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WASHINGTON: Osama bin Laden has told Americans to rethink their policies, in a new message in which he links their support for Israel to the September 11 attacks in 2001, a US-based monitoring group said.
Titled "Message to the American People," the video -- released on Sunday by the As-Sahab media production branch of Al-Qaeda -- features a still image of Osama and an audio statement, said IntelCenter, based outside Washington.
It came two two days after the United States marked the eighth anniversary of the attacks by Osama's Al-Qaeda network in which hijacked airliners were flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people.
Osama said that among "some other injustices," US support to Israel motivated Al-Qaeda to launch the September 11 attacks, IntelCenter reported.
He also stated that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were driven by the pro-Israeli lobby in the White House and corporate interests, and not by Islamic militants.
"If you think about your situation well, you will know that the White House is occupied by pressure groups," he said, according to IntelCenter.
"Rather than fighting to liberate Iraq -- as Bush claimed -- it (the White House) should have been liberated."
He was referring to former US president George W. Bush, who ordered the March 2003 invasion of Iraq that overthrew Saddam Hussein's regime.
If Americans want to end their confrontation with Al-Qaeda, Osama continued, they must reconsider their attitude toward the Jewish state.
"Put the file of your alliance with Israelis on the discussion table," he stated, according to IntelCenter's translation of the address.
"Ask yourselves to determine your position: is your security, your blood, your children, your money, your jobs, your homes, your economy, and your reputation dearer to you than the security of the Israelis, their children and their economy?
"If you choose your security and cessation of war, and this is what the polls have shown, this requires you to work to punish those on your side who play with our security," Osama said.
"We are ready to respond to this choice on aforementioned sound and just bases."
According to Osama, current US President Barack Obama is powerless and unwilling to change the course of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Obama's retention of US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other individuals from the Bush administration is confirmation of the president's weakness, the Al-Qaeda chief said.
"It will become clear to you in days that all you have changed in the White House are faces," he is quoted by IntelCenter as saying.
"The bitter truth is that the neo-conservatives continue to cast their heavy shadows upon you."
Osama urged Americans to pressure White House leaders to cease the wars and US support to Israel, rather than succumb to what he called "the ideological terrorism" exercised by neo-conservatives.
"The bitter truth is that the neo-conservatives continue to cast their heavy shadows upon you," he insisted.
If the wars are not ended, "all we will do is to continue the war of attrition against you on all possible axes, like we exhausted the Soviet Union for 10 years until it collapsed with grace from Allah the Almighty and became a memory of the past," Osama said.
IntelCenter said Osama typically releases such a statement annually around September or October.
The last audiotape by the Al-Qaeda leader was released on June 3. In that missive he scorned Obama's overture to the Islamic world and warned of decades of conflict ahead.
That audiotape aired on the Al-Jazeera satellite news channel less than an hour after Obama landed in Saudi Arabia, Osama's home country, at the start of a Middle East tour.
Osama has a 50-million-US-dollar bounty on his head and has been in hiding for the past eight years.
Intelligence officials, US military analysts and other experts have long believed he is hiding in either Pakistan or Afghanistan near the remote mountainous border between the two countries.
In March, an audio attributed to Osama accused some Arab leaders of being "complicit" with Israel and the West against Muslims and urged holy war to liberate the Palestinian territories.
The same month, he urged the overthrow of the Somali president.
- AFP/yb/ir
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