Hilary Benn has deliberately provoked a controversy by distancing himself from the phrase “War on Terror” in the very city where thousands were killed on September 11 by al-Qaeda terrorists.

The expression is still used daily by the Bush Administration, which even has a section devoted to the “Global War on Terror” on the White House website.

Elsewhere the term has fallen from use in the aftermath of the debacle in Iraq and the general disenchantment with the course of the conflict against militant Islam over the past six years.

Late last year the Foreign and Commonwealth Office announced that it was no longer using the phrase because it was seen as counter-productive.

As Mr Benn explains in New York today the conflict cannot be won by military means alone. The intelligence services in Britain have banned the term, fearing that it can be exploited as a recruiting agent and propaganda tool for militant Islamic groups seeking to portray the current conflict as an all out war between two civilisations.

Tony Blair and Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, have not used the expression for months. The only minister to refer to the phrase was Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in an article late last year in The Sun.

While Mr Benn risks upsetting some of his hosts, there is evidence that a growing number of Americans share his opinions.

A Gallup poll taken in America in October 2001 identified terrorism as their top priority. Three years later it had fallen to 19 per cent and today it is just five per cent.

Some Democrats in Congress have attempted to ban the phrase from documents and even Donald Rumsfeld, the former US Defence Secretary and architect of the “War on Terror”, has since his departure from the Pentagon regretted using of the term.

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