Gore said "too many of our soldiers are paying the highest price for the strategic miscalculations, serious misjudgments and historic mistakes"

NEW YORK, Aug 8 (IslamOnline.net & news Agencies) - Former U.S. vice president Al Gore lashed out at the White House foreign and domestic policies, accusing President George Bush of orchestrating "a systematic effort to manipulate facts," reported a leading U.S. newspaper Friday, August 9.

Addressing a gathering at New York University Thursday, August 7, Gore said the "direction in which our nation is being led now is deeply troubling to me, not only in Iraq, but also here at home, on economic policy, social policy and environmental policy."

He said that Bush’s "mishandling of and selective use of the best evidence available on the threat posed by Iraq is pretty much the same as the way he intentionally distorted the best available evidence on climate change, and rejected the best available evidence on the threat posed to America's economy by his tax and budget proposals," reported Washington Post.

Gore added that Bush "seems to have been pursuing policies chosen well in advance of the facts that were designed to benefit friends and supporters, and has then used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny essential in our system of checks and balances."

He regretted that "normally, we Americans lay the facts on the table and talk through the choices before us and make a decision," but "that didn't really happen with this (Iraq) war."

The ex-vice president lamented "too many of our soldiers are paying the highest price for the strategic miscalculations, serious misjudgments and historic mistakes that have put them and our nation in harm's way."

He expressed conviction that "one of the reasons we did not have a better public debate before the Iraq war started is because so many of the impressions that the majority of the country had back then turned out to have been completely wrong."

Elaborating, Gore underlined that claims about ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s partial involvement in 9-11 attacks, links to Al-Qaeda and his possession of nuclear and biological weapons turned out to be "just dead wrong."

He also chided the administration over its argument that U.S. soldiers "would be welcomed with open arms by cheering Iraqis," citing mounting attacks against American forces and spiraling anti-American sentiments among Iraqis.

Gore ridiculed White House argument that once winning the war all world countries who opposed the Iraq invasion would "contribute lots of money and soldiers," judging this does not seem to be the case at present.

He accused Bush, as well, of posing a threat to American’s long-cherished democracy by ignoring "the mandates of basic honesty" in the pursuit of a "totalistic ideology."

The ex-vice president made it clear that the "very idea of self-government depends upon honest and open debate as the preferred method for pursuing the truth," charging that the Bush administration "routinely shows disrespect for that whole process."

Gore said he once thought Bush's advisers were responsible for "curious mismatch between myth and reality" in the administration's policies but has just reached the conclusion "that the real problem may be the president himself and that next year we ought to fire him and get a new one."

He criticized Congress and the news media for being "less vigilant and exacting" in holding the Bush administration accountable for its actions.

The former vice president exhorted Bush to "rein in [Attorney General] John Ashcroft and stop the gross abuses of civil rights" by the Justice Department.

Squelching rumors of an impending White House bid, Gore said: "I'm not going to join them (Democrat presidential hopefuls), but later in the political cycle I will endorse one of them."

Democrats point to the faltering U.S. economy, recent contretemps surrounding U.S. prewar intelligence on Iraq, rising numbers of U.S. troops killed there, and Bush's falling poll numbers as indicators that a prominent Democrat could mount a successful challenge against the U.S. president.