Our anti-terrorism policy is now being informed by the same voice that spoke to Kevin Costner in “Field of Dreams”: If you build it, he will come. Only instead of building a baseball diamond (Cuba’s got plenty already) the Bush administration is building a facility to hold war crimes trials at Guantánamo Bay to the tune of $125 million.

The military said on Friday that it planned to build a $125 million compound at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba where it hopes to hold war-crimes trials for terrorism suspects by the middle of next year.

The compound, designed to accommodate as many as 1,200 people, would include dining areas, work spaces and sleeping accommodations for administrative personnel, lawyers, journalists and others involved in trials. It would create three courtrooms to allow for simultaneous trials, and a separate high-security area to house those on trial.

“We need to build more courtrooms, and we want to do multiple trials,” said Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler, a Pentagon spokesman.

If the Bush administration has imprisoned people that they believe are war criminals, put them on trial right now. A nine-figure luxury building should not stop you. Hell, fly them into the US and bring up in front of the Supreme Court — I hear they have a nice building in DC that’s underused. This project is an excuse, an expensive prophylactic for actually holding any trials now.

What a colossal waste of money. This building will go down as a physical manifestation of the failures of the Bush administration to make any progress morally, legally, or militarily in its war against Islamic extremists. Constructing a massive facility to try war crimes does not mean that we will have people to put on trial and it cannot justify the reprehensible way the American government has treated detainees in Bush’s war on terror.

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