GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Two military judges gavel the war court into session Wednesday to hear a pair of Pentagon requests to postpone the al Qaeda foot soldier cases of two alleged war criminals from Sudan.

First up is Noor Uthman Mohammed, in his 40s, who allegedly worked as an AK-47 assault weapon instructor and sometimes logistician at the Khalden camp in Afghanistan in the 1990s.

Capt. Moira Modzelewski, a Navy judge, is presiding in the case. Mohammed was formally charged in January, and the Defense Department is seeking its third delay while the Obama administration decides whether to proceed with a military or civilian prosecution.

Later in the day, Lt. Col. Nancy Paul, an Air Force judge, will hear a Pentagon request to delay the case of Ibrahim al Qosi, a 49-year-old Sudanese man whom the Pentagon had at one time accused of being al Qaeda's payroll clerk. Those charges were dropped after the U.S. Supreme Court found Bush's earlier formula for a war court unconstitutional, and Qosi now faces material support for terror and conspiracy charges for allegedly serving as a bodyguard and driver for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, a member of an al Qaeda mortar crew and supply officer at a Bin Laden's ``Star of Jihad'' compound in Jalalabad.

Defense attorneys were arranging for a Sudanese lawyer, Ahmed el Mufti, to watch the proceedings from the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum by closed-circuit video feed, in Mufti's role as a foreign legal consultant on the case.

``These are foot soldiers, meaning they aided al Qaeda in training camps and provided material support generally,'' said Navy Capt. John F. Murphy, the Pentagon's chief war crimes prosecutor

Murphy is awaiting word from the Justice Department on whether his six current cases will go forward at a military commission or in a classic criminal federal court setting -- and he has been campaigning for weeks to keep the cases at the Pentagon's special war court, which was created by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks.

``No group of prosecutors knows these cases better,'' he said Tuesday, adding that his Pentagon team has identified 65 to 70 of the 221 detainees held here for years whom they'd like to charge with war crimes.

Qosi was among the first detainees at Guantánamo to accept U.S. military defense counsel, and among the earliest captives to allege sexual and religious humiliation here.

His first military lawyer sued the government in 2004, cataloging a list of abuses such as sleep deprivation through short shackling and blasts of mind-numbing music as well as, for the first time, accusing interrogators of wrapping him in an Israeli flag to break his will.

His petition has yet to be heard.

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