GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- President Barack Obama may want to close these prison camps, but the CIA director said Wednesday that, if U.S. forces catch Osama bin Laden or his deputy, they would likely airlift them here from Afghanistan.

“We would probably move them quickly into military jurisdiction at Bagram for questioning and then eventually move them probably to Guantánamo,” Leon Panetta told the Senate Intelligence Committee.

There was no hint that a capture was imminent. But here at the war court, where bin Laden’s legacy is omnipresent, the Pentagon is closing the file on its latest terror prosecution with the conviction of a Sudanese man who was a weapons trainer at an al Qaeda pipeline camp in Afghanistan.

"Terrorists are not born. They are made,” Navy Lt. Cmdr. Arthur Gaston told a jury of nine U.S. military officers Wednesday. “And the accused in this case, Noor Mohammed, has made hundreds of them."

Noor, in his mid 40s, pleaded guilty Tuesday to supporting terror and conspiracy in a secret plea bargain that military sources said could see him free by 2014. He confessed to being an instructor and sometimes operation manager at the Khaldan terror training camp whose alumni include 9/11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaui and a 1998 East Africa embassies bomber.

Now the jury decides a sentence for his crimes — up to life in prison — which he would only serve if he breaches his agreement with the U.S. government to cooperate in future prosecutions. To help them deliberate, Gaston said, the Pentagon will screen a portion of an Arabic-language video made by alleged arch-terrorist Zayn al Abdeen Mohamed Hussein, known as Abu Zubaydah.

A CIA-Pakistani raid captured Abu Zubaydah on March 28, 2002 and rounded up dozens of other Arabs, including Noor, in a Faisalabad safe house that Gaston described as a terror plot hothouse.

Noor’s volunteer no-charge defense lawyer, Howard Cabot of Phoenix, painted the Sudanese captive as “little more than a low-level functionary – cooking, running errands, teaching others how to use small arms.”

The lawyer called his client a nomadic orphan who left his homeland in 1994 “in search of a better life,” ended up at Khaldan where “he learned rudimentary religious and small-arms training” – then passed the skill-set on to others.

“He never joined al Qaeda. He never joined the Taliban. And he never planned or carried out an attack against the United States and you will not hear any evidence to the contrary.”

Lawyers spent much of the day Wednesday choosing the Noor jury, a military commission, from a pool of 15 senior U.S. officers flown in from across the globe to sit in judgment at the maximum-security courthouse the Bush administration built for the death penalty mass murder trial of five alleged Sept. 11, 2001 plotters, all still here.

Obama stopped that military commission soon after taking office, declared Guantánamo’s framework “quite literally a mess,” and ordered a task force to close the camps through releases, transfers and criminal or military trials. Attorney General Eric Holder proposed to hold the 9/11 trial in Manhattan, not far from the site of the World Trade Center. Congress rebelled against that plan, imposed harsh restrictions on prisoner releases and blocked funding for trials on U.S. soil.

Still White House Jay Carney said after Panetta's remarks to Congress that Obama "remains committed to closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, because, as our military commanders have made clear, it's a national security priority to do so."

As for bin Laden, he said: "I'm not going speculate about what would happen if we were to capture Osama bin Laden. I can tell you that this government is very focused on bringing to justice the perpetrator of the attacks on 9/11."

This week it held 172 captives. With Noor’s confession and guilty plea, he becomes the fourth convicted war criminal among them.