By , ,
Published December 24, 2015
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs may have slipped in yesterday's daily briefing when he referred to "our war on terror" in response to a question about the current situation in Afghanistan.
This morning he was asked why he used the Bush-era term, since the Obama White House quickly abandoned it after the president took office. Mr. Gibbs simply responded, "We're focused on getting the strategy right."
The phrase -- coined by President Obama's predecessor after the September 11th attacks -- has not been used at all by the current White House, whose budget referred instead to funding for "Overseas Contingency Operations."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confirmed in March that the administration had stopped using "war on terror" but the president's own counterterrorism adviser John Brennan went beyond that early last month telling reporters, "...describing our efforts as a 'global war' only plays into the warped narrative that Al-Qaeda propagates."
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gibbs-refers-to-war-on-terror