Joy.

The Pentagon plans to build a military commissions compound at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, costing up to $125 million, a major undertaking meant to accommodate up to 1,200 people for the first U.S. war crimes trials since World War II, The Miami Herald learned Thursday.

If funded by Congress, the compound would be the largest single construction expenditure at Guantánamo since the Bush administration set up the offshore detention center in January 2002.

”The solicitation is unrestricted — so any number of entities might want to bid on this,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Thursday. “We want to start construction as soon as possible, so we can begin multiple trials as early as July of 2007.”

The proposal calls for a work, residential and security compound on an abandoned airfield that in the 1990s housed a tent camp for Cuban rafters. Years before, it was the site of a hangar for U.S. military blimps.

Start the bidding, Panopticon lovers! This gravy trains’s just getting started.