Name	George W. Bush
Alt	A portrait shot of a smiling older male looking straight ahead. He has short gray hair, and is wearing a dark navy blazer with a blue styled tie over a white collared shirt. In the background is an American flag hanging from a flagpole.
Office	43rd President of the United States
Vicepresident	Dick Cheney
Term start	January 20, 2001
Term end	January 20, 2009
Predecessor	Bill Clinton
Successor	Barack Obama
Order2	46th Governor of Texas
Lieutenant2	Bob BullockRick Perry
Term start2	January 17, 1995
Term end2	December 21, 2000
Predecessor2	Ann Richards
Successor2	Rick Perry
Birth name	George Walker Bush
Birth date	July 06, 1946
Birth place	New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.
Party	Republican Party
Spouse	Laura Welch (1977–present)
Children	BarbaraJenna
Profession	Businessman (Oil, baseball)
Alma mater	Yale UniversityHarvard Business School
Religion	Episcopal (Before 1977)United Methodism (1977–present)
Signature	GeorgeWBush Signature.svg
Signature alt	Cursive signature in ink
Website	Bush Presidential LibraryBush Presidential CenterThe White House ''Archived''
Branch	Texas Air National GuardAlabama Air National Guard
Serviceyears	1968–1974
Rank	First Lieutenant
Unit	147th Reconnaissance Wing187th Fighter Wing }}

George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States from 2001 to 2009 and the 46th Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000.

Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the eldest son of Barbara Bush and 41st President George H. W. Bush, making him the second American president to have been the son of a former president. He is also the brother of Jeb Bush, former Governor of Florida.

After graduating from Yale University in 1968 and Harvard Business School in 1975, Bush worked in oil businesses. He married Laura Welch in 1977 and ran unsuccessfully for the House of Representatives shortly thereafter. He later co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team before defeating Ann Richards in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. In a close and controversial election, Bush was elected President in 2000 as the Republican candidate, defeating Vice President Al Gore in the Electoral College.

Early on, the Bush administration withdrew from a number of international treaty processes, notably the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. A series of terrorist attacks occurred eight months into Bush's first term as president on September 11, 2001. In response, Bush announced the War on Terror, an international military campaign which included the war in Afghanistan launched in 2001 and the war in Iraq launched in 2003. In addition to national security issues, Bush promoted policies on the economy, health care, education, and social security reform. He signed into law broad tax cuts, the PATRIOT Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, and Medicare prescription drug benefits for seniors. His tenure saw national debates on immigration, Social Security, electronic surveillance, and enhanced interrogation techniques.

Bush successfully ran for re-election against Democratic Senator John Kerry in 2004, in another relatively close election. After his re-election, Bush received increasingly heated criticism from across the political spectrum. In 2005, the Bush Administration dealt with widespread criticism over its handling of Hurricane Katrina. Following this and other controversies, as well as the growing unpopularity of the Iraq War, Democrats won control of Congress in the 2006 elections. In December 2007, the United States entered its longest post–World War II recession, prompting the Bush Administration to enact multiple economic programs intended to preserve the country's financial system. Though Bush was popular in the U.S. for much of his first term, his popularity declined sharply during his second. He was a highly controversial figure internationally, with public protests occurring even during visits to close allies, such as the United Kingdom.

After leaving office, Bush returned to Texas and purchased a home in a suburban area of Dallas. He is currently a public speaker and has written a book about his life entitled ''Decision Points''.

Childhood to mid-life

George Walker Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut at Grace-New Haven Hospital (now Yale – New Haven Hospital), on July 6, 1946, the first child of George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush (née Pierce). He was raised in Midland and Houston, Texas, with four siblings, Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Dorothy. Another younger sister, Robin, died from leukemia at the age of three in 1953. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. Senator from Connecticut. Bush's father, George H. W. Bush, was Vice President from 1981 to 1989 and President from 1989 to 1993. Bush is of primarily English descent and also more distant German, Dutch, Welsh, Irish, French, and Scottish ancestry.

Education

Bush attended public schools in Midland, Texas until the family moved to Houston after he completed seventh grade. He then went to The Kinkaid School, a prep school in Houston, for two years.

Bush finished high school at Phillips Academy, a boarding school (then all-male) in Andover, Massachusetts, where he played baseball and during his senior year was the head cheerleader. Bush attended Yale University from 1964 to 1968, graduating with an A.B. in history. During this time, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, being elected the fraternity's president during his senior year. Bush also became a member of the Skull and Bones society as a senior. Bush was a keen rugby union player, and was on Yale's 1st XV. He characterized himself as an average student.

Beginning in the fall of 1973, Bush attended the Harvard Business School, where he earned a Master of Business Administration. He is the only U.S. President to have earned an M.B.A.

Texas Air National Guard

In May 1968, Bush was commissioned into the Texas Air National Guard. After two years of active-duty service while training, he was assigned to Houston, flying Convair F-102s with the 147th Reconnaissance Wing out of Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base. Critics, including former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, have alleged that Bush was favorably treated due to his father's political standing, citing his selection as a pilot despite his low pilot aptitude test scores and his irregular attendance. In June 2005, the United States Department of Defense released all the records of Bush's Texas Air National Guard service, which remain in its official archives.

In late 1972 and early 1973, he drilled with the 187th Fighter Wing of the Alabama Air National Guard, having moved to Montgomery, Alabama to work on the unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign of Republican Winton M. Blount. In October 1973, Bush was discharged from the Texas Air National Guard and transferred to inactive duty in the Air Force Reserve. He was honorably discharged from the Air Force Reserve on November 21, 1974.

Marriage, family, and personal life

At a backyard barbecue in 1977, friends introduced him to Laura Welch, a school teacher and librarian. Bush proposed to her after a three-month courtship, and they married on November 5 of that year. The couple settled in Midland, Texas. Bush left his family's Episcopal Church to join his wife's United Methodist Church. In 1981, Laura Bush gave birth to fraternal twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara; they graduated from high school in 2000 and from the University of Texas at Austin and Yale University, respectively, in 2004.

Prior to his marriage, Bush had multiple episodes of alcohol abuse. In one instance, on September 4, 1976, he was arrested near his family's summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, for driving under the influence of alcohol. He pleaded guilty, was fined $150 and had his Maine driver's license suspended until 1978. Bush's alleged drug usage is less clear; when asked about alleged past illicit drug use, Bush has consistently refused to answer. He defended his refusal to answer in a publicized casual conversation with a friend, saying that he feared setting a bad example for the younger generation.

Bush says his wife has had a stabilizing effect on his life, and attributes to her influence his 1986 decision to give up alcohol. While Governor of Texas, Bush said of his wife, "I saw an elegant, beautiful woman who turned out not only to be elegant and beautiful, but very smart and willing to put up with my rough edges, and I must confess has smoothed them off over time."

Bush mostly reads "serious historical nonfiction" for pleasure. During his time as president, Bush read 14 Lincoln biographies and, during the last three years of his presidency, he reportedly read 186 books. A reporter recalls seeing "books by John Fowles, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Gore Vidal lying about, as well as biographies of Willa Cather and Queen Victoria" in his home when Bush was a Texas oilman. Other hobbies include cigar smoking and golf.

Early career

In 1978, Bush ran for the House of Representatives from Texas's 19th congressional district. His opponent, Kent Hance, portrayed him as out of touch with rural Texans; Bush lost by 6,000 votes (6%) of the 103,000 votes cast. He returned to the oil industry and began a series of small, independent oil exploration companies. He created Arbusto Energy, and later changed the name to Bush Exploration. In 1984, his company merged with the larger Spectrum 7, and Bush became chairman. The company was hurt by decreased oil prices, and it folded into HKN, Inc. Bush served on the board of directors for HKN. Questions of possible insider trading involving HKN arose, but the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) investigation concluded that the information Bush had at the time of his stock sale was not sufficient to constitute insider trading.

Bush moved his family to Washington, D.C. in 1988 to work on his father's campaign for the U.S. presidency. He served as a campaign adviser and liaison to the media; he assisted his father by campaigning across the country. Returning to Texas after the successful campaign, he purchased a share in the Texas Rangers baseball franchise in April 1989, where he served as managing general partner for five years. He actively led the team's projects and regularly attended its games, often choosing to sit in the open stands with fans. Bush's sale of his shares in the Rangers in 1998 brought him over $15 million from his initial $800,000 investment.

In December 1991, Bush was one of seven people named by his father to run his father's 1992 Presidential re-election campaign as "campaign advisor". The prior month, his father asked him to tell White House chief of staff John H. Sununu that he should resign.

Governor of Texas

As Bush's brother, Jeb, sought the governorship of Florida, Bush declared his candidacy for the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. His campaign focused on four themes: welfare reform, tort reform, crime reduction, and education improvement. Bush's campaign advisers were Karen Hughes, Joe Allbaugh, and Karl Rove.

After easily winning the Republican primary, Bush faced popular Democratic incumbent Governor Ann Richards. In the course of the campaign, Bush pledged to sign a bill allowing Texans to obtain permits to carry concealed weapons. Richards had vetoed the bill, but Bush signed it after he became governor. According to ''The Atlantic Monthly'', the race "featured a rumor that she was a lesbian, along with a rare instance of such a tactic's making it into the public record – when a regional chairman of the Bush campaign allowed himself, perhaps inadvertently, to be quoted criticizing Richards for 'appointing avowed homosexual activists' to state jobs". ''The Atlantic'', and others, connected the lesbian rumor to Karl Rove, but Rove denied being involved. Bush won the general election with 53.5% against Richards' 45.9%.

Bush used a budget surplus to push through Texas's largest tax-cut, $2 billion. He extended government funding for organizations providing education of the dangers of alcohol and drug use and abuse, and helping to reduce domestic violence. Critics contended that during his tenure, Texas ranked near the bottom in environmental evaluations, but supporters pointed to his efforts to raise the salaries of teachers and improved educational test scores.

In 1999, Bush also helped make Texas eventually the leading producer of wind powered electricity in the U.S. by signing a state law obliging electric retailers to buy a certain amount of energy from renewable sources (RPS).

In 1998, Bush won re-election with a record 69% of the vote. He became the first governor in Texas history to be elected to two consecutive four-year terms. For most of Texas history, governors served two-year terms; a constitutional amendment extended those terms to four years starting in 1975. In his second term, Bush promoted faith-based organizations and enjoyed high approval ratings. He proclaimed June 10, 2000 to be Jesus Day in Texas, a day on which he "urge[d] all Texans to answer the call to serve those in need".

Throughout Bush's first term, national attention focused on him as a potential future presidential candidate. Following his re-election, speculation soared. Within a year, he decided to seek the Republican nomination for the presidency.

Presidential campaigns

2000 Presidential candidacy

Primary

In June 1999, while Governor of Texas, Bush announced his candidacy for President of the United States. With no incumbent running, Bush entered a large field of candidates for the Republican Party presidential nomination consisting of John McCain, Alan Keyes, Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer, Orrin Hatch, Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle, Pat Buchanan, Lamar Alexander, John Kasich, and Robert C. Smith.

Bush portrayed himself as a compassionate conservative, implying he was more centrist than other Republicans. He campaigned on a platform that included increasing the size of the United States Armed Forces, cutting taxes, improving education, and aiding minorities. By early 2000, the race had centered on Bush and McCain.

Bush won the Iowa caucuses, but, although he was heavily favored to win the New Hampshire primary, he trailed McCain by 19% and lost that primary. Despite this, Bush regained momentum and, according to political observers, effectively became the front runner after the South Carolina primary, which according to ''The Boston Globe'' made history for his campaign's negativity; ''The New York Times'' described it as a smear campaign.

General election

On July 25, 2000, Bush surprised some observers by asking Dick Cheney, a former White House Chief of Staff, U.S. Representative, and Secretary of Defense, to be his running mate. Cheney was then serving as head of Bush's Vice-Presidential search committee. Soon after, Cheney was officially nominated by the Republican Party at the 2000 Republican National Convention.

Bush continued to campaign across the country and touted his record as Governor of Texas. Bush's campaign criticized his Democratic opponent, incumbent Vice President Al Gore, over gun control and taxation.

When the election returns came in on November 7, Bush won 29 states, including Florida. The closeness of the Florida outcome led to a recount. The initial recount also went to Bush, but the outcome was tied up in courts for a month until reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. On December 9, in a controversial ruling the ''Bush v. Gore'' case the Court reversed a Florida Supreme Court decision ordering a third count, and stopped an ordered statewide hand recount based on the argument that the use of different standards among Florida's counties violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The machine recount showed that Bush had won the Florida vote by a margin of 537 votes out of six million cast. Although he received 543,895 fewer individual votes than Gore nationwide, Bush won the election, receiving 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266.

2004 Presidential candidacy

In 2004, Bush commanded broad support in the Republican Party and did not encounter a primary challenge. He appointed Ken Mehlman as campaign manager, with a political strategy devised by Karl Rove. Bush and the Republican platform included a strong commitment to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, support for the USA PATRIOT Act, a renewed shift in policy for constitutional amendments banning abortion and same-sex marriage, reforming Social Security to create private investment accounts, creation of an ownership society, and opposing mandatory carbon emissions controls. Bush also called for the implementation of a guest worker program for immigrants, which was criticized by conservatives.

The Bush campaign advertised across the U.S. against Democratic candidates, including Bush's emerging opponent, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. Kerry and other Democrats attacked Bush on the Iraq War, and accused him of failing to stimulate the economy and job growth. The Bush campaign portrayed Kerry as a staunch liberal who would raise taxes and increase the size of government. The Bush campaign continuously criticized Kerry's seemingly contradictory statements on the war in Iraq, and argued that Kerry lacked the decisiveness and vision necessary for success in the War on Terror.

In the election, Bush carried 31 of 50 states, receiving a total of 286 electoral votes. He won an outright majority of the popular vote (50.7% to his opponent's 48.3%). The previous President to win an outright majority of the popular vote was Bush's father in the 1988 election. Additionally, it was the first time since Herbert Hoover's election in 1928 that a Republican president was elected alongside re-elected Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress. Bush's 2.5% margin of victory was the narrowest ever for a victorious incumbent President, breaking Woodrow Wilson's 3.1% margin of victory against Charles Evans Hughes in the election of 1916.

Presidency

Bush was sworn in as president on January 20, 2001. Though he originally outlined an ambitious domestic agenda, his priorities were significantly altered following the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Wars were waged in Afghanistan and later Iraq while significant debates regarding immigration, healthcare, Social Security, economic policy, and treatment of terrorist detainees took place within the United States. Over an eight year period, Bush's once-high approval ratings steadily declined throughout his Presidency while his disapproval numbers increased significantly over the same time frame. During 2007, the United States entered into the longest post World War II recession and the administration responded by enacting multiple economic programs.

Domestic policy

Economic policy

In a February 28, 2001, message to the Congress, Bush estimated that there would be a $5.6 trillion surplus over the next ten years. Facing opposition in Congress, Bush held town hall-style public meetings across the U.S. in 2001 to increase public support for his plan for a $1.35 trillion tax cut program—one of the largest tax cuts in U.S. history. Bush argued that unspent government funds should be returned to taxpayers, saying "the surplus is not the government’s money. The surplus is the people’s money." With reports of the threat of recession from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Bush argued that such a tax cut would stimulate the economy and create jobs. Others, including the Treasury Secretary at the time Paul O'Neill, were opposed to some of the tax cuts on the basis that they would contribute to budget deficits and undermine Social Security. O'Neill disputes the claim made in Bush's book "Decision Points" that he never openly disagreed with him on planned tax cuts. By 2003, the economy showed signs of improvement, though job growth remained stagnant. Another tax cut program was passed that year. Under the Bush Administration, real GDP grew at an average annual rate of 2.5%, considerably below the average for business cycles from 1949 to 2000. Bush entered office with the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 10,587, and the average peaked in October 2007 at over 14,000. When Bush left office, the average was at 7,949, one of the lowest levels of his presidency. Unemployment originally rose from 4.2% in January 2001 to 6.3% in June 2003, but subsequently dropped to 4.5% as of July 2007. Adjusted for inflation, median household income dropped by $1,175 between 2000 and 2007, while Professor Ken Homa of Georgetown University has noted that "after-tax median household income increased by 2%" The poverty rate increased from 11.3% in 2000 to 12.3% in 2006 after peaking at 12.7% in 2004. By October 2008, due to increases in domestic and foreign spending, the national debt had risen to $11.3 trillion, an increase of over 100% from the start of the year 2000 when the debt was $5.6 trillion. Most debt was accumulated as a result of what became known as the "Bush tax cuts" and increased national security spending. By the end of Bush's presidency, unemployment climbed to 7.2%. The perception of Bush's effect on the economy is significantly affected by partisanship. In December 2007, the United States entered the longest post–World War II recession, which included a housing market correction, a subprime mortgage crisis, soaring oil prices, and a declining dollar value. In February, 63,000 jobs were lost, a five-year record. To aid with the situation, Bush signed a $170 billion economic stimulus package which was intended to improve the economic situation by sending tax rebate checks to many Americans and providing tax breaks for struggling businesses. The Bush administration pushed for significantly increased regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2003, and after two years, the regulations passed the House but died in the Senate. Many Republican senators, as well as influential members of the Bush Administration, feared that the agency created by these regulations would merely be mimicking the private sector’s risky practices. In September 2008, the crisis became much more serious beginning with the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac followed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers and a federal bailout of American International Group for $85 billion.

Many economists and world governments determined that the situation became the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Additional regulation over the housing market would have been beneficial, according to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Bush, meanwhile, proposed a financial rescue plan to buy back a large portion of the U.S. mortgage market. Vince Reinhardt, a former Federal Reserve economist now at the American Enterprise Institute, said "it would have helped for the Bush administration to empower the folks at Treasury and the Federal Reserve and the comptroller of the currency and the FDIC to look at these issues more closely", and additionally, that it would have helped "for Congress to have held hearings".

In November 2008, over 500,000 jobs were lost, which marked the largest loss of jobs in the United States in 34 years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the last four months of 2008, 1.9 million jobs were lost. By the end of 2008, the U.S. had lost a total of 2.6 million jobs.

Education and health

Bush undertook a number of educational priorities, such as increasing the funding for the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health in his first years of office, and creating education programs to strengthen the grounding in science and mathematics for American high school students. Funding for the NIH was cut in 2006, the first such cut in 36 years, due to rising inflation.

One of the administration's early major initiatives was the No Child Left Behind Act, which aimed to measure and close the gap between rich and poor student performance, provide options to parents with students in low-performing schools, and target more federal funding to low-income schools. This landmark education initiative passed with broad bipartisan support, including that of Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. It was signed into law by Bush in early 2002. Many contend that the initiative has been successful, as cited by the fact that students in the U.S. have performed significantly better on state reading and math tests since Bush signed "No Child Left Behind" into law. Critics argue that it is underfunded and that NCLBA's focus on "high stakes testing" and quantitative outcomes is counterproductive.

