GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Last month, it was the alleged 9/11 mastermind who censored a Guantánamo war court sketch artist. Tuesday, U.S. Special Forces were the censors.

Early Tuesday morning, the Pentagon whisked media pool sketch artist Janet Hamlin from Andrews Air Force Base in Washington to Guantánamo, then across the bay to the hilltop courtroom, only to find herself ejected from the first day of testimony at the U.S. military commission of Osama bin Laden's driver.

She spent hours in an anteroom waiting -- while an Army soldier testified anonymously, with media watching, about the November 2001 capture of the driver in wartime Afghanistan.

''It made no sense whatsoever,'' said Hamlin, who wasn't trying to sketch the soldier. ``I'm only there to draw what I'm allowed to draw.''

And Tuesday it was Hamdan, the 37-year-old Yemeni on trial this week as an alleged al Qaeda conspirator in a historic first U.S. war crimes tribunal since World War II.

The media was clamoring for fresh sketches. Hamlin last drew him in June 2007.

Under court rules, the trial judge declared off-limits any sketches that fill in the features of the six-officer U.S. military jury as well as certain other witnesses covered by a war court ``protective order.''

Army Sgt. Major A's likeness was already prohibited.

But the prosecution's insistence that the artist be excluded meant Hamlin could only draw the driver from ''30-second glimpses'' through a double door that swung open as security personnel came and went from the tribunal chamber.

She was eventually allowed back in when former FBI Agent Ali Soufan testified about Hamdan, with the same rule as when the Special Forces soldier testified. His sketch was prohibited.

Hamlin has long experience with the vagaries of working at the war court.

On June 5, when the Pentagon arraigned Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the man known as KSM vetoed one of her sketches. Acting as his own attorney, he instructed her to trim his nose before releasing it. She did.

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