By Dr Nafeez Ahmed

Former assistant director of FBI’s counter-terrorism division Dale Watson; former Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf; current Pakistani President Asif Zardari; Afghan President Hamid Karzai; the late Benazir Bhutto; Israeli intelligence sources; Pakistani and Afghan sources, including Taliban leaders – all have reported Osama bin Laden to be “probably dead” since December 2001.

Several independent experts - including former US foreign intelligence officer Angelo M Codevilla and renowned bin Laden specialist Professor Bruce Lawrence - agree with this assessment, as reported by the Daily Mail last year. Says Codevilla: “All the evidence suggests Elvis Presley is more alive today than Osama bin Laden.”

Professor Lawrence, head of religious studies at Duke University in the US, argues: “The increasingly secular language in the video and audio tapes of Osama (his earliest ones are littered with references to God and the Prophet Mohammed) are inconsistent with his strict Islamic religion, Wahhabism.” The Mail reports that “on one video” – the famous post-9/11 ‘confession’ – “bin Laden wears golden rings on his fingers, an adornment banned among Wahhabi followers.”

We cannot know for sure whether bin Laden is dead or alive, although multiple credible sources from the region give strong reason to doubt that he is indeed alive. In any case, the audio and video recordings attributed to him are simply too fraught with unresolved anomalies to count as serious proof that he remains alive.

The latest bin Laden tape to emerge on Sunday 24th January arrived just over 48 hours before President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. Unlike the Bush administration, which frequently jumped to confirm the authenticity of previous bin Laden recordings, White House advisor David Axelrod stated that they could not “confirm the authenticity of the tape”.

Given that there is no way to independently confirm the source of the tape, it is difficult to draw any serious conclusions from it. The statements in the tape that have received most attention include the vague claim of responsibility for the attempted but failed Christmas Day crotch-bombing, as well as the focus on the Israel-Palestine conflict: “Our attacks against you will continue as long as US support for Israel continues ... It is not fair that Americans should live in peace as long as our brothers in Gaza live in the worst conditions.”

Taken at face value, this would indicate a desire to positively spin what was in fact a spectacular failure by insisting that future attacks are being planned, plus a desire to capitalise on the political grievances among Muslims about Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine. The issue is the continuing centrality of the Middle East conflict to terrorist recruiting strategies. Israel’s siege and subjugation of Gaza, more than ever, is acting as a ‘recruiting sergeant’ for terrorist networks, and whoever is behind the release of this tape knows it and wishes to make the most of it.

Unfortunately, neither the US nor the UK government appears to be taking this issue seriously. Judge Richard Goldstone’s UN Human Rights Council report on the Gaza conflict concluded that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. The UN News Centre summarises as follows:

“‘The mission finds that the conduct of the Israeli armed forces constitute grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of wilful killings and wilfully causing great suffering to protected persons and as such give rise to individual criminal responsibility,’ the report’s executive summary said. ‘It also finds that the direct targeting and arbitrary killing of Palestinian civilians is a violation of the right to life.’

“It went on to criticize the ‘deliberate and systematic policy on the part of the Israeli armed forces to target industrial sites and water installations,’ and the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields.”

Independent human rights groups like Human Rights Watch support the Goldstone Report’s findings and call for the establishment of independent investigations by Israel and Hamas into the allegations, but Britain has prevaricated. Ongoing US-UK attempts to defend Israel’s actions in Palestine fatally undermine their credibility in the region, and lend fuel to the efforts of terrorists to recruit. The new tape, whatever its origin, only confirms this further.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, and is an author and political scientist who has commented for the BBC, Channel 4, Sky News and various US television networks. He testified to the US Congress in 2005 and has also advised the UK Parliamentary Select Committee for Communities on its inquiry into the 'Prevent' anti-extremism programme.