After being re-elected, Bush signed into law a Medicare drug benefit program that, according to Jan Crawford Greenburg, resulted in "the greatest expansion in America's welfare state in forty years;" the bill's costs approached $7 trillion. In 2007, Bush opposed and vetoed State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) legislation, which was added by the Democrats onto a war funding bill and passed by Congress. The SCHIP legislation would have significantly expanded federally funded health care benefits and plans to children of some low-income families from about six million to ten million children. It was to be funded by an increase in the cigarette tax. Bush viewed the legislation as a move toward socialized health care, and asserted that the program could benefit families making as much as $83,000 per year who did not need the help.

Social services and Social Security

Following Republican efforts to pass the Medicare Act of 2003, Bush signed the bill, which included major changes to the Medicare program by providing beneficiaries with some assistance in paying for prescription drugs, while relying on private insurance for the delivery of benefits. The retired persons lobby group AARP worked with the Bush Administration on the program and gave their endorsement. Bush said the law, estimated to cost $400 billion over the first ten years, would give the elderly "better choices and more control over their health care".

Bush began his second term by outlining a major initiative to reform Social Security, which was facing record deficit projections beginning in 2005. Bush made it the centerpiece of his domestic agenda despite opposition from some in the U.S. Congress. In his 2005 State of the Union Address, Bush discussed the potential impending bankruptcy of the program and outlined his new program, which included partial privatization of the system, personal Social Security accounts, and options to permit Americans to divert a portion of their Social Security tax (FICA) into secured investments. Democrats opposed the proposal to partially privatize the system.

Bush embarked on a 60-day national tour, campaigning vigorously for his initiative in media events, known as the "Conversations on Social Security", in an attempt to gain support from the general public. Despite the energetic campaign, public support for the proposal declined and the House Republican leadership decided not to put Social Security reform on the priority list for the remainder of their 2005 legislative agenda. The proposal's legislative prospects were further diminished by the political fallout from the Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005. After the Democrats gained control of both houses of the Congress as a result of the 2006 midterm elections, the prospects of any further congressional action on the Bush proposal were dead for the remainder of his term in office.

Environmental and energy policies

Upon taking office in 2001, Bush stated his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, an amendment to the UN Convention on Climate Change which seeks to impose mandatory targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, citing that the treaty exempted 80% of the world's population and would have cost tens of billions of dollars per year. He also cited that the Senate had voted 95–0 in 1997 on a resolution expressing its disapproval of the protocol. In May 2001, Bush signed an executive order to create an inter-agency task force to streamline energy projects, and later signed two other executive orders to tackle environmental issues.

In 2002, Bush announced the Clear Skies Act of 2003, aimed at amending the Clean Air Act to reduce air pollution through the use of emissions trading programs. It was argued, however, that this legislation would have weakened the original legislation by allowing higher levels of pollutants than were permitted at that time. The initiative was introduced to Congress, but failed to make it out of committee.

Bush has said that he believes that global warming is real and has noted that it is a serious problem, but he asserted there is a "debate over whether it's man-made or naturally caused". The Bush Administration's stance on global warming remained controversial in the scientific and environmental communities. Critics have alleged that the administration misinformed the public and did not do enough to reduce carbon emissions and deter global warming.

In his 2006 State of the Union Address, Bush declared, "America is addicted to oil" and announced his Advanced Energy Initiative to increase energy development research.

That same year, Bush declared the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a national monument, creating the largest marine reserve to date. The Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument comprises 84 million acres (340,000 km²) and is home to 7,000 species of fish, birds, and other marine animals, many of which are specific to only those islands. The move was hailed by conservationists for "its foresight and leadership in protecting this incredible area".

In his 2007 State of the Union Address, Bush renewed his pledge to work toward diminished reliance on foreign oil by reducing fossil fuel consumption and increasing alternative fuel production. Amid high gasoline prices in 2008, Bush lifted a ban on offshore drilling. However, the move was largely symbolic as there is still a federal law banning offshore drilling. Bush said, "This means that the only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil reserves is action from the U.S. Congress." Bush had said in June 2008, "In the long run, the solution is to reduce demand for oil by promoting alternative energy technologies. My administration has worked with Congress to invest in gas-saving technologies like advanced batteries and hydrogen fuel cells.... In the short run, the American economy will continue to rely largely on oil. And that means we need to increase supply, especially here at home. So my administration has repeatedly called on Congress to expand domestic oil production." In his 2008 State of the Union Address, Bush announced that the U.S. would commit $2 billion over the next three years to a new international fund to promote clean energy technologies and fight climate change, saying, "Along with contributions from other countries, this fund will increase and accelerate the deployment of all forms of cleaner, more efficient technologies in developing nations like India and China, and help leverage substantial private-sector capital by making clean energy projects more financially attractive." He also announced plans to reaffirm the United States' commitment to work with major economies, and, through the UN, to complete an international agreement that will slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases; he stated, "This agreement will be effective only if it includes commitments by every major economy and gives none a free ride."

Stem cell research and first use of veto power

Federal funding for medical research involving the creation or destruction of human embryos through the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health has been forbidden by law since the passage in 1995 of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment by Congress and the signature of President Bill Clinton. Bush has said that he supports adult stem cell research and has supported federal legislation that finances adult stem cell research. However, Bush did not support embryonic stem cell research. On August 9, 2001, Bush signed an executive order lifting the ban on federal funding for the 71 existing "lines" of stem cells, but the ability of these existing lines to provide an adequate medium for testing has been questioned. Testing can only be done on 12 of the original lines, and all of the approved lines have been cultured in contact with mouse cells, which creates safety issues that complicate development and approval of therapies from these lines. On July 19, 2006, Bush used his veto power for the first time in his presidency to veto the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act. The bill would have repealed the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, thereby permitting federal money to be used for research where stem cells are derived from the destruction of an embryo.

Immigration

In 2006, Bush urged Congress to allow more than 12 million illegal immigrants to work in the United States with the creation of a "temporary guest-worker program". Bush did not support amnesty for illegal immigrants, but argued that the lack of legal status denies the protections of U.S. laws to millions of people who face dangers of poverty and exploitation, and penalizes employers despite a demand for immigrant labor. Nearly 8 million immigrants came to the United States from 2000 to 2005, more than in any other five-year period in the nation's history. Almost half entered illegally.

Bush also urged Congress to provide additional funds for border security and committed to deploying 6,000 National Guard troops to the Mexico–United States border. In May–June 2007, Bush strongly supported the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, which was written by a bipartisan group of Senators with the active participation of the Bush administration. The bill envisioned a legalization program for illegal immigrants, with an eventual path to citizenship; establishing a guest worker program; a series of border and work site enforcement measures; a reform of the green card application process and the introduction of a point-based "merit" system for green cards; elimination of "chain migration" and of the Diversity Immigrant Visa; and other measures. Bush contended that the proposed bill did not amount to amnesty.

A heated public debate followed, which resulted in a substantial rift within the Republican Party, the majority of conservatives opposed it because of its legalization or amnesty provisions. The bill was eventually defeated in the Senate on June 28, 2007, when a cloture motion failed on a 46–53 vote. Bush expressed disappointment upon the defeat of one of his signature domestic initiatives. The Bush administration later proposed a series of immigration enforcement measures that do not require a change in law.

On September 19, 2010, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Bush offered to accept 100,000 Palestinian refugees as American citizens if a permanent settlement had been reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina, which was one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, struck early in Bush’s second term. Katrina formed in late August during the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season and devastated much of the north-central Gulf Coast of the United States, particularly New Orleans.

Bush declared a state of emergency in Louisiana on August 27, and in Mississippi and Alabama the following day; he authorized the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to manage the disaster, but his announcement failed to spur these agencies to action. The eye of the hurricane made landfall on August 29, and New Orleans began to flood due to levee breaches; later that day, Bush declared that a major disaster existed in Louisiana, officially authorizing FEMA to start using federal funds to assist in the recovery effort. On August 30, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff declared it "an incident of national significance", triggering the first use of the newly created National Response Plan. Three days later, on September 2, National Guard troops first entered the city of New Orleans. The same day, Bush toured parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama and declared that the success of the recovery effort up to that point was "not enough".

As the disaster in New Orleans intensified, critics charged that Bush was misrepresenting his administration's role in what they saw as a flawed response. Leaders attacked Bush for having appointed apparently incompetent leaders to positions of power at FEMA, notably Michael D. Brown; it was also argued that the federal response was limited as a result of the Iraq War and Bush himself did not act upon warnings of floods. Bush responded to mounting criticism by accepting full responsibility for the federal government's failures in its handling of the emergency. It has been argued that with Katrina, Bush passed a political tipping point from which he would not recover.

Midterm dismissal of U.S. attorneys

During Bush's second term, a controversy arose over the Justice Department's midterm dismissal of seven United States Attorneys. The White House maintained that the U.S. attorneys were fired for poor performance. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would later resign over the issue, along with other senior members of the Justice Department. The House Judiciary Committee issued subpoenas for advisers Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten to testify regarding this matter, but Bush directed Miers and Bolten to not comply with those subpoenas, invoking his right of executive privilege. Bush has maintained that all of his advisers are protected under a broad executive privilege protection to receive candid advice. The Justice Department has determined that the President's order was legal.

Although Congressional investigations have focused on whether the Justice Department and the White House were using the U.S. Attorney positions for political advantage, no official findings have been released. On March 10, 2008, the Congress filed a federal lawsuit to enforce their issued subpoenas. On July 31, 2008, a United States district court judge ruled that Bush's top advisers were not immune from Congressional subpoenas.

In August 2009, Karl Rove and Harriet Miers testified before the House Judiciary Committee. A Justice Department inquiry into the firing of U.S. attorneys concluded that political considerations played a part in as many as four of the dismissals. In July 2010, the Justice Department prosecutors closed the two-year investigation without filing charges after determining that the firings were inappropriately political, but not criminal. According to the prosecutors, "Evidence did not demonstrate that any prosecutable criminal offense was committed with regard to the removal of David Iglesias. The investigative team also determined that the evidence did not warrant expanding the scope of the investigation beyond the removal of Iglesias."

Foreign policy

In July 2001 Bush visited the pope at Castel Gandolfo. During his Presidential campaign, Bush's foreign policy platform included support for a stronger economic and political relationship with Latin America, especially Mexico, and a reduction of involvement in "nation-building" and other small-scale military engagements. The administration pursued a national missile defense. Bush was an advocate of China's entry into the World Trade Organization. He said free trade was a force for democratization in China.

After the September 11 attacks, Bush launched the War on Terror, in which the United States military and an international coalition invaded Afghanistan. In 2003, Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, which he described as being part of the War on Terrorism.

Those invasions led to the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq as well as the deaths of many Iraqis, with surveys indicating between four hundred thousand to over one million dead, excluding the tens of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan.

Bush began his second term with an emphasis on improving strained relations with European nations. He appointed long-time adviser Karen Hughes to oversee a global public relations campaign. Bush lauded the pro-democracy struggles in Georgia and Ukraine.

In March 2006, a visit to India led to renewed ties between the two countries, reversing decades of U.S. policy. The visit focused particularly on areas of nuclear energy and counter-terrorism cooperation, discussions that would lead eventually to the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement. This is in stark contrast to the stance taken by his predecessor, Clinton, whose approach and response to India after the 1998 nuclear tests was that of sanctions and hectoring. The relationship between India and the United States was one that dramatically improved during Bush's tenure.

Midway through Bush's second term, it was questioned whether Bush was retreating from his freedom and democracy agenda, highlighted in policy changes toward some oil-rich former Soviet republics in central Asia.

In an address before both Houses of Congress on September 20, 2001, Bush thanked the nations of the world for their support following the September 11 attacks. He specifically thanked British Prime Minister Tony Blair for traveling to the Washington to show "unity of purpose with America", and said "America has no truer friend than Great Britain."

September 11, 2001

The September 11 terrorist attacks were a major turning point in Bush's presidency. That evening, he addressed the nation from the Oval Office, promising a strong response to the attacks but emphasizing the need for the nation to come together and comfort the families of the victims. On September 14, he visited Ground Zero, meeting with Mayor Rudy Giuliani, firefighters, police officers, and volunteers. Bush addressed the gathering via a megaphone while standing on a heap of rubble, to much applause: }} In a September 20 speech, Bush condemned Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, and issued an ultimatum to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, where bin Laden was operating, to "hand over the terrorists, or ... share in their fate".

War on Terrorism

After September 11, Bush announced a global War on Terror. The Afghan Taliban regime was not forthcoming with Osama bin Laden, so Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban regime. In his January 29, 2002 State of the Union Address, he asserted that an "axis of evil" consisting of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq was "arming to threaten the peace of the world" and "pose[d] a grave and growing danger". The Bush Administration proceeded to assert a right and intention to engage in preemptive war, also called preventive war, in response to perceived threats. This would form a basis for what became known as the Bush Doctrine. The broader "War on Terror", allegations of an "axis of evil", and, in particular, the doctrine of preemptive war, began to weaken the unprecedented levels of international and domestic support for Bush and United States action against al-Qaeda following the September 11 attacks.

Some national leaders alleged abuse by U.S. troops and called for the U.S. to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and other such facilities. Dissent from, and criticism of, Bush's leadership in the War on Terror increased as the war in Iraq expanded. In 2006, a National Intelligence Estimate expressed the combined opinion of the United States' own intelligence agencies, concluding that the Iraq War had become the "cause célèbre for jihadists" and that the jihad movement was growing.

Afghanistan

On October 7, 2001, U.S. and British forces initiated bombing campaigns that led to the arrival of Northern Alliance troops in Kabul on November 13. The main goals of the war were to defeat the Taliban, drive al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, and capture key al-Qaeda leaders. In December 2001, the Pentagon reported that the Taliban had been defeated, but cautioned that the war would go on to continue weakening Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders. Later that month the UN had installed the Afghan Transitional Administration chaired by Hamid Karzai.

Efforts to kill or capture al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden failed as he escaped a battle in December 2001 in the mountainous region of Tora Bora, which the Bush Administration later acknowledged to have resulted from a failure to commit enough U.S. ground troops. On March 13, 2002, Bush stated that "I truly am not that concerned about him" when asked about bin Laden, brushing him off as "a person who has now been marginalized", despite declaring that he was wanted "Dead or Alive" shortly after 9/11, and statements from U.S. commanders that bin Laden was "still a threat in the new Afghanistan". It was not until May 2011, two years after Bush left office, that bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces. Bin Laden's successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as the leader of the Taliban, Mohammed Omar, remain at large.

Despite the initial success in driving the Taliban from power in Kabul, by early 2003 the Taliban was regrouping, amassing new funds and recruits. In 2006, the Taliban insurgency appeared larger, fiercer and better organized than expected, with large-scale allied offensives such as Operation Mountain Thrust attaining limited success. As a result, Bush commissioned 3,500 additional troops to the country in March 2007.

Iraq

Beginning with his January 29, 2002 State of the Union address, Bush began publicly focusing attention on Iraq, which he labeled as part of an "axis of evil" allied with terrorists and posing "a grave and growing danger" to U.S. interests through possession of weapons of mass destruction.

In the latter half of 2002, CIA reports contained assertions of Saddam Hussein's intent of reconstituting nuclear weapons programs, not properly accounting for Iraqi biological and chemical weapons, and that some Iraqi missiles had a range greater than allowed by the UN sanctions. Contentions that the Bush Administration manipulated or exaggerated the threat and evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities would eventually become a major point of criticism for the president.

In late 2002 and early 2003, Bush urged the United Nations to enforce Iraqi disarmament mandates, precipitating a diplomatic crisis. In November 2002, Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei led UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, but were advised by the U.S. to depart the country four days prior to the U.S. invasion, despite their requests for more time to complete their tasks. The U.S. initially sought a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of military force but dropped the bid for UN approval due to vigorous opposition from several countries.

More than 20 nations (most notably the United Kingdom), designated the "coalition of the willing" joined the United States in invading Iraq. They launched the invasion on March 20, 2003. The Iraqi military was quickly defeated. The capital, Baghdad, fell on April 9, 2003. On May 1, Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq. The initial success of U.S. operations increased his popularity, but the U.S. and allied forces faced a growing insurgency led by sectarian groups; Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech was later criticized as premature. From 2004 until 2007, the situation in Iraq deteriorated further, with some observers arguing that there was a full scale civil war in Iraq. Bush's policies met with criticism, including demands domestically to set a timetable to withdraw troops from Iraq. The 2006 report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, led by James Baker, concluded that the situation in Iraq was "grave and deteriorating". While Bush admitted that there were strategic mistakes made in regards to the stability of Iraq, he maintained he would not change the overall Iraq strategy. In January 2005, free, democratic elections were held in Iraq for the first time in 50 years. According to Iraqi National Security Advisor Mowaffak al-Rubaie, "This is the greatest day in the history of this country." Bush praised the event as well, saying that the Iraqis "have taken rightful control of their country's destiny". This led to the election of Jalal Talabani as President and Nouri al-Maliki as Prime Minister of Iraq. A referendum to approve a constitution in Iraq was held in October 2005, supported by the majority Shiites and many Kurds.

On January 10, 2007, Bush addressed the nation regarding the situation in Iraq. In this speech, he announced a surge of 21,500 more troops for Iraq, as well as a job program for Iraqis, more reconstruction proposals, and $1.2 billion for these programs. On May 1, 2007, Bush used his veto for only the second time in his presidency, rejecting a congressional bill setting a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Five years after the invasion, Bush called the debate over the conflict "understandable" but insisted that a continued U.S. presence there was crucial.

In March 2008, Bush praised the Iraqi government's "bold decision" to launch the Battle of Basra against the Mahdi Army, calling it "a defining moment in the history of a free Iraq". He said he would carefully weigh recommendations from his commanding General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker about how to proceed after the end of the military buildup in the summer of 2008. He also praised the Iraqis' legislative achievements, including a pension law, a revised de-Baathification law, a new budget, an amnesty law, and a provincial powers measure that, he said, set the stage for the Iraqi elections.

On July 31, 2008, Bush announced that with the end of July, American troop deaths had reached their lowest number—thirteen—since the war began in 2003. Due to increased stability in Iraq, Bush announced the withdrawal of additional American forces. This reflected an emerging consensus between the White House and the Pentagon that the war has "turned a corner". He also described what he saw as the success of the 2007 troop surge.

Surveillance

Following the events of September 11, Bush issued an executive order authorizing the President's Surveillance Program which included allowing the NSA to monitor communications between suspected terrorists outside the U.S and parties within the U.S. without obtaining a warrant as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. As of 2009, the other provisions of program remained highly classified.) Once the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel questioned its original legal opinion that FISA did not apply in a time of war, the program was subsequently re-authorized by the President on the basis that the warrant requirements of FISA were implicitly superseded by the subsequent passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists. The program proved to be controversial, as critics of the administration, as well as organizations such as the American Bar Association, argued that it was illegal. In August 2006, a U.S. district court judge ruled that the NSA electronic surveillance program was unconstitutional, but on July 6, 2007, that ruling was vacated by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing. On January 17, 2007, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales informed U.S. Senate leaders that the program would not be reauthorized by the President, but would be subjected to judicial oversight.

