2008 Woodie Awards
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"We were told by the president that war was his last choice," Gore said. "It is now clear from the newly available evidence that it was always his first."
Earlier this month, U.S. officials said they found no evidence that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein harbored unconventional weapons at the time of the March 2003 invasion.
Gore's speech - his last major policy address before the presidential election on Nov. 2 - focused on Bush's actions during the Iraq war. Gore, who temporarily withdrew from the public eye following the much-contested 2000 election, has criticized the war in Iraq for months.
On Monday, he accused the president of "a willful refusal to even consider alternative opinions or conflicting evidence, that poses the most serious danger to the country."
Gore also blamed Attorney General John Ashcroft for ignoring warnings of a possible attack on Sept. 11, 2001.
"That is an extremely serious error in judgment that constitutes a reckless disregard for the safety of the American people," he said.
Gore contrasted Bush's failure to consider warnings of terrorist activity to former President Bill Clinton's responses to the threats of attack during the year 2000 festivities and the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
Gore also decried the failure of the Bush administration to take action against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for his alleged complicity in the use of torture by American forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"The president never holds anyone accountable in his administration, no matter what they do," Gore said.
Gore also outlined many negative outcomes of the war in Iraq, including the more than 1,000 American soldiers who have died there. Poland and Italy, who both have military contingents in Iraq, announced this week that they will soon withdraw their troops, he noted.
"The war in Iraq has become a recruiting bonanza for terrorists who use it as their most damning indictment of U.S. policy," he said.
