Osama remains No.1 threat

WASHINGTON - PRESIDENT-ELECT Barack Obama said on Wednesday that Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden remain the 'number one threat' to US security, after the elusive militant leader warned of new fronts in his war on the West.

In his first audio commentary in eight months, bin Laden called on all Muslims to take revenge against Israel for its deadly offensive in Gaza, charging the onslaught had been timed to take advantage of the dying days of George W. Bush's presidency.

'Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda are our number one threat when it comes to American security,' Mr Obama told reporters after the emergence of the 22-minute audio recording entitled 'A Call for Jihad to Stop Aggression Against Gaza.'

'We're going to do everything in our power to make sure that they cannot create safe havens that can attack Americans. That's the bottom line,' added Mr Obama.

The US-based Site Intelligence Group said it believed the recording, in which bin Laden crows at the legacy that Mr Bush is leaving Mr Obama, was authentic.

The White House declined to immediately authenticate the statement as being from the man who carries a US$25-million (S$37 million) bounty on his head.

But spokesman Gordon Johndroe said: 'It appears this tape demonstrates his isolation and continued attempts to remain relevant at a time when Al-Qaeda's ideology, mission, and agenda are being questioned and challenged throughout the world.'

The audio tape came as Bush, whose presidency was dominated by the September 11, 2001 attacks launched by bin Laden's militants, prepares to hand power to Mr Obama on Tuesday.

'Indicators suggest ... that 75 per cent of the American people are pleased with the departure of the president who bogged them down in wars that they have nothing to do with,' Bin Laden said in the recording.

'He drowned them in economic turmoil that reached their ears. He passed a heavy legacy to his successor.'

Bin Laden, who would appear to have outlasted the presidency of his arch-foe Mr Bush, said Mr Obama was already facing difficult choices amid two losing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

'It is most difficult for a man to inherit the legacy of a long guerrilla warfare with a patient and stubborn adversary, a war which is financed by usurious loans.

'If he withdraws from the war, it is military defeat. And if he continues it, he drowns in economic crisis,' said bin Laden, who US officials believe has found refuge in Pakistan's anarchic tribal areas on the Afghan border.

'How can it be that he passed over to him two wars, not one war, and he is unable to continue them. We are on our path to open other fronts, with God's blessing.'

Bin Laden listed Palestine, the Pakistani province of Waziristan, North Africa and Somalia as among the new battlefields where his fighters would take on the West.

The Al-Qaeda leader also slammed Arab governments for their inaction in the face of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, and said Israel launched the offensive fearing the power of its US ally would swiftly wane.

'You know that the first loser from the waning of American injustice is the Zionist entity, which thereby loses one of the most important pillars of its survival and arteries of its life,' he said.

'This horrible and rapid waning of American power is one of the important motives for the Israelis in this cruel attack on Gaza, in a desperate attempt to benefit from the final days of the two terms of President Bush and the neoconservatives.'

He said there was no remedy to be secured from the UN Security Council for the people of Gaza and called on Muslims worldwide to launch a global jihad or holy war.

'The duty is to incite to individual jihad and to recruit youth into the brigades for jihad in the cause of Allah against the Zionist-Crusader (Israeli-Western) alliance and its agents in the region.'

Mr Obama, arguing that Mr Bush fatally distracted the United States from the real front of the 'war on terror,' plans towind down the war in Iraq and shift military resources to Afghanistan and get tough with Pakistan's government.

He commented on the Bin Laden tape after a meeting with his vice president-elect Joseph Biden and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who are just back from a trip that took in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. -- AFP