Interrogation policies

Bush authorized the CIA to use waterboarding as one of several enhanced interrogation techniques. Between 2002 and 2003 the CIA considered certain enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, to be legal based on a secret Justice Department legal opinion arguing that terror detainees were not protected by the Geneva Conventions' ban on torture. The CIA had exercised the technique on certain key terrorist suspects under authority given to it in the Bybee Memo from the Attorney General, though that memo was later withdrawn. While not permitted by the U.S. Army Field Manuals which assert "that harsh interrogation tactics elicit unreliable information", the Bush administration believed these enhanced interrogations "provided critical information" to preserve American lives. Critics, such as former CIA officer Bob Baer, have stated that information was suspect, "you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture's bad enough."

On October 17, 2006, Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006, a law enacted in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision on ''Hamdan v. Rumsfeld'', , which allows the U.S. government to prosecute unlawful enemy combatants by military commission rather than a standard trial. The law also denies them access to ''habeas corpus'' and bars the torture of detainees, but allows the president to determine what constitutes torture.

On March 8, 2008, Bush vetoed H.R. 2082, a bill that would have expanded congressional oversight over the intelligence community and banned the use of waterboarding as well as other forms of interrogation not permitted under the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations, saying that "the bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror". In April 2009, the ACLU sued and won release of the secret memos that had authorized the Bush administration's interrogation tactics. One memo detailed specific interrogation tactics including a footnote that described waterboarding as torture as well as that the form of waterboarding used by the CIA was far more intense than authorized by the Justice Department.

North Korea

Bush publicly condemned Kim Jong-il of North Korea, naming North Korea one of three states in an "axis of evil", and saying that "the United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." Within months, "both countries had walked away from their respective commitments under the U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework of October 1994." North Korea's October 9, 2006, detonation of a nuclear device further complicated Bush's foreign policy, which centered for both terms of his presidency on "[preventing] the terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons from threatening the United States and the world". Bush condemned North Korea's position, reaffirmed his commitment to "a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula", and stated that "transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States", for which North Korea would be held accountable. On May 7, 2007, North Korea agreed to shut down its nuclear reactors immediately pending the release of frozen funds held in a foreign bank account. This was a result of a series of three-way talks initiated by the United States and including China. On September 2, 2007, North Korea agreed to disclose and dismantle all of its nuclear programs by the end of 2007. By May 2009, North Korea had restarted its nuclear program and threatened to attack South Korea.

Syria

Bush expanded economic sanctions on Syria. In early 2007, the Treasury Department, acting on a June 2005 executive order, froze American bank accounts of Syria's Higher Institute of Applied Science and Technology, Electronics Institute, and National Standards and Calibration Laboratory. Bush's order prohibits Americans from doing business with these institutions suspected of helping spread weapons of mass destruction and being supportive of terrorism. Under separate executive orders signed by Bush in 2004 and later 2007, the Treasury Department froze the assets of two Lebanese and two Syrians, accusing them of activities to "undermine the legitimate political process in Lebanon" in November 2007. Those designated included: Assaad Halim Hardan, a member of Lebanon's parliament and current leader of the Syrian Socialist National Party; Wi'am Wahhab, a former member of Lebanon's government (Minister of the Environment) under Prime Minister Omar Karami (2004–2005); Hafiz Makhluf, a colonel and senior official in the Syrian General Intelligence Directorate and a cousin of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; and Muhammad Nasif Khayrbik, identified as a close adviser to Assad.

Assassination attempt

On May 10, 2005, Vladimir Arutyunian, a native Georgian who was born to a family of ethnic Armenians, threw a live hand grenade toward a podium where Bush was speaking at Freedom Square in Tbilisi, Georgia. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was seated nearby. It landed in the crowd about from the podium after hitting a girl, but it did not detonate. Arutyunian was arrested in July 2005, confessed, was convicted and was given a life sentence in January 2006.

Other issues

Bush withdrew U.S. support for several international agreements, including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) with Russia. Bush emphasized a careful approach to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians; he denounced Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat for his support of violence, but sponsored dialogues between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Bush supported Sharon's unilateral disengagement plan, and lauded the democratic elections held in Palestine after Arafat's death.

Bush also expressed U.S. support for the defense of Taiwan following the stand-off in April 2001 with the People's Republic of China over the Hainan Island incident, when an EP-3E Aries II surveillance aircraft collided with a People's Liberation Army Air Force jet, leading to the detention of U.S. personnel. In 2003–2004, Bush authorized U.S. military intervention in Haiti and Liberia to protect U.S. interests. Bush condemned the militia attacks Darfur and denounced the killings in Sudan as genocide. Bush said that an international peacekeeping presence was critical in Darfur, but opposed referring the situation to the International Criminal Court.

In his State of the Union address in January 2003, Bush outlined a five-year strategy for global emergency AIDS relief, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Bush announced $15 billion for this effort which directly supported life-saving antiretroviral treatment for more than 3.2 million men, women and children worldwide.

On June 10, 2007, he met with Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha and became the first president to visit Albania. Bush has voiced his support for the independence of Kosovo.

Bush opened the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Departing from previous practice, he stood among a group of U.S. athletes rather than from a ceremonial stand or box, saying: "On behalf of a proud, determined, and grateful nation, I declare open the Games of Salt Lake City, celebrating the Olympic Winter Games." In 2008, in the course of a good-will trip to Asia, he attended the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Judicial appointments

Supreme Court

Following the announcement of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement on July 1, 2005, Bush nominated John Roberts to succeed her. On September 5, following the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, this nomination was withdrawn and Bush instead nominated Roberts for Chief Justice to succeed Rehnquist. Roberts was confirmed by the Senate as the 17th Chief Justice on September 29, 2005.

On October 3, 2005, Bush nominated White House Counsel Harriet Miers for O'Connor's position; after facing significant opposition, she asked that her name be withdrawn on October 27. Four days later, on October 31, Bush nominated federal appellate judge Samuel Alito for the position and he was confirmed as the 110th Supreme Court Justice on January 31, 2006.

Other courts

In addition to his two Supreme Court appointments, Bush appointed 61 judges to the United States Courts of Appeals and 261 judges to the United States district courts. Each of these numbers, along with his total of 324 judicial appointments, is third in American history, behind both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Bush experienced a number of judicial appointment controversies, as 39 people nominated to 27 federal appellate judgeships were blocked by the Senate Democrats either in the Senate Judiciary Committee or on the Senate floor using a filibuster.

Public image and perception

Domestic

[[File:George W Bush approval ratings.svg|thumb|right| Gallup/''USA Today'' Bush public opinion polling from February 2001 to January 2009. Blue denotes approve, red disapprove and green unsure.]]

Image

Bush's upbringing in West Texas, his accent, his vacations on his Texas ranch, and his penchant for country metaphors contribute to his folksy, American cowboy image. "I think people look at him and think John Wayne", says Piers Morgan, editor of the British ''Daily Mirror''. It has been suggested that Bush's accent was an active choice, as a way of distinguishing himself from Northeastern intellectuals and anchoring himself to his Texas roots. Both supporters and detractors have pointed to his country persona as reasons for their support or criticism.

Bush's intelligence has been satirized by the media, comedians, and other politicians. Detractors tended to cite linguistic errors made by Bush during his public speeches, which are colloquially termed as Bushisms. Editorials in ''Harper's Magazine'', ''Rolling Stone'', ''The Washington Post'', ''Common Dreams NewsCenter'', and ''The Nation'' have referred to Bush as "the worst president ever". In contrast to his father, who was perceived as having troubles with an overarching unifying theme, Bush embraced larger visions and was seen as a man of larger ideas and associated huge risks. Tony Blair wrote in 2010 that the caricature of Bush as being dumb is "ludicrous" and that Bush is "very smart".

Approval

Bush's popularity was highly variable during his two terms. He began his presidency with approval ratings near 50%. After the September 11 attacks, Bush gained an approval rating of 90%, maintaining 80–90% approval for four months after the attacks. It remained over 50% during most of his first term.

In 2000 and again in 2004, ''Time'' magazine named George W. Bush as its Person of the Year, a title awarded to someone who the editors believe "has done the most to influence the events of the year". In May 2004, Gallup reported that 89% of the Republican electorate approved of Bush. However, the support waned due mostly to a minority of Republicans' frustration with him on issues of spending, illegal immigration, and Middle Eastern affairs. Within the United States armed forces, according to an unscientific survey, the president was strongly supported in the 2004 presidential elections. While 73% of military personnel said that they would vote for Bush, 18% preferred his Democratic rival, John Kerry. According to Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who has studied the political leanings of the U.S. military, members of the armed services supported Bush because they found him more likely than Kerry to complete the War in Iraq.

Bush's approval rating went below the 50% mark in AP-Ipsos polling in December 2004. Thereafter, his approval ratings and approval of his handling of domestic and foreign policy issues steadily dropped. Bush received heavy criticism for his handling of the Iraq War, his response to Hurricane Katrina and to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, NSA warrantless surveillance, the Plame affair, and Guantanamo Bay detention camp controversies.

Polls conducted in 2006 showed an average of 37% approval ratings for Bush, the lowest for any second-term president at that point of his term since Harry S. Truman in March 1951, when Truman's approval rating was 28%, which contributed to what Bush called the "thumping" of the Republican Party in the 2006 mid-term elections. Throughout 2007, Bush's approval rating hovered in the mid-thirties, although in an October 17, 2007, Reuters poll, Bush received a lower approval rating of 24%, the lowest point of his presidency.

By April 2008, Bush's disapproval ratings were the highest ever recorded in the 70-year history of the Gallup poll for any president, with 69% of those polled disapproving of the job Bush was doing as president and 28% approving. In September 2008, in polls performed by various agencies, Bush's approval rating ranged from 19%—the lowest ever—to 34%. and his disapproval rating stood at 69%. Bush left the White House as one of the most unpopular American presidents, second in unpopularity only to Richard Nixon.

In response to his poll numbers and "worst president" accusations, Bush said, "I frankly don't give a damn about the polls.... To assume that historians can figure out the effect of the Bush administration before the Bush administration has ended is ... in my mind ... not an accurate reflection upon how history works."

In 2006, 744 professional historians surveyed by Siena College regarded Bush's presidency as follows: Great: 2%; Near Great: 5%; Average: 11%; Below Average: 24%; Failure: 58%. Thomas Kelly, professor emeritus of American studies at Siena College, said that "In this case, current public opinion polls actually seem to cut the President more slack than the experts do." Similar outcomes were retrieved by two informal surveys done by the History News Network in 2004 and 2008.

A March 13, 2008, poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported that 53% of Americans believe that "the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals" in Iraq. That figure was up from 42% in September 2007 and the highest since 2006.

A 2010 Siena College poll of 238 Presidential scholars found that Bush was ranked 39th out of 43, with poor ratings in handling of the economy, communication, ability to compromise, foreign policy accomplishments and intelligence.

Calls for Bush's impeachment were made, though most polls showed a plurality of Americans did not support the president's impeachment. The reasoning behind impeachment usually centered on the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy, the Bush administration's justification for the war in Iraq, and alleged violations of the Geneva Conventions. Representative Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Ohio, introduced 35 articles of impeachment on the floor of the House of Representatives against Bush on June 9, 2008, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that impeachment was "off the table".

Foreign perceptions

Bush has been criticized internationally and targeted by the global anti-war and anti-globalization campaigns, particularly for his administration's foreign policy. Views of him within the international community are more negative than previous American Presidents, with France largely opposed to what he advocated.

Bush was described as having especially close personal relationships with Tony Blair and Vicente Fox, although formal relations were sometimes strained. Other leaders, such as Afghan president Hamid Karzai, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, have openly criticized the president. Later in Bush's presidency, tensions arose between himself and Vladimir Putin, which has led to a cooling of their relationship. In 2006, a majority of respondents in 18 of 21 countries surveyed around the world were found to hold an unfavorable opinion of Bush. Respondents indicated that they judged his administration as negative for world security. In 2007, the Pew Global Attitudes Project reported that during the Bush presidency, attitudes towards the United States and the American people became less favorable around the world.

A March 2007 survey of Arab opinion conducted by Zogby International and the University of Maryland found that Bush was the most disliked leader in the Arab world.

The Pew Research Center's 2007 Global Attitudes poll found that out of 47 countries, a majority of respondents expressed "a lot of confidence" or "some confidence" in Bush in only nine countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Israel, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, and Uganda.

During a June 2007 visit to the predominantly Muslim Eastern European nation of Albania, Bush was greeted enthusiastically. Albania has a population of 3.6 million, has troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and the country's government is highly supportive of American foreign policy. A huge image of the President was hung in the middle of the capital city of Tirana flanked by Albanian and American flags while a local street was named after him. A shirt-sleeved statue of Bush was unveiled in Fushe-Kruje, a few kilometers northwest of Tirana. The Bush administration's support for the independence of Albanian-majority Kosovo, while endearing him to the Albanians, has troubled U.S. relations with Serbia, leading to the February 2008 torching of the U.S. embassy in Belgrade.

Acknowledgements

On May 7, 2005 at an official state visit in Latvia, George W. Bush was awarded the Order of the Three Stars presented to him by president Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga.

Post-presidency

Following the inauguration of Barack Obama, Bush and his family flew from Andrews Air Force Base to a homecoming celebration in Midland, Texas, following which they returned to their ranch in Crawford, Texas. They bought a home in the Preston Hollow neighborhood of Dallas, Texas, where they settled down.

Since leaving office, Bush has kept a relatively low profile though he has made public appearances, most notably after the release of his memoirs in 2010 and for the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in 2011. He makes regular appearances at various events throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth area, most notably when he conducted the opening coin toss at the Dallas Cowboys first game in the team's new stadium in Arlington and an April 2009 visit to a Texas Rangers game, where he thanked the people of Dallas for helping him settle in and was met with a standing ovation.

In 2009, he delivered a speech in Calgary, Alberta, appeared via video on ''The Colbert Report'' during which he praised U.S. troops for earning a "special place in American history," and attended the funeral of Senator Ted Kennedy. Bush made his debut as a motivational speaker on October 26 at the "Get Motivated" seminar in Dallas. In the aftermath of the Fort Hood shooting that took place on November 5, 2009 in Texas, the Bushes paid an undisclosed visit to the survivors and victims' families the day following the shooting, having contacted the base commander requesting that the visit be private and not involve press coverage. They spent one to two hours at the base.

Bush released his memoirs, ''Decision Points'', on November 9, 2010. During a pre-release appearance promoting the book, Bush said he considered his biggest accomplishment to be keeping "the country safe amid a real danger," and his greatest failure to be his inability to secure the passage of Social Security reform. At President Obama's request, Bush and Bill Clinton established the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund to raise contributions for relief and recovery efforts following the 2010 Haiti earthquake earlier in January. He also made news defending his administration's enhanced interrogation techniques, specifically the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, saying, "I'd do it again to save lives." He also attended every home playoff game for the Texas Rangers 2010 season and, accompanied by his father, threw out the ceremonial first pitch at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington for Game 4 of the 2010 World Series on October 31, 2010.

In February 2011, Bush scrapped a planned visit to Switzerland amid threats of protest at a speech he intended to give at a dinner in Geneva; human rights groups have claimed the cancellation was due to fears of arrest by Swiss authorities based on his acknowledgement that he ordered the waterboarding of detainees. Human rights groups, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed papers with Swiss authorities demanding his criminal prosecution pursuant to the Convention on Torture, an international treaty that requires authorities of all countries that have ratified the treaty to open an investigation of people suspected to torturing. On May 2, 2011, President Obama called Bush, who was at a restaurant with his wife, to inform him that Osama bin Laden had been killed. The Bushes joined the Obamas in New York City to mark the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. At the Ground Zero memorial, Bush read a letter that President Abraham Lincoln wrote to a widow who lost five sons during the Civil War.

See also

Electoral history of George W. Bush

Historical rankings of Presidents of the United States

List of George W. Bush legislation and programs

List of nicknames for George W. Bush

List of nicknames used by George W. Bush

List of Presidents of the United States by languages spoken

Political positions of George W. Bush

References

Further reading

;Academic

Abramson, Paul R., John H. Aldrich, and David W. Rohde. ''Change and Continuity in the 2004 and 2006 Elections'' (2007), 324pp excerpt and text search

Allard, Scott W. "The Changing Face of Welfare During the Bush Administration." ''Publius'' 2007 37(3): 304–332. Issn: 0048-5950

Barone, Michael. ''The Almanac of American Politics'' (2004, 2006, 2008, 2010), highly detailed coverage of electoral politics and Congress.

Berggren, D. Jason, and Nicol C. Rae. "Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush: Faith, Foreign Policy, and an Evangelical Presidential Style." ''Presidential Studies Quarterly.'' 36#4 2006. pp 606+. online edition

Campbell, Colin, Bert A. Rockman, and Andrew Rudalevige, eds.. ''The George W. Bush Legacy'' Congressional Quarterly Press, 2007, 352pp; 14 essays by scholars excerpts and online search from Amazon.com

Congressional Quarterly. ''CQ Almanac Plus'' highly detailed annual compilation of events in Congress, White House, Supreme Court, summarizing the weekly "Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report". (annual, 2002–2009)

Conlan, Tim and John Dinan. "Federalism, the Bush Administration, and the Transformation of American Conservatism." ''Publius'' 2007 37(3): 279–303. Issn: 0048-5950

Corrado, Anthony, E. J. Dionne Jr., Kathleen A. Frankovic. ''The Election of 2000: Reports and Interpretations'' (2001) online edition

Daynes, Byron W. and Glen Sussman. "Comparing the Environmental Policies of Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush." ''White House Studies'' 2007 7(2): 163–179. Issn: 1535-4738

Desch, Michael C. "Bush and the Generals." ''Foreign Affairs'' 2007 86(3): 97–108. Issn: 0015-7120 Fulltext: Ebsco

Eckersley, Robyn. "Ambushed: the Kyoto Protocol, the Bush Administration's Climate Policy and the Erosion of Legitimacy." ''International Politics'' 2007 44(2–3): 306–324. Issn: 1384-5748

Edwards III, George C. and Philip John Davies, eds. ''New Challenges for the American Presidency'' New York: Pearson Longman, 2004. 245 pp. articles from ''Presidential Studies Quarterly''

Edwards III, George C. and Desmond King, eds. ''The Polarized Presidency of George W. Bush'' (2007), 478pp; essays by scholars; excerpt and online search from Amazon.com

Fortier, John C. and Norman J. Ornstein, eds. ''Second-term Blues: How George W. Bush Has Governed'' (2007), 146pp excerpt and online search from Amazon.com

Graham John D. ''Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks'' (Indiana University Press, 2010) 425 pages; covers taxation, education, health care, energy, the environment, and regulatory reform.

