A Missouri firm that specializes in providing prefabricated buildings to the U.S. military has won a contract to provide a $235,156 pop-up site for defense lawyers to meet with six captives at Guantanamo.
The Pentagon announcement awarding the contract to Hunter Saak of Jonesburg, Mo., included a sketch of the proposed wheelchair-accessible, 30-foot-by-70-foot modular building. It shows six 10-by-10-foot windowless meetings rooms, a monitored telephone room of the same size and an equipment room, which has the word "listen" beside it.
The specifications say the site will include a "Privileged Team Room" with two work stations for "technical and security staff" to conduct "communication monitoring of the Phone Room." Telephone calls between lawyers and captives have never been considered confidential. Security staff members listen in, with the authority to pull the plug on the conversations if they cross into sensitive or classified information.
The senior Pentagon official overseeing military commissions, Convening Authority Harvey Rishikof, proposed the new site before he was fired in February for undisclosed reasons. Since then, prosecutors have released one reason why three civilian defense attorneys quit the case against the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing: They discovered a microphone in their legal meeting space for ostensibly confidential attorney-client consultations.
The Pentagon prosecutor said the microphone was a leftover from earlier interrogations at Guantanamo and was never turned on.
Separately, on Monday, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis submitted a filing under seal in the 9/11 terrorism case explaining his reasons for firing Rishikof, whose legal adviser Gary Brown was also dismissed. Lawyers who saw it said that because it was sealed, they could not describe its contents. Nor could they say what the Department of Defense general counsel, William Castle, wrote in his filing explaining why Brown was fired.
Requirements for the new site include three wheelchair-accessible restrooms _ one for the captives, and the other two "public restrooms" for men and women. An Iraqi captive awaiting a war crimes trial has been using a walker and wheelchair as he recovers from a series of back surgeries. In addition, an attorney responsible for handling plea-deal cases uses a wheelchair.
The meeting rooms are to have no light switches, the specifications say, and are to include a conduit for a closed-circuit TV camera with lights and camera to be managed by a control room complete with "CCTV monitoring and communications equipment."
In a nod to the hurricane season that has disrupted both hearings and meetings at the remote base, the specifications said Hunter Saak must "provide necessary tie-down to resist destructive weather events."
