Text of Al Gore's 5/25 speech before MoveOn.org

I don't like being lied to either and I hate that the intelligence was insufficient, bogus or whatever....but Saddam's deposing was long overdue and no one is to blame but himself.

We do have interest in the region, no doubt many political reasons to do it and we are not the only country who had zillions of dollars and interest at stake there.

In February of 2003, you put your enormous personal reputation on the line before the United Nations and said that you had solid sources for the case against Saddam Hussein. It now appears that an agent called Curveball had misled the CIA by suggesting that Saddam had trucks and trains that were delivering biological and chemical weapons. How concerned are you that some of the information you shared with the world is now inaccurate and discredited?

I'm very concerned. When I made that presentation in February 2003, it was based on the best information that the Central Intelligence Agency made available to me. We studied it carefully; we looked at the sourcing in the case of the mobile trucks and trains. There was multiple sourcing for that. Unfortunately, that multiple sourcing over time has turned out to be not accurate. And so I'm deeply disappointed.

But I'm also comfortable that at the time that I made the presentation, it reflected the collective judgment, the sound judgment of the intelligence community. But it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that, I am disappointed and I regret it.

I look at it as thousands saved by deposing Saddam, which gets downplayed by 'you guys'.

"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job,"

"The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home. They take it out on the nearest person they can't understand."

"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, "the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him,"

"Now, whether the detainees are put into the general intelligence holding area, where they rot for a few months until final release, or if they are placed in solitary confinement because their story seems unbelievable is completely in the hands of the interrogator's opinion," he said. "It is in solitary that the abuses can be committed. So, in theory it is in fact very possible that purely innocent Iraqis could be placed in an environment where they could be brutalised, abused, "softened up" or even killed."

At Abu Ghraib there were plenty of detainees talking or wanting to talk, but the leadership was focused on the "hard" targets of high-value,"

"This was mainly because the leadership was almost completely focused on getting the highest ranking Ba'ath party members still in hiding. And many of the interrogators were anxious to "go after" the difficult eggs. They wanted to be the one interrogator who broke the linking detainee and found such and such high value target. They weren't interested in going through the less glamorous work of sifting through the chaff to get to the kernels of truth from the willing detainees, they were interested in "breaking" the tough targets."

"All it takes is the signature of a low ranking NCO to send someone right around the world and have them locked up indefinitely but it takes the signature of the secretary of defence to let them go."