Greenstein, Fred I. ed. ''The George W. Bush Presidency: An Early Assessment'' Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003

Greenstein, Fred I. “The Contemporary Presidency: The Changing Leadership of George W. Bush A Pre- and Post-9/11 Comparison” in ''Presidential Studies Quarterly'' v 32#2 2002 pp 387+. online edition

Gregg II, Gary L. and Mark J. Rozell, eds. ''Considering the Bush Presidency'' Oxford University Press, 2004. 210 pp. British perspectives

Hendrickson, Ryan C., and Kristina Spohr Readman, "From the Baltic to the Black Sea: Bush's NATO Enlargement." ''White House Studies.'' (2004) 4#3 pp: 319+. online edition

Hilliard, Bryan, Tom Lansford, and Robert P Watson, eds. ''George W. Bush: Evaluating the President at Midterm'' SUNY Press 2004

Jacobson, Gary C. “The Bush Presidency and the American Electorate” ''Presidential Studies Quarterly'' v 33 No.4 2003 pp 701+. online edition

Jacobson, Gary C. "Referendum: the 2006 Midterm Congressional Elections." ''Political Science Quarterly'' 2007 122(1): 1–24. Issn: 0032-3195 Fulltext: Ebsco

Milkis, Sidney M. and Jesse H.Rhodes. "George W. Bush, the Party System, and American Federalism." ''Publius'' 2007 37(3): 478–503. Issn: 0048-5950

Moens, Alexander ''The Foreign Policy of George W. Bush: Values, Strategy, and Loyalty.'' Ashgate, 2004. 227 pp.

Rabe, Barry. "Environmental Policy and the Bush Era: the Collision Between the Administrative Presidency and State Experimentation." ''Publius'' 2007 37(3): 413–431. Issn: 0048-5950

Sabato, Larry J. ed. ''The Sixth Year Itch: The Rise and Fall of the George W. Bush Presidency'' (2007), experts on the 2006 elections in major states

Strozeski, Josh, et al. "From Benign Neglect to Strategic Interest: the Role of Africa in the Foreign Policies of Bush 41 and 43." ''White House Studies'' 2007 7(1): 35–51. Issn: 1535-4738

Wekkin, Gary D. "George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush: Puzzling Presidencies, or the Puzzle of the Presidency?" ''White House Studies'' 2007 7(2): 113–124. Issn: 1535-4738

Wong, Kenneth and Gail Sunderman. "Education Accountability as a Presidential Priority: No Child Left Behind and the Bush Presidency." ''Publius'' 2007 37(3): 333–350. Issn: 0048-5950

;Reflections on the Bush presidency

Barnes, Fred. ''Rebel-in-Chief: How George W. Bush Is Redefining the Conservative Movement and Transforming America'' (2006)

Bartlett, Bruce. ''Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy'' (2006)

Cheney, Dick. ''In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir'' (2011)

Draper, Robert. ''Inside the Bush White House: The Presidency of George W. Bush'' (2007)

Ferguson, Michaele L. and Lori Jo Marso. ''W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender'' (2007)

Gerson, Michael J. ''Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America's Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don't)'' (2007), excerpt and text search

Greenspan, Alan. ''The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World'' (2007)

Hayes, Stephen F. ''Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President'' (2007), excerpts and online search

Hughes, Karen. ''George W. Bush: Portrait of a Leader'' (2005)

Mabry, Marcus. ''Twice as Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power'' (2007)

Moore, James. and Wayne Slater. ''Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential'' (2003) online edition

Rice, Condoleezza. ''No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington'' (2011)

Rumsfeld, Donald. ''Known and Unknown: A Memoir'' (2011)

Suskind, Ron. ''The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill'' (2004), excerpts and online search from Amazon.com

Woodward, Bob. ''Plan of Attack'' (2003), excerpt and text search

; Primary sources

Council of Economic Advisors, ''Economic Report of the President'' (annual 1947– ), complete series online; important analysis of current trends and policies, plus statistical tables

Bush, George W. ''George W. Bush on God and Country: The President Speaks Out About Faith, Principle, and Patriotism'' (2004)

Bush, George W. ''Decision Points'' (2010)

External links

Official White House biography

Archived White House website – National Archives and Records Administration, maintains content from January 20, 2009

Photographing the President – video slideshow by ''Time Magazine''

Essays on Bush, each member of his cabinet and First Lady the Miller Center of Public Affairs

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af:George W. Bush als:George W. Bush am:ጆርጅ ደብሊዩ ቡሽ ang:George W. Bush ar:جورج دبليو بوش an:George Walker Bush frp:George Walker Bush ast:George Walker Bush az:Corc Uoker Buş bn:জর্জ ডব্লিউ. বুশ zh-min-nan:George W. Bush be:Джордж Уокер Буш be-x-old:Джордж Ўокер Буш bcl:George W. Bush bg:Джордж Уокър Буш bar:George W. Bush bs:George W. Bush br:George Walker Bush ca:George Walker Bush ceb:George W. Bush cs:George W. Bush cbk-zam:George W. Bush cy:George W. Bush da:George W. Bush pdc:George W. Bush de:George W. Bush dv:ޖޯޖް ވޯކަރ ބުޝް nv:Hastiin alą́ąjįʼ dahsidáhígíí George W. Bush et:George W. Bush el:Τζορτζ Μπους (νεότερος) es:George W. Bush eo:George W. Bush eu:George W. Bush fa:جورج دبلیو بوش fo:George W. Bush fr:George W. Bush fy:George W. Bush ga:George W. Bush gv:George W. Bush gd:George W. Bush gl:George W. Bush ko:조지 W. 부시 hy:Ջորջ Վոկեր Բուշ hi:जॉर्ज वॉकर बुश hsb:George W. Bush hr:George W. Bush io:George W. Bush ilo:George W. Bush bpy:জর্জ ৱাকার বুশ id:George Walker Bush ia:George W. Bush os:Буш, Джордж Уокер is:George W. Bush it:George W. Bush he:ג'ורג' ווקר בוש jv:George Walker Bush kn:ಜಾರ್ಜ್ ಡಬ್ಲ್ಯು. ಬುಷ್ pam:George W. Bush ka:ჯორჯ უოლკერ ბუში kk:Джордж Буш rw:George W. Bush sw:George W. Bush ku:George W. Bush la:Georgius W. Bush lv:Džordžs V. Bušs lb:George W. Bush lt:George Walker Bush li:George Bush jr. ln:George Walker Bush jbo:djordj. ualker. buc hu:George W. Bush mk:Џорџ В. Буш mg:George Bush ml:ജോർജ്ജ് ഡബ്ല്യു. ബുഷ് mr:जॉर्ज डब्ल्यू. बुश arz:جورج ووكر بوش ms:George W. Bush mn:Жорж Уокер Буш nah:George W. Bush nl:George W. Bush nds-nl:George Walker Bush ja:ジョージ・W・ブッシュ nap:George W. Bush no:George W. Bush nn:George W. Bush nrm:George W. Bush oc:George Walker Bush uz:George W. Bush pag:George W. Bush pnb:جارج ڈبلیو بش ps:جورج واکر بوش tpi:George Walker Bush nds:George W. Bush pl:George W. Bush pt:George W. Bush ty:George W. Bush ksh:George W. Bush ro:George W. Bush rm:George W. Bush qu:George Walker Bush ru:Буш, Джордж Уокер sah:Дьордь Уокер Буш se:George W. Bush sa:जार्ज डबल्यु बुश sco:George W. Bush sq:George W. Bush scn:George W. Bush simple:George W. Bush sk:George W. Bush sl:George W. Bush cu:Джорджь Вокєръ Боушь so:George W. Bush sr:Џорџ В. Буш sh:George W. Bush su:George W. Bush fi:George W. Bush sv:George W. Bush tl:George W. Bush ta:ஜார்ஜ் வாக்கர் புஷ் tt:Джордж Уокер Буш th:จอร์จ ดับเบิลยู. บุช tg:Ҷорҷ Уокер Буш tr:George W. Bush tk:Jorj Uoker Buş uk:Джордж Вокер Буш ur:جارج ڈبلیو بش ug:جورج ۋولكېر بۇش vi:George W. Bush fiu-vro:Bushi George W. war:George W. Bush yi:דזשארדזש וו. בוש yo:George Walker Bush zh-yue:喬治布殊 bat-smg:George W. Bush zh:乔治·沃克·布什

Name	Osama bin Laden
Birth date	March 10, 1957
Birth place	Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Death date	May 02, 2011
Death place	Abbottabad, Pakistan
Placeofburial	North Arabian Sea
Religion	Sunni Islam (Qutbism)
Years active	1979–2011
Death cause	Ballistic trauma
Successor	Ayman Al-Zawahiri
Spouse(s)	Najwa GhanhemKhadijah SharifKhairiah SabarSiham SabarAmal Ahmed al-Sadah
Children
Allegiance	Al-Qaeda
Serviceyears	1988–2011
Battles	Soviet war in AfghanistanWar on Terror: War in Afghanistan *Battle of Tora Bora War in North-West Pakistan *Operation Neptune Spear }}

}} Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden (; , ''''; March 10, 1957 May 2, 2011) was the founder of the militant Islamist organization Al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets. He was a member of the wealthy Saudi bin Laden family, and an ethnic Yemeni Kindite.

Bin Laden was on the American Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) lists of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives and Most Wanted Terrorists for his involvement in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings. From 2001 to 2011, bin Laden was a major target of the War on Terror, with a bounty by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

After being placed on the FBI's Most Wanted list, bin Laden remained in hiding during three U.S. presidential administrations. On May 2, 2011, bin Laden was shot and killed inside a private residential compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by U.S. Navy SEALs and CIA operatives in a covert operation ordered by United States President Barack Obama. Shortly after his death, bin Laden's body was buried at sea. Al-Qaeda acknowledged his death on May 6, 2011, vowing to retaliate.

Early life and education

Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a son of Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, a billionaire construction magnate with close ties to the Saudi royal family, and Mohammed bin Laden's tenth wife, Hamida al-Attas (then called Alia Ghanem). In a 1998 interview, bin Laden gave his birth date as March 10, 1957.

Mohammed bin Laden divorced Hamida soon after Osama bin Laden was born. Mohammed recommended Hamida to Mohammed al-Attas, an associate. Al-Attas married Hamida in the late 1950s or early 1960s, and they are still together. The couple had four children, and bin Laden lived in the new household with three half-brothers and one half-sister. The bin Laden family made $5 billion in the construction industry, of which Osama later inherited around $25–30 million.

Bin Laden was raised as a devout Wahhabi Muslim. From 1968 to 1976, he attended the élite secular Al-Thager Model School. He studied economics and business administration at King Abdulaziz University. Some reports suggest he earned a degree in civil engineering in 1979, or a degree in public administration in 1981. One source described him as "hard working", another said he left university during his third year without completing a college degree. At university, bin Laden's main interest was religion, where he was involved in both "interpreting the Quran and jihad" and charitable work. Other interests included writing poetry; reading, with the works of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and Charles de Gaulle said to be among his favorites; black stallions; and association football, in which he enjoyed playing at centre forward and followed the fortunes of Arsenal F.C.

Personal life

In 1974, at the age of 17, bin Laden married Najwa Ghanem at Latakia, Syria; they were divorced before September 11, 2001. Bin Laden's other known wives were Khadijah Sharif (married 1983, divorced 1990s), Khairiah Sabar (married 1985), Siham Sabar (married 1987), and Amal al-Sadah (married 2000). Some sources also list a sixth wife, name unknown, whose marriage to bin Laden was annulled soon after the ceremony. Bin Laden fathered between 20 and 26 children with his wives. Many of bin Laden's children fled to Iran following the September 11 attacks and Iranian authorities reportedly continue to control their movement.

Bin Laden's father Mohammed died in 1967 in an airplane crash in Saudi Arabia when his American pilot misjudged a landing. Bin Laden's eldest half-brother, Salem bin Laden, the subsequent head of the bin Laden family, was killed in 1988 near San Antonio, Texas, in the United States, when he accidentally flew a plane into power lines.

The FBI described bin Laden as an adult as tall and thin, between 6 ft 4 in and 6 ft 6 in (193–198 cm) in height and weighing about 165 pounds (75 kg). Interviewer Lawrence Wright, on the other hand, described him as quite slender, but not particularly tall. Bin Laden had an olive complexion and was left-handed, usually walking with a cane. He wore a plain white turban and he had stopped wearing the traditional Saudi male headdress. Bin Laden was described as soft-spoken and mild-mannered in demeanor.

Name

There is no universally accepted standard for transliterating Arabic words and Arabic names into English; bin Laden's name is most frequently rendered "Osama bin Laden". The FBI and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as other U.S. governmental agencies, have used either "Usama bin Laden" or "Usama bin Ladin", both of which may be abbreviated as "UBL". Less common renderings include "Ussamah bin Ladin" and, in the French-language media, "Oussama ben Laden". Other spellings include "Binladen" or, as used by his family in the West, "Binladin". The decapitalization of ''bin'' is based on the convention of leaving short prepositions and articles uncapitalized in surnames; however, ''bin'' means "son of" and is not, strictly speaking, a preposition or article. The spellings with ''o'' and ''e'' come from a Persian-influenced pronunciation also used in Afghanistan, where bin Laden spent many years.

Osama bin Laden's full name, Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, means "Osama, son of Mohammed, son of Awad, son of Laden". "Mohammed" refers to bin Laden's father Mohammed bin Laden; "Awad" refers to his grandfather, Awad bin Aboud bin Laden, a Kindite Hadhrami tribesman; "Laden" refers not to bin Laden's great-grandfather, who was named Aboud, but to a more distant ancestor.

The Arabic linguistic convention would be to refer to him as "Osama" or "Osama bin Laden", not "bin Laden" alone, as "bin Laden" is a patronymic, not a surname in the Western manner. According to bin Laden's son Omar bin Laden, the family's hereditary surname is "al-Qahtani" (, ''āl-Qaḥṭānī''), but bin Laden's father Mohammed bin Laden never officially registered the name.

Osama bin Laden had also assumed the ''kunyah'' "Abū ʿAbdāllāh" ("father of Abdallah"). His admirers have referred to him by several nicknames, including the "Prince" or "Emir" (الأمير, ''al-Amīr''), the "Sheik" (الشيخ, ''aš-Šayḫ''), the "Jihadist Sheik" or "Sheik al-Mujahid" (شيخ المجاهد, ''al-Muǧāhid Šayḫ''), "Hajj" (حج, ''Ḥaǧǧ''), and the "Director". The word ''ʾusāmah'' (أسامة) means "lion", earning him the nicknames "Lion" and "Lion Sheik".

Beliefs and ideology

According to former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who led the CIA's hunt for Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader was motivated by a belief that U.S. foreign policy has oppressed, killed, or otherwise harmed Muslims in the Middle East, condensed in the phrase "They hate us for what we do, not who we are."

Bin Laden also said only the restoration of Sharia law would "set things right" in the Muslim world, and that alternatives such as "pan-Arabism, socialism, communism, democracy" must be opposed. This belief, in conjunction with violent jihad, has sometimes been called Qutbism after being promoted by Sayyid Qutb. Bin Laden believed that Afghanistan, under the rule of Mullah Omar's Taliban, was "the only Islamic country" in the Muslim world. Bin Laden consistently dwelt on the need for violent jihad to right what he believed were injustices against Muslims perpetrated by the United States and sometimes by other non-Muslim states, the need to eliminate the state of Israel, and the necessity of forcing the United States to withdraw from the Middle East. He also called on Americans to "reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and usury", in an October 2002 letter.

Bin Laden's ideology included the idea that innocent civilians, including women and children, are legitimate targets of jihad. Bin Laden was anti-Semitic, and delivered warnings against alleged Jewish conspiracies: "These Jews are masters of usury and leaders in treachery. They will leave you nothing, either in this world or the next." Shia Muslims have been listed along with "heretics, [...] America, and Israel" as the four principal "enemies of Islam" at ideology classes of bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization.

Bin Laden opposed music on religious grounds, and his attitude towards technology was mixed. He was interested in "earth-moving machinery and genetic engineering of plants" on the one hand, but rejected "chilled water" on the other.

His viewpoints and methods of achieving them had led to him being designated as a terrorist by scholars, journalists from ''The New York Times'', the BBC, and Qatari news station Al Jazeera, analysts such as Peter Bergen, Michael Scheuer, Marc Sageman, and Bruce Hoffman and he was indicted on terrorism charges by law enforcement agencies in Madrid, New York City, and Tripoli.

Bin Laden's overall strategy against much larger enemies such as the Soviet Union and United States was to lure them into a long war of attrition in Muslim countries, attracting large numbers of jihadists who would never surrender. He believed this would lead to economic collapse of the enemy nation. Al-Qaeda manuals clearly outline this strategy.

Militant activity

Mujahideen in Afghanistan

After leaving college in 1979, bin Laden went to Pakistan and joined Abdullah Azzam to take part in the Soviet war in Afghanistan. During Operation Cyclone from 1979 to 1989, the United States provided financial aid and weapons to the mujahideen leaders through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Bin Laden met and built relations with Hamid Gul, who was a three-star general in the Pakistani army and head of the ISI agency. Although the United States provided the money and weapons, the training of militant groups was entirely done by the Pakistani Armed Forces and the ISI.

By 1984, bin Laden and Azzam established Maktab al-Khidamat, which funneled money, arms and fighters from around the Arab world into Afghanistan. Through al-Khadamat, bin Laden's inherited family fortune paid for air tickets and accommodation, paid for paperwork with Pakistani authorities and provided other such services for the jihadi fighters. Bin Laden established camps inside Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan and used it to train volunteer fighters against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. It was during his time in Pakistan that he began wearing camouflage-print jackets and carrying a Russian-made assault rifle.

Formation and structuring of Al-Qaeda

By 1988, bin Laden had split from Maktab al-Khidamat. While Azzam acted as support for Afghan fighters, bin Laden wanted a more military role. One of the main points leading to the split and the creation of al-Qaeda was Azzam's insistence that Arab fighters be integrated among the Afghan fighting groups instead of forming a separate fighting force. Notes of a meeting of bin Laden and others on August 20, 1988, indicate al-Qaeda was a formal group by that time: "Basically an organized Islamic faction, its goal is to lift the word of God, to make his religion victorious." A list of requirements for membership itemized the following: listening ability, good manners, obedience, and making a pledge (''bayat'') to follow one's superiors.

According to Wright, the group's real name was not used in public pronouncements because "its existence was still a closely held secret". His research suggests that al-Qaeda was formed at an August 11, 1988, meeting between "several senior leaders" of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Abdullah Azzam, and bin Laden, where it was agreed to join bin Laden's money with the expertise of the Islamic Jihad organization and take up the jihadist cause elsewhere after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan. Following the Soviet Union's withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, Osama bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia in 1990 as a hero of jihad, who along with his Arab legion "had brought down the mighty superpower" of the Soviet Union.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait under Saddam Hussein on August 2, 1990, put the Saudi kingdom and the House of Saud at risk, with Iraqi forces on the Saudi border and Saddam's appeal to pan-Arabism potentially inciting internal dissent. Bin Laden met with King Fahd, and Saudi Defense Minister Sultan, telling them not to depend on non-Muslim assistance from the United States and others, offering to help defend Saudi Arabia with his mujahideen. Bin Laden's offer was rebuffed, and after the Saudi monarchy invited the deployment of U.S. troops in Saudi territory, Bin Laden publicly denounced Saudi Arabia's dependence on the U.S. military. Bin Laden believed the presence of foreign troops in the "land of the two mosques" (Mecca and Medina) profaned sacred soil. Bin Laden's criticism of the Saudi monarchy led that government to attempt to silence him.

