GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- In a mixed verdict, a U.S. military jury on Wednesday convicted Osama bin Laden's driver of providing material support for terror but found him not guilty of a more serious charge of conspiring with al Qaeda in a string of worldwide terror attacks.

Salim Hamdan, 37, stood and listened with head bowed to anArabic translation as he became the first man convicted at trial in the first U.S. war crimes tribunal since World War II.

He said nothing but wiped his eyes with his head scarf.

Six senior military officers, led by a Navy captain, deliberated for a little more than eight hours across three days to announce the verdict at 10:16 a.m.

The evidence phase of the trial lasted two weeks and took testimony from 22 witnesses -- two in secret, two on paper and two with their names never revealed publicly.

Next, the same jury will hear evidence and arguments to decide whether to give Hamdan the maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Arguments were slated to begin at 2 p.m. Wednesday before the captain, two colonels and three lieutenant colonels on the jury.

The trial judge, Capt. Keith Allred, told spectators he did not expect a sentencing decision by day's end.

The conviction caps a four-year effort by attorneys for Hamdan to have him face traditional U.S. civilian or military courts and avoid the war crimes trials ordered by President Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

In convicting on five of eight counts of material support for terror, the jury appeared to reject Hamdan's argument that he was a mere driver, a $200-a-month civilian employee of a Saudi millionaire who happened to be Osama bin Laden.

Prosecutors called him a bodyguard, a key member of al Qaeda's security detail whose job was to floor the accelerator and escape should enemies attack bin Laden's motorcade.

In finding Hamdan not guilty of two counts of conspiracy, the jury did not entirely accept the Pentagon's theory that the father of two with a fourth-grade education was a key cog responsible for al Qaeda mayhem culminating with the 9/11 terror attacks.

Prosecutors argued that -- even if he did not know in advance -- Hamdan affirmatively chose not to walk away from bin Laden after the terror attacks on two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000 and on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.

Prosecutors cast Hamdan as an al Qaeda insider who arrived in Afghanistan in 1996 and developed intimate access and knowledge of the al Qaeda infrastructure -- from the media organization to the training camps to the compounds and farms that belonged to bin Laden.

Prosecutor John Murphy called him an ``al Qaeda warrior.''

The White House declared the driver ''received a fair trial'' in a statement. ''We look forward to other cases moving forward to trial,'' said the statement, signed by Tony Fratto, deputy White House spokesman.

The nation's top defense lawyers' group decried the verdict, and the military commissions process. ''It convicted a truck driver of being guilty of driving a truck,'' said John Wesley Hall, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

The jury cleared the driver of terror support charges that alleged Hamdan he committed a war crime by having two surface-to-air missiles in his car when U.S. allies captured him in southern Afghanistan in November 2001.

According to the military judge's instructions, the jury would have had to conclude that the SA-7s were meant to attack civilians, wounded or captured combatants or troops performing religious or medical functions.

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