President Barack Obama's administration denied Wednesday dropping the punchy but controversial phrase "global war on terror" for the less snappy formulation "overseas contingency operation."
There is no administration-wide edict from the White House Office of Management and Budget mandating the name change, as claimed in a Washington Post report, officials said.
"I sometimes am amused by things that I read in the press. I am not aware of any communication that I've had on that topic," OMB director Peter Orszag told reporters.
According to the newspaper, the OMB had directed the Pentagon to drop the name coined by president George W. Bush for his battle against extremism after the September 11 attacks of 2001.
For critics, the phrase "global war on terror" was emblematic of an approach that was dangerously broad-brushed and which risked alienating the Islamic world.
Its formal omission would be consistent with the Obama administration's reversal of key Bush policies, including ending the war in Iraq and shutting down the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
The Post said the new name favored by the OMB was the less evocative but more neutral "overseas contingency operation" -- a phrase that has indeed featured in recent congressional testimony by top officials.
OMB spokesman Ken Baer said there was no official edict, only a "communication by a mid-level career civil servant" to the Pentagon giving the bureaucrat's preference to drop the war on terror tag.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said he had "never received such a directive" and said "perhaps somebody within OMB may have been a little over-exuberant."
"I'm the one who speaks publicly about these matters, and I have never been told which words to use or not to use. So I don't think there's anything to the story," he said.
"Overseas contingency operation" was in fact a budgetary term to describe the Obama administration's funding priorities, Morrell said.