Shortly after Saudi Arabia invited U.S. troops into Saudi Arabia, bin Laden turned his attention to attacks on the West. On November 8, 1990, the FBI raided the New Jersey home of El Sayyid Nosair, an associate of al-Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed, discovering copious evidence of terrorist plots, including plans to blow up New York City skyscrapers. This marked the earliest discovery of al-Qaeda terrorist plans outside of Muslim countries. Nosair was eventually convicted in connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and later admitted guilt for the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York on November 5, 1990.

Bin Laden continued to speak publicly against the Saudi government for harboring American troops, for which the Saudis banished him. He went to live in exile in Sudan, in 1992, in a deal brokered by Ali Mohamed.

Sudan and return to Afghanistan

In Sudan, bin Laden established a new base for mujahideen operations in Khartoum. He bought a house on Al-Mashtal Street in the affluent Al-Riyadh quarter and a retreat at Soba on the Blue Nile. During his time in the country he heavily invested in the infrastructure and in agriculture and businesses. He continued his verbal assault on King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, and in response, on March 5, 1994, Fahd sent an emissary to Sudan demanding bin Laden's passport. His family was persuaded to cut off his $7 million a year stipend. By now bin Laden was strongly associated with Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), which made up the core of al-Qaeda. In 1995 the EIJ attempted to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The attempt failed, and the EIJ was expelled from Sudan.

As a result of his dealings in and advocacy of violent extremist jihad, Osama bin Laden lost his Saudi citizenship in 1994 and was disowned by his billionaire family.

Sudan also began efforts to expel bin Laden. The 9/11 Commission Report states:

In late 1995, when Bin Laden was still in Sudan, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) learned that Sudanese officials were discussing with the Saudi government the possibility of expelling Bin Laden. CIA paramilitary officer Billy Waugh tracked down Bin Ladin in the Sudan and prepared an operation to apprehend him, but was denied authorization. U.S. Ambassador Timothy Carney encouraged the Sudanese to pursue this course. The Saudis, however, did not want Bin Laden, giving as their reason their revocation of his citizenship. Sudan's minister of defense, Fatih Erwa, has claimed that Sudan offered to hand Bin Laden over to the United States. The Commission has found no credible evidence that this was so. Ambassador Carney had instructions only to push the Sudanese to expel Bin Laden. Ambassador Carney had no legal basis to ask for more from the Sudanese since, at the time, there was no indictment outstanding.

The 9/11 Commission Report further states:

In February 1996, Sudanese officials began approaching officials from the United States and other governments, asking what actions of theirs might ease foreign pressure. In secret meetings with Saudi officials, Sudan offered to expel Bin Laden to Saudi Arabia and asked the Saudis to pardon him. U.S. officials became aware of these secret discussions, certainly by March. Saudi officials apparently wanted Bin Laden expelled from Sudan. They had already revoked his citizenship, however, and would not tolerate his presence in their country. Also Bin Laden may have no longer felt safe in Sudan, where he had already escaped at least one assassination attempt that he believed to have been the work of the Egyptian or Saudi regimes, or both.

In May 1996, under increasing pressure on Sudan, from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United States, bin Laden returned to Jalalabad, Afghanistan aboard a chartered flight, and there forged a close relationship with Mullah Mohammed Omar. When bin Laden left Sudan, he and his organization were significantly weakened, despite his ambitions and organizational skills.

In August, 1996, bin Laden declared war against the United States. This fatwā was first published in Al Quds Al Arabi, a London-based newspaper. The fatwā is entitled "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places." Saudi Arabia is sometimes called "The Land of the Two Holy Mosques" in reference to Mecca and Medina, the two holiest places in Islam. The reference to occupation in the fatwā refers to U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia for the purpose of controlling air space in Iraq, known as Operation Southern Watch.

In Afghanistan, bin Laden and al-Qaeda raised money from "donors from the days of the Soviet jihad", and from the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to establish more training camps for Mujahideen fighters.

Bin Laden effectively had hijacked Ariana Afghan Airlines, which ferried Islamic militants, arms, cash and opium through the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan as well as provided false identifications to members of bin Laden's terrorist network. Viktor Bout helped to run the airline, maintaining planes and loading cargo. Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, concluded that Ariana was being used as a "terrorist taxi service".

Early attacks and aid for attacks

It is believed that the first bombing attack involving bin Laden was the December 29, 1992, bombing of the Gold Mihor Hotel in Aden in which two people were killed.

It was after this bombing that al-Qaeda was reported to have developed its justification for the killing of innocent people. According to a fatwa issued by Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, the killing of someone standing near the enemy is justified because any innocent bystander will find their proper reward in death, going to ''Jannah'' (Paradise) if they were good Muslims and to ''Jahannam'' (hell) if they were bad or non-believers. The fatwa was issued to al-Qaeda members but not the general public.

In the 1990s bin Laden's al-Qaeda assisted jihadis financially and sometimes militarily in Algeria, Egypt and Afghanistan. In 1992 or 1993 bin Laden sent an emissary, Qari el-Said, with $40,000 to Algeria to aid the Islamists and urge war rather than negotiation with the government. Their advice was heeded but the war that followed killed 150,000–200,000 Algerians and ended with Islamist surrender to the government.

Bin Laden funded the Luxor massacre of November 17, 1997, which killed 62 civilians, but outraged the Egyptian public. In mid-1997, the Northern Alliance threatened to overrun Jalalabad, causing bin Laden to abandon his Nazim Jihad compound and move his operations to Tarnak Farms in the south.

Another successful attack was carried out in the city of Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan. Bin Laden helped cement his alliance with the Taliban by sending several hundreds of Afghan Arab fighters along to help the Taliban kill between five and six thousand Hazaras overrunning the city.

In February 1998, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri co-signed a ''fatwa'' in the name of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders which declared the killing of North Americans and their allies an "individual duty for every Muslim" to "liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem) and the holy mosque (in Mecca) from their grip". At the public announcement of the fatwa bin Laden announced that North Americans are "very easy targets". He told the attending journalists, "You will see the results of this in a very short time."

Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri organized an al-Qaeda congress on June 24, 1998.

The 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings were a series of attacks that occurred on August 7, 1998, in which hundreds of people were killed in simultaneous truck bomb explosions at the United States embassies in the major East African cities of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. The attacks were linked to local members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, brought Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri to the attention of the United States public for the first time, and resulted in the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation placing bin Laden on its Ten Most Wanted list.

In December 1998, the Director of Central Intelligence Counterterrorist Center reported to President Bill Clinton that al-Qaeda was preparing for attacks in the United States of America, including the training of personnel to hijack aircraft.

At the end of 2000, Richard Clarke revealed that Islamic militants headed by bin Laden had planned a triple attack on January 3, 2000 which would have included bombings in Jordan of the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman and tourists at Mount Nebo and a site on the Jordan River, the sinking of the destroyer USS ''The Sullivans'' in Yemen, as well as an attack on a target within the United States. The plan was foiled by the arrest of the Jordanian terrorist cell, the sinking of the explosive-filled skiff intended to target the destroyer, and the arrest of Ahmed Ressam.

Yugoslav Wars

A former U.S. State Department official in October 2001 described Bosnia and Herzegovina as a safe haven for terrorists, after it was asserted that militant elements of the former Sarajevo government were protecting extremists, some with ties to Osama bin Laden. In 1997, ''Rzeczpospolita'', one of the largest Polish daily newspapers, reported that intelligence services of the Nordic-Polish SFOR Brigade suspected that a center for training terrorists from Islamic countries was located in the Bocina Donja village near Maglaj in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1992, hundreds of volunteers joined an "all-mujahedeen unit" called El Moujahed in an abandoned hillside factory, a compound with a hospital and prayer hall.

According to Middle East intelligence reports, bin Laden financed small convoys of recruits from the Arab world through his businesses in Sudan. Among them was Karim Said Atmani who was identified by authorities as the document forger for a group of Algerians accused of plotting the bombings in the United States of America. He is a former roommate of Ahmed Ressam, the man arrested at the Canadian-U.S. border in mid-December 1999 with a car full of nitroglycerin and bomb-making materials. He was convicted of colluding with Osama bin Laden by a French court.

A Bosnian government search of passport and residency records, conducted at the urging of the United States, revealed other former mujahideen who were linked to the same Algerian group or to other groups of suspected terrorists, and had lived in the area north of Sarajevo, the capital, in the past few years. Khalil al-Deek, was arrested in Jordan in late December 1999 on suspicion of involvement in a plot to blow up tourist sites; a second man with Bosnian citizenship, Hamid Aich, lived in Canada at the same time as Atmani and worked for a charity associated with Osama bin Laden. In its June 26, 1997, report on the bombing of the Al Khobar building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, ''The New York Times'' noted that those arrested confessed to serving with Bosnian Muslims forces. Further, the captured men also admitted to ties with Osama bin Laden.

In 1999 it was revealed that bin Laden and his Tunisian assistant Mehrez Aodouni were granted citizenship and Bosnian passports in 1993 by the government in Sarajevo. This information was denied by the Bosnian government following the September 11 attacks, but it was later found that Aodouni was arrested in Turkey and that at that time he possessed the Bosnian passport. Following this revelation, a new explanation was given that bin Laden "did not personally collect his Bosnian passport" and that officials at the Bosnian embassy in Vienna, which issued the passport, could not have known who bin Laden was at the time.

During his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević presented FBI documents that verified bin Laden's al-Qaeda had a presence in the Balkans and aided the Kosovo Liberation Army, which was identified by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization shortly before the 1998 embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. Milošević had argued that the United States aided the terrorists which culminated in its backing of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War.

September 11, 2001 attacks

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After his denial, Osama bin Laden finally claimed responsibility for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States in 2004. The attacks involved the hijacking of four commercial passenger aircraft, the subsequent destruction of those planes and the World Trade Center in New York City, New York, severe damage to The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the deaths of 2,974 people and the nineteen hijackers. In response to the attacks, the United States launched a War on Terror to depose the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and capture al-Qaeda operatives, and several countries strengthened their anti-terrorism legislation to preclude future attacks. The CIA's Special Activities Division was given the lead in tracking down and killing or capturing bin Laden.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has stated that classified evidence linking al-Qaeda and bin Laden to the September 11 attacks is clear and irrefutable. The UK Government reached a similar conclusion regarding al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden's culpability for the September 11 attacks, although the government report notes that the evidence presented is not necessarily sufficient for a prosecutable case.

Bin Laden initially denied involvement in the attacks. On September 16, 2001, bin Laden read a statement later broadcast by Qatar's Al Jazeera satellite channel denying responsibility for the attack.

In a videotape recovered by U.S. forces in November 2001 in Jalalabad, bin Laden was seen discussing the attack with Khaled al-Harbi in a way that indicates foreknowledge. The tape was broadcast on various news networks on December 13, 2001. The merits of this translation have been disputed. Arabist Dr. Abdel El M. Husseini stated: "This translation is very problematic. At the most important places where it is held to prove the guilt of bin Laden, it is not identical with the Arabic."

In the 2004 Osama bin Laden video, bin Laden abandoned his denials without retracting past statements. In it he stated he had personally directed the nineteen hijackers. In the 18-minute tape, played on Al-Jazeera, four days before the American presidential election, bin Laden accused U.S. President George W. Bush of negligence on the hijacking of the planes on September 11.

According to the tapes, bin Laden claimed he was inspired to destroy the World Trade Center after watching the destruction of towers in Lebanon by Israel during the 1982 Lebanon War.

Through two other tapes aired by Al Jazeera in 2006, Osama bin Laden announced, "I am the one in charge of the nineteen brothers. [...] I was responsible for entrusting the nineteen brothers [...] with the raids" (May 23, 2006). In the tapes he was seen with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, as well as two of the 9/11 hijackers, Hamza al-Ghamdi and Wail al-Shehri, as they made preparations for the attacks (videotape broadcast September 7, 2006).

Identified motivations of the September 11 attacks include the support of Israel by the United States, presence of the U.S. military in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. enforcement of sanctions against Iraq.

Criminal charges

name	Usama Bin Laden
charge	* Murder of U.S. Nationals Outside the United States Conspiracy to Murder U.S. Nationals Outside the United States Attack on a Federal Facility Resulting in Death
reward	$25 million
alias	* Usama Bin Muhammad Bin Ladin Shaykh Usama Bin Ladin the Prince the Emir Abu Abdallah Mujahid Shaykh Hajj the Director
birth date	1957
birth place	Saudi Arabia
death date	May 02, 2011
death place	Abbottabad, Pakistan
cause	Ballistic trauma
nationality	Saudi Arabian
gender	Male
height	6'4" to 6'6"
weight	Approximately 160 pounds
occupation	Unknown
added date	June 7, 1999
remove date	May 2, 2011
number	456
status	Killed/Captured }}

On March 16, 1998, Libya issued the first official Interpol arrest warrant against bin Laden and three other people. They were charged for killing Silvan Becker, agent of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, in the Terrorism Department, and his wife Vera in Libya on March 10, 1994. Bin Laden was still wanted by the Libyan government at the time of his death. Osama bin Laden was first indicted by the United States on June 8, 1998, when a grand jury indicted Osama bin Laden on charges of killing five Americans and two Indians in the November 14, 1995, truck bombing of a U.S.-operated Saudi National Guard training center in Riyadh. Bin Laden was charged with "conspiracy to attack defense utilities of the United States" and prosecutors further charged that bin Laden is the head of the terrorist organization called al-Qaeda, and that he was a major financial backer of Islamic fighters worldwide. Bin Laden denied involvement but praised the attack. On November 4, 1998, Osama bin Laden was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, on charges of ''Murder of U.S. Nationals Outside the United States, Conspiracy to Murder U.S. Nationals Outside the United States, and Attacks on a Federal Facility Resulting in Death'' for his alleged role in the 1998 United States embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. The evidence against bin Laden included courtroom testimony by former al-Qaeda members and satellite phone records, from a phone purchased for him by al-Qaeda procurement agent Ziyad Khaleel in the United States.

Bin Laden became the 456th person listed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, when he was added to the list on June 7, 1999, following his indictment along with others for capital crimes in the 1998 embassy attacks. Attempts at assassination and requests for the extradition of bin Laden from the Taliban of Afghanistan were met with failure prior to the bombing of Afghanistan in October 2001. In 1999, U.S. President Bill Clinton convinced the United Nations to impose sanctions against Afghanistan in an attempt to force the Taliban to extradite him.

Years later, on October 10, 2001, bin Laden appeared as well on the initial list of the top 22 FBI Most Wanted Terrorists, which was released to the public by the President of the United States George W. Bush, in direct response to the September 11 attacks, but which was again based on the indictment for the 1998 embassy attack. Bin Laden was among a group of thirteen fugitive terrorists wanted on that latter list for questioning about the 1998 embassy bombings. Bin Laden remains the only fugitive ever to be listed on both FBI fugitive lists.

Despite the multiple indictments listed above and multiple requests, the Taliban refused to extradite Osama bin Laden. They did however offer to try him before an Islamic court if evidence of Osama bin Laden's involvement in the September 11 attacks was provided. It was not until eight days after the bombing of Afghanistan began in October 2001 that the Taliban finally did offer to turn over Osama bin Laden to a third-party country for trial in return for the United States ending the bombing. This offer was rejected by President Bush stating that this was no longer negotiable, with Bush responding "there's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty."

On June 15, 2011, federal prosecutors of the United States of America officially dropped all criminal charges against Osama Bin Laden following his death in May.

Attempted capture by the United States

Clinton administration

Capturing Osama bin Laden had been an objective of the United States government since the presidency of Bill Clinton. Shortly after the September 11 attacks it was revealed that President Clinton had signed a directive authorizing the CIA (and specifically their elite Special Activities Division) to apprehend bin Laden and bring him to the United States to stand trial after the 1998 United States embassy bombings in Africa; if taking bin Laden alive was deemed impossible, then deadly force was authorized. On August 20, 1998, 66 cruise missiles launched by United States Navy ships in the Arabian Sea struck bin Laden's training camps near Khost in Afghanistan, narrowly missing him by a few hours. In 1999 the CIA, together with Pakistani military intelligence, had prepared a team of approximately 60 Pakistani commandos to infiltrate Afghanistan to capture or kill bin Laden, but the plan was aborted by the 1999 Pakistani coup d'état; in 2000, foreign operatives working on behalf of the CIA had fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a convoy of vehicles in which bin Laden was traveling through the mountains of Afghanistan, hitting one of the vehicles but not the one in which bin Laden was riding.

In 2000, prior to the September 11 attacks, Paul Bremer characterized the Clinton administration as "correctly focused on bin Laden", while Robert Oakley criticized their "obsession with Osama".

Bush administration

Immediately after the September 11 attacks, U.S. government officials named bin Laden and the al-Qaeda organization as the prime suspects and offered a reward of $25 million for information leading to his capture or death. On July 13, 2007, this figure was doubled to $50 million. The Airline Pilots Association and the Air Transport Association offered an additional $2 million reward.

According to ''The Washington Post'', the U.S. government concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the Battle of Tora Bora, Afghanistan in late 2001, and according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge, failure by the United States to commit enough U.S. ground troops to hunt him led to his escape and was the gravest failure by the United States in the war against al-Qaeda. Intelligence officials have assembled what they believe to be decisive evidence, from contemporary and subsequent interrogations and intercepted communications, that bin Laden began the Battle of Tora Bora inside the cave complex along Afghanistan's mountainous eastern border.

''The Washington Post'' also reported that the CIA unit composed of their special operations paramilitary forces dedicated to capturing bin Laden was shut down in late 2005. Bush had previously defended this scaling back of the effort several times, saying, "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."

U.S. and Afghanistan forces raided the mountain caves in Tora Bora between August 14–16, 2007. The military was drawn to the area after receiving intelligence of a pre-Ramadan meeting held by al-Qaeda members. After killing dozens of al-Qaeda and Taliban members, they did not find either Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Obama administration

On October 7, 2008, in the second presidential debate, on foreign policy, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama pledged, "We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority." Upon being elected, then President-elect Obama expressed his plans to "renew U.S. commitment to finding al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to his national security advisers" in an effort to ratchet up the hunt for the terrorist. President Obama rejected the Bush administration's policy on bin Laden that "conflated all terror threats from al-Qaeda to Hamas to Hezbollah," replacing it with "with a covert, laserlike focus on al-Qaeda and its spawn."

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in December 2009 that officials had had no reliable information on bin Laden's whereabouts for years. One week later, General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said in December 2009 that al-Qaeda will not be defeated unless its leader, Osama bin Laden, is captured or killed. Testifying to the U.S. Congress, he said bin Laden had become an "iconic figure, whose survival emboldens al-Qaeda as a franchising organization across the world", and that Obama's deployment of 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan meant that success would be possible. "I don't think that we can finally defeat al-Qaeda until he's captured or killed", McChrystal said of bin Laden. "Killing or capturing bin Laden would not spell the end of al-Qaeda, but the movement could not be eradicated while he remained at large."

In April 2011, President Obama ordered a covert operation to kill or capture bin Laden. On May 1, 2011, the White House announced that U.S. Navy SEALs had carried it out, killing him in his Abbottabad, Pakistan compound.

