The fugitive Al-Qaeda leader said that his group would kill any Americans it captured if the United States executed Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the September 11 attacks in 2001.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, flying with President Barack Obama to Iowa on Air Force One, did not directly respond to the comments said to be from bin Laden in a tape aired by Al-Jazeera television.
But he said: "The president has rightly increased our tempo and put pressure on the Al-Qaeda network."
"We see that Al-Qaeda has nothing to spread but hate and that?s why the administration will keep up the pressure to destroy the Al-Qaeda network."
In the tape, bin Laden purportedly said that the "White House has declared its wish to execute (Sheikh Mohammed and his co-accused).
"The day the United States takes such a decision, it would be also taking the decision that any of youfalling into our hands will be executed," bin Laden said in the audio message.
The Al-Qaeda chief said Obama was "still walking in the footsteps" of his predecessor, George W.
Bush, by escalating the war in Afghanistan.
The Kuwaiti-born Sheikh Mohammed is being held in Guantanamo Bay and was subjected to repeated water-boarding, a now banned interrogation technique that simulates drowning, after his 2003 arrest in Pakistan.
The United States is just weeks away from a landmark decision on whether to try Sheikh Mohammed and his four alleged co-conspirators in a civilian federal court or in a military tribunal.
David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
Creative Writer
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