The Pentagon opened its long-delayed $4 million secondary courtroom this week, which will allow the war court compound – called Camp Justice at Guantanamo Bay – to hold simultaneous hearings in adjacent chambers, The New York Times reports. “The step was small but significant,” wrote reporter Carol Rosenberg. “It meant that, if pretrial issues and housing problems are ever resolved, the war court could hold a trial in one of its four active cases without bringing the other three to a standstill.”
The court has cost U.S. taxpayers around $2 billion in proceedings, planning and construction, and the prison operation that now holds 30 detainees has cost billions more. A $10 million tiny-house village of 150 single-occupancy trailers meant to house legal teams has not yet opened, but it already had a fungus problem in 2022. In a tentative test in January, court management housed about a dozen members of the military in the units, which are on the outskirts of the court compound by a beach. But court officials will not discuss the experiment or when the rest of the units will open.