Activities and whereabouts after the September 11 attacks

While referring to Osama bin Laden in a CNN film clip on September 17, 2001, then President George W. Bush stated, "I want justice. There is an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted dead or alive'. Subsequently, bin Laden retreated further from public contact to avoid capture. Numerous speculative press reports were issued about his whereabouts or even death; some placed bin Laden in different locations during overlapping time periods. None were ever definitively proven. After military offensives in Afghanistan failed to uncover his whereabouts, Pakistan was regularly identified as his suspected hiding place. Some of the conflicting reports regarding bin Laden’s continued whereabouts and mistaken claims about his death follow:

In December 11, 2005, a letter from Atiyah Abd al-Rahman to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi indicated that bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership were based in the Waziristan region of Pakistan at the time. In the letter, translated by the United States military's Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, "Atiyah" instructs Zarqawi to "send messengers from your end to Waziristan so that they meet with the brothers of the leadership [...] I am now on a visit to them and I am writing you this letter as I am with them..." Al-Rahman also indicates that bin Laden and al-Qaeda are "weak" and "have many of their own problems." The letter has been deemed authentic by military and counterterrorism officials, according to The Washington Post. Al-Qaeda continued to release time-sensitive and professionally-verified videos demonstrating bin Laden's continued survival as recently as August 2007. In 2009, a research team led by Thomas W. Gillespie and John A. Agnew of UCLA used satellite-aided geographical analysis to pinpoint three compounds in Parachinar as bin Laden's likely hideouts. . In March 2009, the New York Daily News reported that the hunt for bin Laden had centered in the Chitral District of Pakistan, including the Kalam Valley. Author, Rohan Gunaratna, stated that captured al-Qaeda leaders had confirmed that bin Laden was hiding in Chitral. In the first week of December 2009, a Taliban detainee in Pakistan said he had information that bin Laden was in Afghanistan in 2009. The detainee reported that in January or February (2009) he met a trusted contact who had seen bin Laden in Afghanistan about 15 to 20 days earlier. However, on December 6, 2009, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated that the United States had had no reliable information on the whereabouts of bin Laden in years. Pakistan's Prime Minister Gillani rejected claims that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan. On Dec. 9, 2009 BBC News reported that U.S. Army General Stanley A. McChrystal, who served as Commander of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan from June 15, 2009 until June 23, 2010 emphasized the continued importance of the capture or killing of bin Laden, thus indicating that the U.S. high command believed that bin Laden was still alive On February 2, 2010, Afghan president, Hamid Karzai arrived in Saudi Arabia for an official visit. The agenda included discussion of a possible Saudi role in Karzai’s plan to reintegrate Taliban militants. During the visit an anonymous official of the Saudi Foreign Ministry declared that the kingdom had no intention of getting involved in peacemaking in Afghanistan unless the Taliban severed ties with extremists and expelled Osama bin Laden. On June 7, 2010, the Kuwaiti newspaper, Al Siyassa reported that bin Laden was hiding out in the mountainous town of Savzevar, in north eastern Iran. The Australian News,online edition published the claim on June 9. On June 9, The Australian News, online edition repeated the claim. On October 18, 2010, an unnamed NATO official suggested that bin Laden was "alive and well and living comfortably" in Pakistan, protected by elements of the country's intelligence services. A senior Pakistani official denied the allegations and said the accusations were designed to put pressure on the Pakistani government ahead of talks aimed at strengthening ties between Pakistan and the United States. On April 16, 2011, a leaked Al Jazeera report claimed that bin Laden had been captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Whereabouts just prior to his death

In July 2010, CIA operatives spotted Bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti driving through the streets of Peshawar, Pakistan. In August 2010, Al-Kuwaiti drives into a large compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. About 35 miles north of the capital, Islamabad, and just yards from a military academy. It was originally believed that bin Laden was hiding near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but he was found away in a three-story mansion in Abbottabad at . Bin Laden's mansion was located southwest of the Pakistan Military Academy, the country's "West Point". Google Earth maps show that the compound was not present in 2001, but was present on images taken in 2005.

Death

Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, shortly after 1 a.m. local time by a United States special forces military unit. The operation, code-named Operation Neptune Spear, was ordered by United States President Barack Obama and carried out in a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operation by a team of United States Navy SEALs from the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group (also known as DEVGRU or informally by its former name, SEAL Team Six) of the Joint Special Operations Command, with support from CIA operatives on the ground. The raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan was launched from Afghanistan. After the raid, U.S. forces took bin Laden's body to Afghanistan for identification, then buried it at sea within 24 hours of his death.

Critics accused Pakistan's military and security establishment of protecting bin Laden. For example, Mosharraf Zaidi, a leading Pakistani columnist, stated, "It seems deeply improbable that bin Laden could have been where he was killed without the knowledge of some parts of the Pakistani state." Pakistan's president Asif Ali Zardari denied that his country's security forces sheltered bin Laden, and called any supposed support for bin Laden by the Pakistani government "baseless speculation".

It was speculated that the issue might further strain U.S. ties with Pakistan. Bin Laden was killed in what some suggest was his residence for five years. It was an expensive compound located less than a mile from Pakistan's version of West Point, probably built for him and less than 100 kilometers' drive from the capital.

The Pakistani government's foreign office issued a statement that "categorically denies" any reports by the media that the country's leadership, "civil as well as military, had any prior knowledge of the U.S. operation against Osama bin Laden".

Pakistan's United States envoy, ambassador Husain Haqqani, promises a "full inquiry" into how Pakistani intelligence services failed to find bin Laden in a fortified compound, just a few hours drive from Islamabad, and stated that "obviously bin Laden did have a support system; the issue is, was that support system within the government and the state of Pakistan or within the society of Pakistan?"

See also

Afghan civil war

Childhood, education and personal life of Osama bin Laden

Fatawā of Osama bin Laden

Islamic fundamentalism

Islamic mujahid movement

Islamic terrorism

Osama bin Laden in popular culture

Pakistan and state terrorism

The Golden Chain

War against Islam

Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad

References

;Footnotes ;Additional notes # The date according to Pakistan Standard Time (UTC+05:00). ;Bibliography }} }} }}

Further reading

}} }} }}

Foreign Broadcast Information Service (2006) – Compilation of Usama Bin Laden Statements 1994 – January 2004

External links

Osama bin Laden collected news and commentary at ''Dawn''

Full text: bin Laden's 'letter to America', ''The Observer'', November 24, 2002

Hunting Bin Laden, ''PBS Frontline'', (November 2002)

Young Osama, Steve Coll, ''The New Yorker'', December 12, 2005

How the World Sees Osama bin Laden, slideshow by ''Life''

The Osama bin Laden File from The National Security Archive, posted May 2, 2011

Category:1957 births Category:2011 deaths Category:20th-century criminals Category:21st-century criminals Category:Abdullah Yusuf Azzam Category:Afghan Civil War Category:Al-Qaeda founders Category:Al-Qaeda propagandists Category:Bin Laden family Category:Burials at sea Category:Civil engineers Category:Deaths by firearm in Pakistan Category:FBI Most Wanted Terrorists Category:FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives Category:Islamic terrorism Category:People from Abbottabad Category:People of the Soviet war in Afghanistan Category:People of the War in Afghanistan (2001–present) Category:Salafis Category:Saudi Arabia expatriates Category:Saudi Arabian expatriates in Pakistan Category:Saudi Arabian al-Qaeda members Category:Saudi Arabian anti-communists Category:Saudi Arabian poets Category:September 11 attacks Category:Stateless persons Category:War on Terror Category:People designated by the Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee

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Occupation	Film actor, comedian }}

Steve Bridges is an American comedian, impressionist, and actor who has "developed a repertoire of over 200 impressions, including TV characters Barney Fife and Homer Simpson, broadcasters Tom Brokaw, Paul Harvey and Rush Limbaugh; his impressions of political leaders Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Arnold Schwarzenegger rapidly established him as a premiere vocal impressionist."

In 2006 he appeared alongside the real George W. Bush at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, mimicking him during his speech, acting as his inner thoughts.

Born in 1964, Bridges is a Biola University alumnus.

Filmography

''Nurses'' (1994) as Torrance

''The District'' (2000)

''ER'' (2001) as Leone

''Lange Flate Ballær 2'' (2008) as General of the U.S. Navy

As George W. Bush

''JAG'' episode "Dangerous Game" (2002)

''Navy NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service'' episode "Yankee White" (2003)

''Whoopi'' episode "The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" (2003)

''George Lopez '' (2003)

''Comedy Central Roast of Jeff Foxworthy'' (2005)

''Merry F#%$in' Christmas'' (2005)

''The Tonight Show with Jay Leno''

''White House Correspondents Dinner'' (2006)

''Blue Collar Comedy Tour: One For the Road (Yankee Doodle Dandy segment)

''The View'' (May 29, 2006)

''Larry King Live (2006)

''Lange Flate Ballær II (2008) (Norwegian movie)

''I Love the New Millennium'' (2008)

References

External links

Comedy Central Bio

Steve Bridges Official Site

Bridges impersonates Bush with Bush

Steve Bridges Profile Page - Video clip, speaking topics.

Category:1964 births Category:American film actors Category:American comedians Category:American impressionists (entertainers) Category:Biola University alumni Category:Living people

fi:Steve Bridges sv:Steve Bridges

}}

Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. (born March 31, 1948) served as the 45th Vice President of the United States (1993–2001), under President Bill Clinton. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for President in the 2000 U.S. presidential election.

Gore is currently an author, businessman, and environmental activist. He was previously an elected official for 24 years, representing Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives (1977–85), and later in the U.S. Senate (1985–93), and finally becoming Vice President in 1993. In the 2000 presidential election, Gore won the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes. However, he ultimately lost the Electoral College, and the election, to Republican George W. Bush when the U.S. Supreme Court settled the legal controversy over the Florida vote recount by ruling 5-4 in favor of Bush. It was the only time in history that the Supreme Court has determined the outcome of a presidential election.

He is a founder and current chair of the Alliance for Climate Protection, the co-founder and chair of Generation Investment Management, the co-founder and chair of Current TV, a member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc., and a senior adviser to Google. Gore is also a partner in the venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, heading that firm's climate change solutions group. He has served as a visiting professor at Middle Tennessee State University, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Fisk University, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Gore has received a number of awards including the Nobel Peace Prize (joint award with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) (2007), a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album (2009) for his book ''An Inconvenient Truth'', a Primetime Emmy Award for Current TV (2007), and a Webby Award (2005). Gore was also the subject of the Academy Award-winning (2007) documentary ''An Inconvenient Truth'' in 2006. In 2007 he was named a runner-up for ''Time's'' 2007 Person of the Year.

Early life

Albert Gore, Jr. was born in Washington, D.C., the second of two children of Albert Gore, Sr., a U.S. Representative who later served as a U.S. Senator from Tennessee, and Pauline LaFon Gore, one of the first women to graduate from Vanderbilt University Law School. Gore's paternal ancestors were Scots-Irish who first settled in Virginia in the mid 17th-century and moved to Tennessee after the Revolutionary War. His older sister Nancy LaFon Gore, who was born in 1938, died of lung cancer in 1984.

During the school year he lived with his family in The Fairfax Hotel in the Embassy Row section in Washington D.C. During the summer months, he worked on the family farm in Carthage, Tennessee, where the Gores grew tobacco and hay and raised cattle.

Gore attended the all boys' St. Albans School in Washington, D.C. from 1956 to 1965, a prestigious feeder school for the Ivy League. He was the captain of the football team, threw discus for the track and field team, and participated in basketball, art, and government. He graduated 25th in his class of 51, applied to only one college, Harvard, and was accepted.

They have four children, Karenna (b. 1973), Kristin Carlson Gore (b. 1977), Sarah LaFon Gore (b. 1979), and Albert Gore III (b. 1982).

In early June 2010, shortly after purchasing a new home, the Gores announced in an e-mail to friends that after "long and careful consideration," they had made a mutual decision to separate.

Harvard, Vietnam, journalism, and Vanderbilt (1965–1976)

Harvard

Gore enrolled in Harvard College in 1965, initially planning to major in English and write novels, but later deciding to major in government. Gore earned an A on his thesis, "The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency, 1947-1969", and graduated with an A.B. ''cum laude'' in June 1969.

Gore attended college during the era of anti Vietnam War protests. Though he was against that war, he disagreed with the tactics of the student protest movement, thinking it silly and juvenile to take anger at the war out on a private university. He and his friends did not participate in Harvard demonstrations. John Tyson, a former roommate, recalled that "We distrusted these movements a lot .... We were a pretty traditional bunch of guys, positive for civil rights and women's rights but formal, transformed by the social revolution to some extent but not buying into something we considered detrimental to our country." Gore helped his father write an anti-war address to the Democratic National Convention of 1968, but stayed with his parents in their hotel room during the violent protests.

Military service

When Gore graduated in 1969, his student deferment ended and he immediately became eligible for the military draft. His father, a vocal anti-Vietnam War critic, was facing a tough reelection fight in 1970. Gore eventually decided that the best way he could contribute to the anti-war effort was to enlist in the Army, which would improve his father's reelection prospects. Although nearly all of his Harvard classmates avoided the draft and service in Vietnam, Gore believed if he found a way around military service, he would be handing an issue to his father's Republican opponent. According to Gore's Senate biography, "He appeared in uniform in his father's campaign commercials, one of which ended with his father advising: 'Son, always love your country.' Despite this, Al senior lost the election.

Gore has said that his other reason for enlisting was that he did not want someone with fewer options than he to go in his place. Actor Tommy Lee Jones, a former college housemate, recalled Gore saying that "if he found a fancy way of not going, someone else would have to go in his place." His Harvard advisor, Richard Neustadt, also stated that Gore decided, "that he would have to go as an enlisted man because, he said, 'In Tennessee, that's what most people have to do.'" In addition, Michael Roche, Gore's editor for ''The Castle Courier,'' stated that "anybody who knew Al Gore in Vietnam knows he could have sat on his butt and he didn't."

After enlisting in August 1969, Gore returned to the anti-war Harvard campus in his military uniform to say goodbye to his adviser and was "jeered" at by students. He later said he was astonished by the "emotional field of negativity and disapproval and piercing glances that ... certainly felt like real hatred".

Gore had basic training at Fort Dix from August to October, and then was assigned to be a journalist at Fort Rucker, Alabama. In April 1970, he was "Soldier of the Month".

His orders to be sent to Vietnam were "held up" for some time and he suspected that this was due to a fear by the Nixon administration that if something happened to him, his father would gain sympathy votes. He was finally shipped to Vietnam on January 2, 1971, after his father had lost his seat in the Senate during the 1970 Senate election, becoming one "of only about a dozen of the 1,115 Harvard graduates in the Class of '69 who went to Vietnam." Gore was stationed with the 20th Engineer Brigade in Bien Hoa and was a journalist with ''The Castle Courier.'' He received an honorable discharge from the Army in May 1971.

Of his time in the Army, Gore later stated, "I didn't do the most, or run the gravest danger. But I was proud to wear my country's uniform." He also later stated that his experience in Vietnam "didn't change my conclusions about the war being a terrible mistake, but it struck me that opponents to the war, including myself, really did not take into account the fact that there were an awful lot of South Vietnamese who desperately wanted to hang on to what they called freedom. Coming face to face with those sentiments expressed by people who did the laundry and ran the restaurants and worked in the fields was something I was naively unprepared for."

Vanderbilt and journalism

Gore was "dispirited" after his return from Vietnam. NashvillePost.com noted that, "his father's defeat made service in a conflict he deeply opposed even more abhorrent to Gore. His experiences in the war zone don't seem to have been deeply traumatic in themselves; although the engineers were sometimes fired upon, Gore has said he didn't see full-scale combat. Still, he felt that his participation in the war was wrong."

Although his parents wanted him to go to law school, Gore first attended Vanderbilt University Divinity School from 1971 to 1972 on Rockefeller Foundation scholarship for people planning secular careers. He later said he went there in order to explore "spiritual issues", and that "he had hoped to make sense of the social injustices that seemed to challenge his religious beliefs."

Gore also began to work the night shift for ''The Tennessean'' as an investigative reporter in 1971. His investigations of corruption among members of Nashville's Metro Council resulted in the arrest and prosecution of two councilmen for separate offenses.

He took a leave of absence from ''The Tennessean'' to attend Vanderbilt University Law School in 1974. His decision to become an attorney was a partial result of his time as a journalist, as he realized that while he could expose corruption, he could not change it. Gore did not complete law school, deciding abruptly in 1976 to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives when he found out that his father's former seat in the House was about to be vacated.

Congress and first presidential run (1976–1993)

Gore began serving in the U.S. Congress at the age of 28 and stayed there for the next 16 years, serving in both the House (1977–1985) and the Senate (1985–1993). Gore spent many weekends in Tennessee, working with his constituents.

House and Senate

At the end of February 1976, U.S. Representative Joe L. Evins unexpectedly announced his retirement from Congress, making the Tennessee's 4th congressional district seat to which he had succeeded Albert Gore, Sr. in 1953 open. Within hours after ''Tennessean'' publisher John Seigenthaler, Sr., called him to tell him the announcement was forthcoming, Gore decided to quit law school and run for the House of Representatives:

:Gore's abrupt decision to run for the open seat surprised even himself; he later said that 'I didn't realize myself I had been pulled back so much to it.' The news came as a 'bombshell' to his wife. Tipper Gore held a job in the ''Tennessean'''s photo lab and was working on a master's degree in psychology, but she joined in her husband's campaign (with assurance that she could get her job at the ''Tennessean'' back if he lost). By contrast, Gore asked his father to stay out of his campaign: 'I must become my own man,' he explained. 'I must not be your candidate.'

Gore won a seat in Congress in 1976 "with 32 percent of the vote, three percentage points more than his nearest rival." He won the next three elections in 1978, 1980, and 1982 where "he was unopposed twice and won 79 percent of the vote the other time." In 1984, Gore successfully ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate, which had been vacated by Republican Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker. He was "unopposed in the Democratic Senatorial primary and won the general election going away," despite the fact that Republican President Ronald Reagan swept Tennessee in his reelection campaign the same year.

During his time in Congress, Gore was considered a "moderate" (he referred to himself as a "raging moderate") opposing federal funding of abortion, voting in favor of a bill which supported a moment in silence in schools, and voting against a ban on interstate sales of guns. His position as a moderate (and on policies related to that label) shifted later in life after he became Vice President and ran for president in 2000.

During his time in the House, Gore sat on the Energy and Commerce and the Science and Technology committees, chairing the latter for four years. He also sat on the House Intelligence Committee and in 1982 introduced the ''Gore Plan'' for arms control, to "reduce chances of a nuclear first strike by cutting multiple warheads and deploying single-warhead mobile launchers." While in the Senate, he sat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the Rules and Administration, and the Armed Services Committees. In 1991, Gore was one of ten democrats who supported the Gulf War.

