Rethink your ways, Osama tells Americans in new video

Osama bin Laden has told Americans to rethink their policies, in a new video 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 yesterday by the As-Sahab media production branch of Al-Qaeda -- features a still image of bin Laden 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 bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network in which hijacked airliners were flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people.

Bin Laden 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, bin Laden 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," Bin Laden said.

"We are ready to respond to this choice on aforementioned sound and just bases."

According to bin Laden, 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 leader 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."