Guantanamo commute is a real trial

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA — As more than 70 lawyers, paralegals, courtroom personnel and journalists waited to take off from Baltimore-Washington International Airport on a flight here this month, two crucial figures in the Office of Military Commissions crawled through rush-hour traffic looking for a U-Haul rental drop-off.

Army Sgt. 1st Class Domini McDonald had rented the van the previous night to ferry dozens of boxes of courtroom equipment from Andrews Air Force Base -- where the judicial airlift was initially supposed to take off -- to Baltimore-Washington, where it was moved after a 24-hour postponement.

Army Col. Wendy Kelly followed McDonald in her car, intending to drive them back to the airport once the U-haul was returned.

After stops at two outlets that no longer handled U-Hauls, Kelly called to tell the idling entourage to take off without them.

The main group arrived at Guantanamo 30 hours after assembling at Andrews. McDonald, the senior paralegal and construction liaison for the Expeditionary Legal Complex, and Kelly, the war crimes tribunal's director of operations, needed another 30 hours to catch up with the group. The two were diverted because of a landing-gear problem with the plane they boarded from an Army National Guard site in Virginia.

The aerial circus act involved in assembling the players for the war crimes tribunal proceedings has been troubled since the Pentagon first began shuttling them down here in 2004.

In December, people traveling to the U.S. Navy base in Cuba for the proceedings spent seven hours at Andrews waiting for a military plane, which was snowed in at Spokane, Wash. A replacement aircraft was found later that day, and not because the group's time was being wasted but because a plane was needed in Guantanamo to pick up a delegation of Victoria's Secret models visiting the troops. The models had been assured they would be back on the U.S. mainland that day.

"The problem with all these trips is that the commissions don't have their own budget for air travel. They have to depend on the services, and they are essentially the orphaned stepchild of the military," said Charles Swift, a retired Navy lawyer who is a visiting professor at Emory University's law school in Atlanta. He is assisting in the defense of Yemeni detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former driver.