Gore was one of the ''Atari Democrats'' who were given this name due to their "passion for technological issues, from biomedical research and genetic engineering to the environmental impact of the "greenhouse effect." On March 19, 1979 he became the first member of Congress to appear on C-SPAN. During this time, Gore co-chaired the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future with Newt Gingrich. In addition, he has been described as having been a "genuine nerd, with a geek reputation running back to his days as a futurist ''Atari Democrat'' in the House. Before computers were comprehensible, let alone sexy, the poker-faced Gore struggled to explain artificial intelligence and fiber-optic networks to sleepy colleagues." Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn noted that, "as far back as the 1970s, Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship [...] the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication.

Gore introduced the Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986. He also sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises."

As a Senator, Gore began to craft the ''High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991'' (commonly referred to as "The Gore Bill") after hearing the 1988 report ''Toward a National Research Network'' submitted to Congress by a group chaired by UCLA professor of computer science, Leonard Kleinrock, one of the central creators of the ARPANET (the ARPANET, first deployed by Kleinrock and others in 1969, is the predecessor of the Internet). The bill was passed on December 9, 1991 and led to the National Information Infrastructure (NII) which Gore referred to as the "information superhighway."

After joining the U.S. House of Representatives, Gore held the "first congressional hearings on the climate change, and co-sponsor[ed] hearings on toxic waste and global warming." He continued to speak on the topic throughout the 1980s. In 1990, Senator Gore presided over a three-day conference with legislators from over 42 countries which sought to create a ''Global Marshall Plan,'' "under which industrial nations would help less developed countries grow economically while still protecting the environment."

First presidential run (1988)

Gore campaigned for the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States against Joe Biden, Gary Hart, Dick Gephardt, Paul Simon, Jesse Jackson, and Michael Dukakis (who eventually won the Democratic nomination). Gore carried seven states in the primaries, finishing third overall.

Although Gore initially denied that he intended to run, his candidacy was the subject of speculation: "National analysts make Sen. Gore a long-shot for the Presidential nomination, but many believe he could provide a natural complement for any of the other candidates: a young, attractive, moderate Vice Presidential nominee from the South. He currently denies any interest, but he carefully does not reject the idea out of hand." At the time, he was 39 years old, making him the "youngest serious Presidential candidate since John F. Kennedy."

After announcing that he would run, Gore ran his campaign as "a Southern centrist, [who] opposed federal funding for abortion. He favored a moment of silence for prayer in the schools and voted against banning the interstate sale of handguns."

CNN noted that, "in 1988, for the first time, 12 Southern states would hold their primaries on the same day, dubbed "Super Tuesday". Gore thought he would be the only serious Southern contender; he had not counted on Jesse Jackson." Jackson defeated Gore in the South Carolina Primary, winning, "more than half the total vote, three times that of his closest rival here, Senator Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee." Gore next placed great hope on Super Tuesday where they split the Southern vote: Jackson winning Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia; Gore winning Arkansas, North Carolina, Kentucky, Nevada, Tennessee, and Oklahoma. Gore was later endorsed by New York City Mayor, Ed Koch who made statements in favor of Israel and against Jackson. These statements cast Gore in a negative light, leading voters away from Gore who only received 10% of the vote in the New York Primary. Gore then dropped out of the race. ''The New York Times'' said that Gore also lost support due to his attacks against Jackson, Dukakis, and others.

Gore was eventually able to mend fences with Jackson who supported the Clinton-Gore ticket in 1992 and 1996, and campaigned for the Gore-Lieberman ticket during the 2000 presidential election. Gore's policies changed substantially in 2000, reflecting his eight years as Vice President.

Son's 1989 accident, 1992 election, and first book

On April 3, 1989 as the Gores and their six-year-old son Albert were leaving a baseball game, Albert ran across the street to see his friend and was hit by a car. He was thrown , and then traveled along the pavement for another . Gore later recalled: "I ran to his side and held him and called his name, but he was motionless, limp and still, without breath or pulse [...] His eyes were open with the nothingness stare of death, and we prayed, the two of us, there in the gutter, with only my voice." Albert was tended to by two nurses who happened to be present during the accident. The Gores spent the next month in the hospital with Albert. Gore also commented: "Our lives were consumed with the struggle to restore his body and spirit." This event was "a trauma so shattering that [Gore] views it as a moment of personal rebirth", a "key moment in his life" which "changed everything."

In August 1991, Gore announced that his son's accident was a factor in his decision not to run for president during the 1992 presidential election. Gore stated: "I would like to be President [...] But I am also a father, and I feel deeply about my responsibility to my children [...] I didn't feel right about tearing myself away from my family to the extent that is necessary in a Presidential campaign." During this time, Gore wrote ''Earth in the Balance'', a text which became the first book written by a sitting U.S. Senator to make the New York Times bestseller list since John F. Kennedy's ''Profiles in Courage''.

Vice presidency and second presidential run (1993–2001)

Vice presidency

Al Gore served as Vice President during the Clinton Administration. Gore was initially hesitant to accept a position as Bill Clinton's running mate for the 1992 United States presidential election, but after clashing with the George H. W. Bush administration over global warming issues, he decided to accept the offer. Clinton stated that he chose Gore due to his foreign policy experience, work with the environment, and commitment to his family.

Clinton's choice was criticized as unconventional because rather than picking a running mate who would diversify the ticket, Clinton chose a fellow Southerner who shared his political ideologies and who was nearly the same age as Clinton. The Washington Bureau Chief for ''The Baltimore Sun'', Paul West, later suggested that, "Al Gore revolutionized the way Vice Presidents are made. When he joined Bill Clinton's ticket, it violated the old rules. Regional diversity? Not with two Southerners from neighboring states. Ideological balance? A couple of left-of-center moderates. [...] And yet, Gore has come to be regarded by strategists in both parties as the best vice presidential pick in at least 20 years."

Clinton and Gore accepted the nomination at the Democratic National Convention on July 17, 1992. Known as the ''Baby Boomer Ticket'' and the ''Fortysomething Team,'' ''The New York Times'' noted that if elected, Clinton and Gore, at ages 45 and 44 respectively, would be the "youngest team to make it to the White House in the country's history." Theirs was the first ticket since 1972 to try to capture the youth vote. Gore called the ticket "a new generation of leadership".

The ticket increased in popularity after the candidates traveled with their wives, Hillary and Tipper, on a "six-day, 1,000-mile bus ride, from New York to St. Louis." Gore also successfully debated the other vice presidential candidates, Dan Quayle, and James Stockdale. The Clinton-Gore ticket beat the Bush-Quayle ticket, 43%-38%. Clinton and Gore were inaugurated on January 20, 1993 and were re-elected to a second term in the 1996 election.

At the beginning of the first term, Clinton and Gore developed a "two-page agreement outlining their relationship." Clinton committed himself to regular lunch meetings, recognized Gore as a principal adviser on nominations, and appointed some of Gore's chief advisers to key White House staff positions [...] Clinton involved Gore in decision-making to an unprecedented degree for a Vice President. Through their weekly lunches and daily conversations, Gore became the president's "indisputable chief adviser."

Gore had a particular interest in reducing "waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government and advocated trimming the size of the bureaucracy and the number of regulations." During the Clinton Administration, the U.S. economy expanded, according to David Greenberg (professor of history and media studies at Rutgers University) who said that "by the end of the Clinton presidency, the numbers were uniformly impressive. Besides the record-high surpluses and the record-low poverty rates, the economy could boast the longest economic expansion in history; the lowest unemployment since the early 1970s; and the lowest poverty rates for single mothers, black Americans, and the aged."

According to Leslie Budd, author of ''E-economy: Rhetoric or Business Reality'', this economic success was due, in part, to Gore's continued role as an ''Atari Democrat,'' promoting the development of information technology, which led to the dot-com boom (c. 1995-2001). Clinton and Gore entered office planning to finance research that would "flood the economy with innovative goods and services, lifting the general level of prosperity and strengthening American industry." Their overall aim was to fund the development of, "robotics, smart roads, biotechnology, machine tools, magnetic-levitation trains, fiber-optic communications and national computer networks. Also earmarked [were] a raft of basic technologies like digital imaging and data storage." Critics claimed that the initiatives would "backfire, bloating Congressional pork and creating whole new categories of Federal waste."

During the election and his term as Vice President, Gore popularized the term ''Information Superhighway'', which became synonymous with the Internet, and he was involved in the creation of the National Information Infrastructure. Gore first discussed his plans to emphasize information technology at UCLA on January 11, 1994 in a speech at The Superhighway Summit. He was involved in a number of projects including NetDay'96 and 24 Hours in Cyberspace. The Clinton–Gore administration also launched the first official White House website in 1994 and subsequent versions through 2000. The Clipper Chip, which "Clinton inherited from a multi-year National Security Agency effort," was a method of hardware encryption with a government backdoor. It met with strong opposition from civil liberty groups and was abandoned by 1996.

Gore was also involved in a number of initiatives related to the environment. He launched the GLOBE program on Earth Day '94, an education and science activity that, according to ''Forbes magazine'', "made extensive use of the Internet to increase student awareness of their environment". During the late 1990s, Gore strongly pushed for the passage of the Kyoto Protocol, which called for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Gore was opposed by the Senate, which passed unanimously (95–0) the Byrd–Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98). In 1998, Gore began promoting a NASA satellite that would provide a constant view of the earth, marking the first time such an image would have been made since ''The Blue Marble'' photo from the 1972 Apollo 17 mission. During this time, he also became associated with Digital Earth.

In 1996 Gore became involved in a finance controversy over his attendance at an event at the Buddhist Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California. In an interview on NBC's ''Today'' the following year, Gore said, "I did not know that it was a fund-raiser. I knew it was a political event, and I knew there were finance people that were going to be present, and so that alone should have told me, 'This is inappropriate and this is a mistake; don't do this.' And I take responsibility for that. It was a mistake." In March 1997, Gore had to explain phone calls which he made to solicit funds for the Democratic Party for the 1996 election. In a news conference, Gore stated that, "all calls that I made were charged to the Democratic National Committee. I was advised there was nothing wrong with that. My counsel tells me there is no controlling legal authority that says that is any violation of any law." The phrase "no controlling legal authority" was criticized by columnist Charles Krauthammer, who stated: "Whatever other legacies Al Gore leaves behind between now and retirement, he forever bequeaths this newest weasel word to the lexicon of American political corruption." Robert Conrad, Jr. was the head of a Justice Department task force appointed by Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate Gore's fund-raising controversies. In Spring 2000, Conrad asked Reno to appoint an independent counsel to continue the investigation. After looking into the matter, Reno judged that the appointment of an independent counsel was unwarranted.

During the 1990s, Gore spoke out on a number of issues. In a 1992 speech on the Gulf War, Gore stated that he twice attempted to get the U.S. government to pull the plug on support to Saddam Hussein, citing Hussein's use of poison gas, support of terrorism, and his burgeoning nuclear program, but was opposed both times by the Reagan and Bush administrations. In the wake of the Al-Anfal Campaign, during which Hussein staged deadly mustard and nerve gas attacks on Kurdish Iraqis, Gore cosponsored the Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988, which would have cut all assistance to Iraq. The bill was defeated in part due to intense lobbying of Congress by the Reagan-Bush White House and a veto threat from President Reagan. In 1998, at a conference of APEC hosted by Malaysia, Gore objected to the indictment, arrest and jailing of President Mahathir Mohammad’s longtime second-in-command Anwar Ibrahim, a move which received a negative response from leaders there. Ten years later, Gore again protested when Ibrahim was arrested a second time, a decision condemned by Malaysian foreign minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim.

Soon afterwards, Gore also had to contend with the Lewinsky scandal, involving an affair between President Clinton and an intern, Monica Lewinsky. Gore initially defended Clinton, whom he believed to be innocent, stating, "He is the president of the country! He is my friend [...] I want to ask you now, every single one of you, to join me in supporting him." After Clinton was impeached Gore continued to defend him stating, "I've defined my job in exactly the same way for six years now [...] to do everything I can to help him be the best president possible."

Second presidential run (2000)

There was talk of a potential run in the 2000 presidential race by Gore as early as January 1998. Gore discussed the possibility of running during a March 9, 1999 interview with CNN's ''Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer''. In response to Wolf Blitzer's question: "Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley," Gore responded:

:I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be. But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

Former UCLA professor of information studies Philip E. Agre and journalist Eric Boehlert argued that three articles in ''Wired News'' led to the creation of the widely spread urban legend that Gore claimed to have "invented the Internet," which followed this interview. In addition, computer professionals and congressional colleagues argued in his defense. Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn stated that "we don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he 'invented' the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet." Cerf would later state: "Al Gore had seen what happened with the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, which his father introduced as a military bill. It was very powerful. Housing went up, suburban boom happened, everybody became mobile. Al was attuned to the power of networking much more than any of his elective colleagues. His initiatives led directly to the commercialization of the Internet. So he really does deserve credit." Former Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich also stated: "In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is – and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a "futures group" – the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the '80s began to actually happen." Finally, Wolf Blitzer (who conducted the original 1999 interview) stated in 2008 that: "I didn't ask him about the Internet. I asked him about the differences he had with Bill Bradley [...] Honestly, at the time, when he said it, it didn't dawn on me that this was going to have the impact that it wound up having, because it was distorted to a certain degree and people said they took what he said, which was a carefully phrased comment about taking the initiative and creating the Internet to—I invented the Internet. And that was the sort of shorthand, the way his enemies projected it and it wound up being a devastating setback to him and it hurt him, as I'm sure he acknowledges to this very day."

Gore himself would later poke fun at the controversy. In 2000, while on ''The Late Show with David Letterman'' he read ''Letterman's Top 10 List'' (which for this show was called, "Top Ten Rejected Gore – Lieberman Campaign Slogans") to the audience. Number nine on the list was: "Remember, America, I gave you the Internet, and I can take it away!" In 2005 when Gore was awarded the ''Lifetime Achievement Award'' "for three decades of contributions to the Internet" at the ''Webby Awards'' he joked in his acceptance speech (limited to five words according to ''Webby Awards'' rules): "Please don't recount this vote." He was introduced by Vint Cerf who used the same format to joke: "We all invented the Internet." Gore, who was then asked to add a few more words to his speech, stated: "It is time to reinvent the Internet for all of us to make it more robust and much more accessible and use it to reinvigorate our democracy."

Gore formally announced his candidacy for president in a speech on June 16, 1999, in Carthage, Tennessee, with his major theme being the need to strengthen the American family. He was introduced by his eldest daughter, Karenna Gore Schiff. In making the speech, Gore also distanced himself from Bill Clinton, whom he stated had lied to him. Gore was "briefly interrupted" by AIDS protesters claiming Gore was working with the pharmaceutical industry to prevent access to generic medicines for poor nations and chanting "Gore's greed kills." Additional speeches were also interrupted by the protesters. Gore responded, "I love this country. I love the First Amendment [...] Let me say in response to those who may have chosen an inappropriate way to make their point, that actually the crisis of AIDS in Africa is one that should command the attention of people in the United States and around the world." Gore also issued a statement saying that he supported efforts to lower the cost of the AIDS drugs, provided that they "are done in a way consistent with international agreements."

Gore faced an early challenge by former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley. Bradley was the only candidate to oppose Gore and was considered a "fresh face" for the White House. Gore challenged Bradley to a series of debates which took the form of "town hall" meetings. Gore went on the offensive during these debates leading to a drop in the polls for Bradley. Gore eventually went on to win every primary and caucus and, in March 2000 even won the first primary election ever held over the Internet, the Arizona Presidential Primary. By then, he secured the Democratic nomination.

On August 13, 2000, Gore announced that he had selected Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as his vice presidential running mate. Lieberman became "the first person of the Jewish faith to run for the nation's second-highest office" (Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964, was of "Jewish origin"). Lieberman, who was a more conservative Democrat than Gore, had publicly blasted President Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky affair. Many pundits saw Gore's choice of Lieberman as further distancing him from the scandals of the Clinton White House. Gore's daughter, Karenna, together with her father's former Harvard roommate Tommy Lee Jones, officially nominated Gore as the Democratic presidential candidate during the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, California. Gore accepted his party's nomination and spoke about the major themes of his campaign, stating in particular his plan to extend Medicare to pay for prescription drugs, to work for a sensible universal health-care system. Soon after the convention, Gore hit the campaign trail with running mate Joe Lieberman. Gore and Bush were deadlocked in the polls. Gore and Bush participated in three televised debates. While both sides claimed victory after each, Gore was critiqued as either too stiff, too reticent, or too aggressive in contrast to Bush.

Recount

On election night, news networks first called Florida for Gore, later retracted the projection, and then called Florida for Bush, before finally retracting that projection as well. Florida's Republican Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, eventually certified Florida's vote count. This led to the Florida election recount, a move to further examine the Florida results.

The Florida recount was stopped a few weeks later by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the ruling, ''Bush v. Gore'', the Justices held that the Florida recount was unconstitutional and that no constitutionally valid recount could be completed by the December 12 deadline, effectively ending the recounts. This 7–2 vote ruled that the standards the Florida Supreme Court provided for a recount were unconstitutional due to violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and further ruled 5–4 that no constitutionally valid recount could be completed by the December 12 deadline. This case ordered an end to recounting underway in selected Florida counties, effectively giving George W. Bush a 537 vote victory in Florida and consequently Florida's 25 electoral votes and the presidency. The results of the decision led to Gore winning the popular vote by approximately 500,000 votes nationwide, but receiving 266 electoral votes to Bush's 271 (one District of Columbia elector abstained). On December 13, 2000, Gore conceded the election. Gore strongly disagreed with the Court's decision, but in his concession speech stated that, "for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession."

The 2000 election is the subject of a 2008 made-for-TV movie directed by Jay Roach, produced by, and starring Kevin Spacey called ''Recount.'' It premiered on the HBO cable network on May 25, 2008.

Post Vice Presidency

After maintaining an informal public distance for eight years, Bill Clinton and Gore reunited for the media in August 2009 after Clinton arranged for the release of two journalists who were being held hostage in N. Korea. The two women were employees of Gore's Current TV.

Criticism of Bush

Beginning in late 2002, Gore began to publicly criticize the Bush administration. In a September 23, 2002 speech given before the Commonwealth Club of California, Gore criticized President George W. Bush and Congress for the rush to war prior to the outbreak of hostilities in Iraq. He compared this decision to the Gulf War (which Gore had voted for) stating, "Back in 1991, I was one of a handful of Democrats in the United States Senate to vote in favor of the resolution endorsing the Persian Gulf War [...] But look at the differences between the resolution that was voted on in 1991 and the one this administration is proposing that the Congress vote on in 2002. The circumstances are really completely different. To review a few of them briefly: in 1991, Iraq had crossed an international border, invaded a neighboring sovereign nation and annexed its territory. Now by contrast in 2002, there has been no such invasion." In a speech given in 2004, during the presidential election, Gore accused George W. Bush of betraying the country by using the 9/11 attacks as a justification for the invasion of Iraq. The next year, Gore gave a speech which covered many topics, including what he called "religious zealots" who claim special knowledge of God's will in American politics. Gore stated: "They even claim that those of us who disagree with their point of view are waging war against people of faith." After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Gore chartered two planes to evacuate 270 people from New Orleans and criticized the Bush administration's response to the hurricane. In 2006, Gore criticized Bush's use of domestic wiretaps without a warrant. One month later, in a speech given at the Jeddah Economic Forum, Gore criticized the treatment of Arabs in the U.S. after 9/11 stating, "Unfortunately there have been terrible abuses and it's wrong [...] I do want you to know that it does not represent the desires or wishes or feelings of the majority of the citizens of my country." Gore's 2007 book, ''The Assault on Reason,'' is an analysis of what Gore refers to as the "emptying out of the marketplace of ideas" in civic discourse during the Bush administration. He attributes this phenomenon to the influence of television and argues that it endangers American democracy. By contrast, Gore argues, the Internet can revitalize and ultimately "redeem the integrity of representative democracy." In 2008, Gore argued against the ban of same-sex marriage on his Current TV website, stating, "I think that gay men and women ought to have the same rights as heterosexual men and women to make contracts, have hospital visiting rights, and join together in marriage." In a 2009 interview with CNN, Gore commented on former Vice President Dick Cheney's criticism of the Obama administration. Referring to his own previous criticism of the Bush administration, Gore stated: "I waited two years after I left office to make statements that were critical, and then of the policy [...] You know, you talk about somebody that shouldn't be talking about making the country less safe, invading a country that did not attack us and posed no serious threat to us at all."

