Bin Laden noticeably MIA from Bush's vocabulary USA Today
April 12, 2002
By Judy Keen, USA TodayThere are six syllables President Bush really doesn't want to say aloud: Osama bin Laden.
In the first weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the al-Qaeda leader was on Bush's mind and prominent in his public remarks. Bush said he wanted him found "dead or alive" and rarely missed an opportunity to refer to bin Laden as "the evil one."
But it has been six months since the president launched the war on terrorism, bin Laden has not been caught, and Bush and his advisers have decided that making bin Laden the personification of the enemy is not a good idea. Mentioning him only serves as a reminder that U.S. forces in Afghanistan have failed to fulfill what was once a key objective of the war.
The president's reluctance to speak the name was obvious in a speech on community service in Bridgeport, Conn., on Tuesday. Bush stammered, hesistated, then stopped himself.
"There's no cave deep enough for the long arm of American justice," Bush said in a section of the speech that focused on the war in Afghanistan. U.S. forces believe that if bin Laden is still in Afghanistan, he's hiding in a cave. "There is no calendar on my desk that says, 'If we don't get if so-and-so doesn't show up, then this thing ends,' " Bush said. "That's just not the way I think."
When Bush marked the six-month anniversary of the attacks on March 11, he made no direct reference to bin Laden. He noted that some al-Qaeda leaders were dead and others had been captured and added, "Others are still on the run, hoping to strike again."
Bush left bin Laden out of his State of the Union address Jan. 29, even though it included plenty of references to the war.
Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer says the fact that bin Laden is unaccounted for is not a factor in Bush's choice of words. "The president believes that the war on terrorism is bigger than any one person that even if Osama bin Laden would be captured today, the war would continue tomorrow," Fleischer says.
Fleischer, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell don't volunteer updates on bin Laden's whereabouts when they brief reporters. But they do answer reporters' questions on the subject, usually dismissing bin Laden's fate as not particularly relevant to the war.
In a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll of 802 adults, 47% said the U.S. mission in Afghanistan would be a success even if bin Laden was not captured; 48% said it would not be.
In the poll, 55% considered it very likely or somewhat likely that bin Laden would be caught. The March 8-9 poll had a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points.