DES MOINES, Oct 31: Democratic hopeful John Kerry on Saturday chided President George W. Bush for his failure to snare Osama bin Laden as his menacing new video jarred the US election endgame.

Kerry said he would do a far better job of hunting terrorists than Bush, though tried to insulate himself from the president's charges that he had made a "shameful" bid to reap political gain from Osama's threats.

"Let me make it clear to people all across the world: As Americans, we are all absolutely united, all of us. There are no Democrats, there are no Republicans," Kerry said in a rally in Wisconsin.

"As Americans, we are united in our determination to destroy, capture and kill Osama bin Laden and all of the terrorists."

The tape forced Kerry's camp to wrestle with whether to drop its consistent claim that Bush's mistakes had allowed Osama to escape, amid uncertainty over the tape's impact on Tuesday's knife-edge election.

But Kerry's new assault on Saturday signalled that he would not permit Bush to dominate the last hours of campaigning with an unanswered assault on his credentials as potential commander in chief.

"As I have said for two years now, when Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, it was wrong to outsource the job of capturing them to Afghan warlords who a week earlier were fighting against us," Kerry said.-AFP