GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- A military jury Monday convicted Osama bin Laden's media secretary of war crimes for creating an al Qaeda recruiting video that prosecutors argued incited suicide bombers.

Ali Hamza al Bahlul, about 40, of Yemen, did not react as the guilty verdict was announced. The Army prosecutor asked the jurors to return the maximum, life in prison. The jury was to deliberate Bahlul's sentence Monday afternoon.

He became only the second detainee among the 255 here ever convicted of war crimes before the special terror court President Bush ordered set up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

He will now join bin Laden's driver in a convict's corridor at the prison camps.

Unbowed by the verdict, a defiant Bahlul broke a self-imposed boycott on the proceedings just before lunch.

He launched into a 50-minute monologue that hailed bin Laden, berated the United States for the plight of the Palestinians and cast his conflict with the United States as part of a decades-long battle between the West and Islam.

''We have fought and we fight and will fight any government that governs America,'' he said, at one point waving a boat and an airplane, which he had fashioned from paper. ``You do not deserve to be the masters of the world, the leadership of the world. Today we are the only ones on Earth who stand against you.''

He then waved a poem he said he wrote -- called The Storm of the Airplanes -- dedicated it to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and vowed, ``The war continues. It will never stop until you become fair and go back to your country and pull your ships from the peninsula of Islam.''

There was no evidence across last week's four-day, no-contest trial that Bahlul, a father of four from Yemen's Red Sea region, ever fired a shot at Americans during his 1999-2001 tenure in Afghanistan.

But the Pentagon argued that Bahlul committed three war crimes by creating a two-hour video that spliced fiery bin Laden speeches with Muslim bloodshed and stock news footage of the aftermath of the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole.

The jury of nine senior U.S. military officers agreed.

They deliberated fewer than four hours Friday on the three separate charges -- conspiracy, providing material support for terror and solicitation to murder. The verdict was unsealed Monday morning.

In convicting Bahlul, the jury deleted a portion of the charge sheet that said the Yemeni armed himself with ''an explosive belt'' to protect bin Laden.

No one testified about that at the four-day trial, which called 14 witnesses -- including U.S. agents who interrogated Bahlul here, three former American jihadists who saw his video and FBI forensic experts.

At most, Bahlul can get life in prison.

Later, the Cole's commander, retired Navy Cmdr. Kirk S. Lippold, and the father of one of the slain sailors testified about the pain the video has caused.

''Our son and his 16 mates were minding their own business, refueling in a supposedly friendly harbor and weren't out to hurt anybody and were viciously attacked and murdered,'' said Gary Swenchonis Sr., his hands shaking and voice trembling after using a cane to take the war court's witness stand.

Two al Qaeda suicide bombers in a vessel packed with explosives came up alongside the warship while it was refueling in Aden harbor, waved, then detonated their load.

Swenchonis' son Gary Jr. of Rockport, Texas, was a 26-year-old petty officer and firefighter when he was killed in the attack.