Either way, live testimony has been increasingly shifting from Guantánamo to the satellite chamber, a classified, eavesdropping-proof conference room that was retrofitted for $2.5 million to mirror the courtroom itself, minus a jury box and a judge’s bench. It has tables for five separate defense teams for the five prisoners charged as conspirators in the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001.
That trial has not started either; after years in pretrial hearings, plea negotiations are underway.
The annex is off limits to members of the public, who can watch from a conference center at the Pentagon, a room at the Fort Meade military base in Maryland or in person if they reach Guantánamo.
In May 2021, the chief prosecutor promised “an array of technological equipment allowing for near seamless integration of remote participation.” Legal teams would “virtually participate in all aspects of commissions proceedings,” he wrote in a pleading.
On the third day of the testimony of John Bruce Jessen, a psychologist who waterboarded prisoners for the C.I.A., virtual participation went like this:
People in the Guantánamo chamber watched on a screen while defense lawyers set up a 30-inch-tall plywood box before a camera in the remote courtroom. Dr. Jessen showed how he used it on the Cole case defendant. Mr. Nashiri’s role was played by one of his lawyers, Annie Morgan.
“Annie, you’re not being helpful,” Dr. Jessen said. “We’re going to give you time to think about this. Get in the box.”
Ms. Morgan sat on the floor, slid inside the box, ducked her head and wrapped her arms around her knees. Someone playing a guard shut the door.
The judge and observers at Guantánamo could watch in real time, on the screen displaying the crowded Virginia chamber, that demonstration and another showing how interrogators grabbed and slapped Mr. Nashiri in 2002.
