WASHINGTON - The White House vowed Tuesday the United States would capture elusive Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden as it marked the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
US President George W. Bush has pledged "he'd like to find him. He said all along: we are going to find him," spokesman Tony Snow said, just hours after a new video of bin Laden praising one of the 9/11 hijackers was released.
But Snow added: "The fact is that the war against terror is not a war against one guy, Osama bin Laden. It is against a network that uses all sorts of ways of trying to recruit new terrorists."
Bin Laden called on Muslim youths to join a "caravan" of martyrs, in the second Al-Qaeda video in just five days featuring the West's most wanted man, who had not been seen for almost three years.
Despite a massive manhunt and a 25-million dollar bounty on his head, bin Laden has evaded capture and has regularly taunted the United States and its allies through warnings issued on video and audio cassettes.
"Bin Laden is somebody who is the symgbolic leader of Al-Qaeda. Certainly the capture of bin Laden would be of enormous symbolic importance," Snow said.
In Tuesday's video, bin Laden praised as a "champion", Walid al-Shehri, one of the militants who flew two hijacked planes into the World Trade Center in New York.
A third plane punched a hole into the Pentagon building near Washington, while a fourth plane was brought down in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after a passenger uprising. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the attacks.
In the video, Shehri, one of the 19 hijackers involved in the attacks, was shown warning the United States: "We shall come at you from your front and back, your right and left.
"How could we desire anything other than your (Americans) killing, when our Lord has ordered us thus."
The video came as before the White House issued a statement defending the "war on terror" in a statement entitled: "We are fighting violent extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan and across the world so that we do not have to fight them on American soil."
"These extremists want to overthrow rising democracies, claim a strategic country as a haven for terror, destabilize the Middle East, and strike America and other free nations," the statement added.
Snow added: It is the responsibility of this government in protecting the American people to pursue terrorists wherever we find them."
lal-jkb/mac

09/11/2007 18:09 GMT