GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Osama bin Laden's media secretary joined military jurors Wednesday to watch his handiwork -- a crude two-hour recruiting video that spliced gory Muslim suffering with calls to holy war, offered to prove that the filmmaker committed war crimes.

The accused, Ali Hamza al Bahlul, about 40, was gripped by the screening in the third day of his military commission trial. Pentagon prosecutors cast the video as a key al Qaeda tool of incitement created after the 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole.

The slight Yemeni in a tan prison camp uniform sometimes smiled and nodded during the graphic film, The Destruction of the American Destroyer USS Cole.

The Pentagon alleges that Bahlul committed three war crimes during his two-year tenure at al Qaeda's public relations shop: conspiracy, solicitation to murder and providing material support for terror. Conviction is punishable by life in prison.

RECRUITMENT MESSAGE

Former FBI agent Ali Soufan said Bahlul boasted during a 2002 interrogation that he had produced the film. Soufan summed up its message as this: ``Go to Afghanistan. Join al Qaeda. Join martyrdom operations. Hate life. Love death.''

Bahlul was captured in Afghanistan during the 2001 U.S. invasion and was among the first captives taken to Guantánamo.

No evidence has been offered that he fired a shot or knew intimate details in advance of al Qaeda suicide attacks. Bahlul has forbidden his Pentagon-appointed attorney to offer an argument, or question witnesses, under a self-styled boycott.

In interrogations, agents testified, the Yemeni described himself as bin Laden's public affairs officer. He said he taped the boss, prepared talking points for his press interviews -- and helped two of the 9/11 hijackers write their martyr's wills.

Prosecutors argue that Bahlul's propaganda both recruited al Qaeda volunteers via the Internet and instilled in viewers a passion for martyrdom.

MADE IN AFGHANISTAN

Bahlul told his interrogators that he created the video on a laptop computer while the al Qaeda inner circle was on the run inside Afghanistan after the Oct. 12, 2000, bombing of the USS Cole.

Two suicide bombers in an explosives-laden boat came alongside the $1 billion warship in Aden, Yemen, and detonated their load. Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed.

The video took stock news footage of the aftermath of the attack, and spliced in special effects with Koranic verse and hate speeches against the Americans, infidels and Jews.

It offers a historical sweep of what bin Laden cast as Muslim humiliation: Saudi King Fahd accepting a medal that looks like a crusader's cross from the Queen of England, President Bill Clinton at Arab-Israeli peace talks, images of women and children killed by bullets and airstrikes from Iraq to Gaza and from Chechnya to Kashmir.

The eight-man, one-woman jury of senior U.S. military officers mostly watched expressionless. Once, when the video showed a cartoonish special-effects explosion of the warship, a Navy captain who is a member of the panel snapped his head toward the accused and stared.

Said Special Agent Robert McFadden of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, who interrogated Bahlul: ``He was quite proud of it. He said he made it himself at the tasking of bin Laden.''

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