a lawyer were wearing veils or hijabs.
A dozen guards were lined up along the wall but KSM was unshackled, though chains lay on the ground. Suddenly, the close associate of Osama bin Laden raised his hand. His lawyer said his client wanted to speak.
“We can rely on the 40 seconds delay” if he says something “top secret,” argued prosecutor Joanna Baltes. “No court in the US has the technology we have here.”
The high-security bunker is equipped with microphones, closed-circuit TV, flat screens and ultra-modern furniture.
Resembling from the outside a warehouse surrounded by watchtowers, it was brought here piece by piece from Florida at a total cost of $5 million, according to the Pentagon.
However a figure as high as $12 million was mentioned in the media when the complex was built in 2008.
In the cozy environment of the gallery, a court artist was drawing the only images from this courtroom that the public would be able to see.
“It’s very important to see him in the flesh,” said Alfred Acquaviva, who lost his son in the World Trade Center.
When KSM finally decided to speak, the audience in the anti-chamber could hear his entire diatribe against the United States.
“It’s scary,” Mr. Acquaviva remarked. “If they were tried in another country, particularly in the Middle East, they would have been hanged many years ago.
Modern bunker for Guantanamo trial
