A day after retreating on five cases, the Pentagon prosecutor on Wednesday announced new war crimes charges against two Kuwaiti men at Guantánamo -- one a U.S.-educated aeronautical engineer who described Osama bin Laden as an eccentric millionaire turned revolutionary.

That man, Fouad Rabia, 49, faces charges alleging he ran a supply depot at Tora Bora at the time of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, an accusation he has long denied.

The other, Fayiz Kandari, 33, claims he went as a student to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, to volunteer as a charity worker. His charge sheet alleges he trained with al Qaeda and subsequently ''served as an advisor to Osama bin Laden'' and produced al Qaeda tapes that recruited men to jihad.

Both men were charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terror in charge sheets made public by the Pentagon on Wednesday. Conviction at a military commission is punishable by a maximum of life in prison.

The men are the first detainees accused of war crimes from Kuwait, the tiny oil-rich emirate that the U.S. helped liberate in 1991 after Iraqi forces invaded and annexed it. Both said they traveled to Afghanistan in solidarity with fellow Muslims.

The charges brought to 20 the number of Guantánamo detainees for whom the chief prosecutor, Army Col. Lawrence Morris, is currently seeking to bring to trial in southeast Cuba, where the Pentagon holds about 255 detainees in prison camps.

On Tuesday, the supervisor dismissed charges against five others, prompting calls from civil liberties lawyers to abandon the war court formula that was developed after the Sept. 11 attacks and approved by Congress in 2006.

Wednesday, Tanzanian Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, accused of abetting the 1999 East African embassy bombings, was brought before a military judge for the first time to be arraigned on noncapital war crimes charges.

Ghailani entered no plea and asked for additional defense counsel, said Air Force Capt. Paula Bissonette, from ''Camp Justice,'' where the war court is built in temporary structures on an abandoned airfield.

Both Kuwaitis denied the allegations against them at military hearings in 2005 that determined whether they could be held at Guantánamo as enemy combatants.

Kandari mocked U.S. allegations that he rose from al Qaeda training camp volunteer to bin Laden advisor in three months.

''I ask, are these accusations against Fayiz or against Superman?'' he told the military panel. ``It seems to me that whoever wrote these allegations . . . must have been drunk when he wrote it.''

Rabia acknowledged that he had been at luncheon with bin Laden in Kandahar before the Sept. 11 attacks, on his first-ever visit to Afghanistan. But he said he was curious, not a combatant.

''To us in Kuwait,'' he told the U.S. officers, ``bin Laden was an eccentric millionaire who became a revolutionary.''

He denied he had the influence or access to function as a logistician between al Qaeda and the Taliban in the complex defenses of the Tora Bora mountains.

''All of a sudden I am a trusted person by the people of that land and the people who hide in the mountains and the people who made the man-made caves and all of this? Now they trust me for logistics?'' he said.

A self-described U.S.-educated engineer, Rabia told U.S. troops he arrived at Guantánamo in his mid-40s, has four children and worked 24 years at Kuwaiti airlines.

U.S. attorney Matthew J. MacLean said the Kuwaiti men would contest the charges against them.

''All the evidence is that they were in Afghanistan performing charity work,'' he said, adding that the two men had the longest-running Guantánamo unlawful detention lawsuits pending in the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C.

In January, President Bush said during a visit to the emirate that two Guantánamo detainees would be charged with war crimes.

Still MacLean said that because of recent setbacks at the commissions ''this came as quite a surprise,'' adding that the men's attorneys had not yet received copies of the charges on Wednesday night.

MacLean said he visited the two men at the prison camps in Cuba last week and found them ''not mentally in good shape. They have last all faith in the American legal system,'' after seven-plus years in U.S. detention.

''They have no faith in the justice system, and with respect to the military commissions, they're right.'' MacLean noted that, under Bush administration detention policy, Guantánamo captives acquitted of war crimes by a military jury can still be imprisoned indefinitely as enemy combatants.

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