<p dir="ltr">I probably sound like a broken record but I'm guessing that redhat uses selinux to restrict the ports sshd can bind to.  </p>
<p dir="ltr">Looks like they do it in Fedora 14, so they might in RHEL.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://www.mattnworb.com/post/10163228081/setting-up-a-ssh-tunnel-to-forward-ports-using-fedora">http://www.mattnworb.com/post/10163228081/setting-up-a-ssh-tunnel-to-forward-ports-using-fedora</a></p>