Osama bin Laden, purportedly speaking in a newly released audio tape, said the top al Qaeda leadership ordered the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner and vowed to continue attacks against America and its allies. The Wall Street Journal reports.

The claim of responsibility appears to trump an earlier statement by the Yemen-based branch of the terror group and suggests a high level of coordination and communication between the top leadership thought to be hiding along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and the group based in and operating from the impoverished Arab country.

Intelligence officials and al Qaeda experts have debated how much control Mr. bin Laden has over the operations conducted by regional branches of the terror group due to what is presumed to be his remote and rugged existence while evading capture by U.S. forces since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against America.

The Yemeni branch, known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has raised its profile recently by broadening its attacks beyond Yemen. U.S. officials say Nigerian student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who has been indicted for the attempted airline bombing, told interrogators he received his explosives in Yemen. In August, the Yemeni group claimed it deployed a suicide bomber in a failed assassination attempt against the Saudi deputy interior minister, a nephew of King Abdullah al Saud.

Osama bin Laden’s son tears into the US Government about fighting a war they will never win. Times Online has more. 

Osama bin Laden is worth more to the United States alive than dead because his death could unleash “very,very nasty” attacks by militants, his son has claimed.

In an at times rambling interview with Rolling Stone magazine, which was conducted in part in a Damascus strip club, the terror leader’s fourth-eldest son, Omar Osama bin Laden, said that his father had already won the War on Terror because he had achieved his aim of humbling the US and would probably not feel the need to launch more big attacks.

However, he said that President Barack Obama’s decision to increase troop numbers in Afghanistan was a big mistake that would damage the US economy.

“It is like adding water to sand, as we say in the Arab world. It only makes the sand heavier,” Mr bin Laden told the magazine.

“If I was in his position the first thing I would do is make a truce. Then, for six months or one year, no fighting, no soldiers. Afghanistan can never be won. It has nothing to do with my father. It is the Afghan people.”.