Presidential run speculation

Gore was a speculated candidate for the 2004 Presidential Election (a bumper sticker, "Re-elect Gore in 2004!" was popular). On December 16, 2002, however, Gore announced that he would not run in 2004. Despite Gore taking himself out of the race, a handful of his supporters formed a national campaign to draft him into running. One observer concluded it was “Al Gore who has the best chance to defeat the incumbent president,” noting that “of the 43 Presidents, only three have been direct descendents of former Presidents:” John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison, and George W. Bush, that “all three won the office only after... anomalies in the Electoral College,” that the first two were defeated for re-election in a populist backlash, and finally that “the men who first lost to the presidential progeny and then beat them” (i.e. Andrew Jackson and Grover Cleveland) “each won a sort of immortality--having his image placed on a unit of US currency,” and that Gore should answer this call of history. The draft movement, however, failed to convince Gore to run.

The prospect of a Gore candidacy arose again between 2006 to early 2008 in light of the upcoming 2008 presidential election. Although Gore frequently stated that he had "no plans to run," he did not reject the possibility of future involvement in politics which led to speculation that he might run. This was due in part to his increased popularity after the release of the 2006 documentary, ''An Inconvenient Truth''. The director of the film, Davis Guggenheim, stated that after the release of the film, "Everywhere I go with him, they treat him like a rock star." After ''An Inconvenient Truth'' was nominated for an Academy Award, Donna Brazile (Gore's campaign chairwoman from his 2000 campaign) speculated that Gore might announce a possible presidential candidacy during the Oscars. During the 79th Academy Awards ceremony, Gore and actor Leonardo DiCaprio shared the stage to speak about the "greening" of the ceremony itself. Gore began to give a speech that appeared to be leading up to an announcement that he would run for president. However, background music drowned him out and he was escorted offstage, implying that it was a rehearsed gag, which he later acknowledged. After ''An Inconvenient Truth'' won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, speculation increased about a possible presidential run. Gore's popularity was indicated in polls which showed that even without running, he was coming in second or third among possible Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. Grassroots draft campaigns also developed with the hope that they could encourage Gore to run. Gore, however, remained firm in his decision and declined to run for the presidency.

Involvement in presidential campaigns

After announcing he would not run in the 2004 U.S. presidential election, Gore endorsed Vermont governor Howard Dean in December, 2003, weeks before the first primary of the election cycle. He was criticized for this endorsement by eight Democratic contenders particularly since he did not endorse his former running mate Joe Lieberman (Gore preferred Dean over Lieberman because Lieberman supported the Iraq War and Gore did not). Dean's campaign soon became a target of attacks and eventually failed, with Gore's early endorsement being credited as a factor. In ''The New York Times,'' Dean stated: "I actually do think the endorsement of Al Gore began the decline." The ''Times'' further noted that "Dean instantly amplified his statement to indicate that the endorsement from Mr. Gore, a powerhouse of the establishment, so threatened the other Democratic candidates that they began the attacks on his candidacy that helped derail it." Dean's former campaign manager, Joe Trippi, also stated that after Gore's endorsement of Dean, "alarm bells went off in every newsroom in the country, in every other campaign in the country," indicating that if something did not change, Dean would be the nominee. Later, in March 2004, Gore endorsed John Kerry and gave Kerry $6 million in funds left over from his own unsuccessful 2000 bid. Gore also opened the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

During the 2008 primaries, Gore remained neutral toward all of the candidates which led to speculation that he would come out of a brokered 2008 Democratic National Convention as a "compromise candidate" if the party decided it could not nominate one. Gore responded by stating that these events would not take place because a candidate would be nominated through the primary process. When Senator Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president on June 3, 2008, speculation began that Gore might be tapped for the vice presidency. On June 16, 2008 (a week after Hillary Clinton had suspended her campaign), Gore endorsed Obama in a speech given in Detroit, Michigan which renewed speculation of an Obama-Gore ticket. Gore stated, however, that he was not interested in being Vice President again. On the timing and nature of Gore's endorsement, some argued that Gore waited because he did not want to repeat his calamitous early endorsement of Howard Dean during the 2004 Presidential Election. On the final night of the 2008 Democratic National Convention, shortly before Obama delivered his acceptance address, Gore gave a speech offering his full support. Such support led to new speculation after Obama was elected President during the 2008 Presidential election that Gore would be named a member of the Obama administration. This speculation was enhanced by a meeting held between Obama, Gore, and Joe Biden in Chicago on December 9, 2008. However, Democratic officials and Gore's spokeswoman stated that during the meeting the only subject under discussion was the climate crisis, and Gore would not be joining the Obama administration. On December 19, 2008, Gore described Obama's environmental administrative choices of Carol Browner, Steven Chu, and Lisa Jackson as "an exceptional team to lead the fight against the climate crisis."

Environmentalism

Overview

Gore has been involved with environmental issues since 1976, when as a freshman congressman, he held the "first congressional hearings on the climate change, and co-sponsor[ed] hearings on toxic waste and global warming." He continued to speak on the topic throughout the 1980s and was known as one of the ''Atari Democrats'', later called the "Democrats' Greens, politicians who see issues like clean air, clean water and global warming as the key to future victories for their party."

In 1990, Senator Gore presided over a three-day conference with legislators from over 42 countries which sought to create a ''Global Marshall Plan,'' "under which industrial nations would help less developed countries grow economically while still protecting the environment." In the late 1990s, Gore strongly pushed for the passage of the Kyoto Protocol, which called for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. He was opposed by the Senate, which passed unanimously (95–0) the Byrd–Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States".

In 2004 he co-launched Generation Investment Management, a company for which he serves as Chair. A few years later, Gore also founded The Alliance for Climate Protection, an organization which eventually founded the ''We Campaign''. Gore also became a partner in the venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, heading that firm's climate change solutions group. He also helped to organize the ''Live Earth'' benefit concerts.

Criticism

::::::: Gore's involvement in environmental issues has been criticized. For example, he has been labeled a "carbon billionaire" and accused of profiting from his advocacy; a charge which he has denied, by saying, among other things, that he has not been "working on this issue for 30 years... because of greed". A conservative Washington D.C. think tank, and a Republican member of Congress, among others, have claimed that Gore has a conflict-of-interest for advocating for taxpayer subsidies of green-energy technologies in which he has a personal investment. Additionally, he has been criticized for his above-average energy consumption in using private jets, and in owning multiple, very large homes, one of which was reported in 2007 as using high amounts of electricity. Gore's spokesperson responded by stating that the Gores use renewable energy which is more expensive than regular energy and that the Tennessee house in question has been retrofitted to make it more energy efficient. Philosopher A. C. Grayling defended Al Gore, arguing that Gore's personal lifestyle does nothing to impugn his message and that Gore's critics have committed the ad hominem fallacy.

Data in ''An Inconvenient Truth'' have been questioned. In a 2007 court case, a British judge said that while he had "no doubt ...the film was broadly accurate" and its "four main scientific hypotheses ...are supported by a vast quantity of research," he upheld nine of a "long schedule" of alleged errors presented to the court. He ruled that the film could be shown to schoolchildren in the UK if guidance notes given to teachers were amended to balance out the film's one-sided political views. Gore's spokeswoman responded in 2007 that the court had upheld the film's fundamental thesis and its use as an educational tool. In 2009, an interviewer asked Gore about the British court challenge and the nine "errors", and Gore responded, "the ruling was in my favour."

Organizations including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) criticized Gore for not advocating vegetarianism as a way for individuals to reduce their carbon footprint. Gore agreed that meat production contributes to increased carbon emissions, but did not want to "go quite as far as ... saying everybody should become a vegetarian". He said that although he is not a vegetarian, he has "cut back sharply" on his consumption of meat.

When asked by Bjørn Lomborg to debate whether spending on health and education should take priority over limiting carbon emissions, Gore responded that he would not debate because the “scientific community has gone through this chapter and verse. We have long since passed the time when we should pretend this is a ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ issue . . . . It’s not a matter of theory or conjecture."

Awards and honors

Gore is the recipient of a number of awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize (together with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in 2007, a Primetime Emmy Award for Current TV in 2007, a Webby Award in 2005 and the Prince of Asturias Award in 2007 for International Cooperation. He also starred in the 2006 documentary ''An Inconvenient Truth,'' which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2007 and wrote the book ''An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It'', which won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album in 2009.

See also

Al Gore and information technology

Al Gore and the environment

Gore effect

Selected publications

Books

''Know Climate Change'' and ''101 Q and A on Climate Change'' from 'Save Planet Earth Series', 2008 (children's books)

''Putting People First: How We Can All Change America.'' (with William J. Clinton). New York: Times Books, 1992 .

Articles

"Toward Sustainable Capitalism: Long-term incentives are the antidote to the short-term greed that caused our current economic woes. ''Wall Street Journal'', June 24, 2010.(With David Blood)

"We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change." ''New York Times'', February 27, 2010.

"The Climate for Change." ''New York Times'', November 9, 2008.

Vice President Al Gore's introduction to ''Earthwatch: 24 Hours In Cyberspace. February 8, 1996. ''24 Hours in Cyberspace''

"Foreword by Vice President Al Gore." In ''The Internet Companion: A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking (2nd edition)'' by Tracy LaQuey, 1994.

"Introduction. In ''Silent Spring'' by Rachel Carson. 1994. New York : Houghton-Mifflin.

''The Climate Change Action Plan.'' Washington, D.C.: The White House, October, 1993 (with William J. Clinton).

"Infrastructure for the global village: computers, networks and public policy." ''Scientific American Special Issue on Communications, Computers, and Networks,'' September 1991. 265(3): 150–153.

Notes

References

Agre, Phil. ''Who Invented "Invented"?:Tracing the Real Story of the "Al Gore Invented the Internet" Hoax''. October 17, 2000

Campbell-Kelly, Martin; Aspray, William. "Chapter 12." ''Computer: A History of the Information Machine.'' New York: BasicBooks, 1996.

Chapman, Gary and Marc Rotenberg. ''The National Information Infrastructure:A Public Interest Opportunity.'' In ''Computers, Ethics, & Social Values''. Deborah G. Johnson and Helen Nissanbaum (eds.). Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1995: 628-644.

Cockburn, Alexander. ''Al Gore: A User's Manual'' (2000) (with Jeffrey St. Clair) ISBN 1-85984-803-6

Kirk, Andrew G. ''Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism''. Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 2007.

Rheingold, Howard. "Afterword to the 1994 edition." ''The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (revised edition). '' Cambridge: MIT, 2000.

Stix, Gary. Gigabit Gestalt: Clinton and Gore embrace an activist technology policy. ''Scientific American'', May, 1993.

Turque, Bill, ''Inventing Al Gore'', Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000, ISBN 0-618-13160-4

External links

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 lecture at NobelPrize.org

Partners at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

;Articles

Ask Mr. Science: The moral flaws of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, Gregg Easterbrook, Slate magazine, May 24, 2006

A challenge to our moral imagination, interview with Al Gore 2007

FACTBOX: Al Gore since 2000 White House defeat, ''Reuters'', July 31, 2008

Al Gore addresses the inaugural The Times-Smith School Forum on Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University, July 2009

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Name	Alastair Campbell
Office	Downing Street Director of Communications and Strategy
Term start	15 July 2000
Term end	29 August 2003
Primeminister	Tony Blair
Office2	Downing Street Press Secretary
Term start2	2 May 1997
Term end2	15 July 2000
Primeminister2	Tony Blair
Birth date	May 25, 1957
Birth place	Yorkshire, England, UK
Alma mater	Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Party	Labour
Occupation	Journalist, author, broadcaster
Partner	Fiona Millar
Children	3
Religion	Atheist
Signature	AlastairCampbellSignature.gif }}

Alastair John Campbell (born 25 May 1957) is a British journalist, broadcaster, political aide and author, best known for his work as Director of Communications and Strategy for Prime Minister Tony Blair between 1997 and 2003, having first started working for Blair in 1994. Campbell describes himself as a "Communicator, Writer and Strategist" on his website, while others have described him as Labour's "unelected, but ... hardly underscrutinised" spin doctor.

Early life

Alastair John Campbell was born on 25 May 1957 in Yorkshire, son of a Scottish veterinary surgeon, Donald Campbell, and his wife Elizabeth. Campbell's parents had moved to Keighley when his father became a partner in a local veterinary practice. Donald was a Gaelic-speaker from the island of Tiree; his wife was from Ayrshire. Campbell has two elder brothers, Donald and Graeme, and a younger sister, Elizabeth. Even though Alastair was born in Yorkshire, he would go over the county border to Lancashire to watch Burnley Football Club with his father, Donald.

He attended City of Leicester Boys' Grammar School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied modern languages, French and German, for which he received an upper second (2:1). He later claimed he wrote essays based solely on works of literary criticism, often rather than having read the works themselves. He spent a year in the south of France as part of his degree course.

Campbell became interested in journalism. His first published work was ''Inter-City Ditties'', his winning entry to a readers' competition in the pornographic magazine ''Forum''. This led to a lengthy stint writing pieces for the magazine with such titles as ''Busking with Bagpipes'' and ''The Riviera Gigolo'', written in a style calculated to lead readers at the time to believe they were descriptions of his own sexual exploits.

Campbell became a sports reporter on the ''Tavistock Times''. His first significant contribution to the news pages was coverage of the Penlee lifeboat disaster. As a trainee on the Plymouth-based ''Sunday Independent'', then owned by Mirror Group Newspapers, he met his partner Fiona Millar, with whom he has three children, two sons (born November 1987 and July 1989) and a daughter (born May 1993).

National newspapers

Campbell moved to the London office of the ''Daily Mirror'', England's sole remaining big-circulation supporter of the Labour Party. He became a political correspondent. His rapid rise and its accompanying stress led to alcohol abuse.

Alcoholism and depression

Campbell was admitted to hospital in 1986 when he travelled to Scotland to cover Neil Kinnock's visit to Glasgow. He was detained by the police for his own safety after being observed behaving oddly. Police contacted his partner and following her calls to friends in Scotland the police let a family friend take Campbell to Ross Hall Hospital, a private BMI hospital in Glasgow where she and her father visited him. Over the next five days as an inpatient he was given medication to calm him, and he realised that he had an alcohol problem after seeing the psychiatrist. Campbell said that from that day onwards he counted each one that he did not drink alcohol, and did not stop counting until he had reached thousands.

Campbell returned to England, preferring to stay with friends near Cheltenham, rather than return to London (and his partner) where he did not feel safe. His condition continued with a phase of depression, and he was reluctant to seek further medical help. He eventually cooperated with treatment from his family doctor.

Return to work

His first son was born in 1987; and when Campbell returned to the ''Daily Mirror'', he had to restart at a low grade again and work nightshifts, but rebuilt his career and became political editor.

He was a close advisor of Neil Kinnock, going on holiday with the Kinnocks, and worked closely with Robert Maxwell. Campbell's loyalty to Maxwell was demonstrated when he punched ''The Guardian'' journalist Michael White after White joked about "Captain Bob, Bob, Bob...bobbing" in the Atlantic Ocean shortly after Maxwell's drowning in 1991. Campbell later put this down to stress at the thought of himself and others losing their job following the demise of the ''Daily Mirror'' proprietor.

After leaving the ''Mirror'', Campbell became political editor of ''Today'', a full-colour tabloid newspaper which had launched in 1986, but was now trying to turn leftward. He was working there when John Smith died in 1994. He was a well-known face and helped to interview the three candidates for the new Labour Party leader; it was later revealed he had already formed links with Tony Blair.

Politics and government

Shortly after Blair won and became leader of the Labour Party in 1994, Campbell left the newspaper to become his spokesman. Having recovered and become teetotal, he told Blair about his illness, which Blair did not see as a problem. He played an important role in the run-up to the 1997 general election, working with Peter Mandelson to co-ordinate Labour's campaign. He also worked hard to win support from the national media for the Labour Party, particularly from the newspapers who for many years had been anti-Labour. By March 1997, many of the leading newspapers - including ''The Sun'', once a staunch Thatcherite paper - had declared their support for Labour.

He moved into government when Labour won the general election in May 1997 and was the Prime Minister's chief press secretary until 2000. He then moved to the post of Prime Minister's Director of Communications which gave him a strategic role in overseeing government communications. He was sponsored by the US President George W. Bush to complete the London marathon in aid of a cancer charity, Leukaemia Research.

Iraq War

In the runup to the Iraq War Campbell was involved in the preparation and release of the "September Dossier" in September 2002 and the "Iraq Dossier" in February 2003. These documents argued the case for concern over possible weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. Both have been criticized as overstating or distorting the actual intelligence findings. Subsequent investigation revealed that the September Dossier had been altered, on Campbell's orders, to be consistent with a speech given by George W. Bush and statements by other United States officials. On 9 September 2002, Campbell sent a memo to John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, in which Campbell directed that the British dossier be "one that complements rather than conflicts with" the U.S. claims.

Later in 2003, commenting on WMDs in Iraq he said, "Come on, you don't seriously think we won't find anything?". He resigned in August 2003 during the Hutton Inquiry into the death of David Kelly. (Kelly's view that the government grossly exaggerated the Iraqi threat in the notorious 'dodgy dossier', told to BBC journalists Andrew Gilligan and Susan Watts, had led to Campbell battling with the BBC. "The government was determined to use Dr Kelly in its battle against the BBC, and he and Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon had taken the decision, in Campbell's words, 'to fuck Gilligan'. The counsel for the Kelly family said to Lord Hutton: 'The family invite the inquiry to find that the government made a deliberate decision to use Dr Kelly as a pawn as part of its strategy in its battle with the BBC.')

Campbell gave evidence to the Iraq Inquiry on 12 January 2011.

Later career

Campbell worked again for the Labour Party in the run-up to the May 2005 General Election. Sir Clive Woodward recruited Campbell to manage relations with the press for the British and Irish Lions tour to New Zealand in 2005. Campbell wrote a column for ''The Times'' during the tour.

Throughout his time in Downing Street, Campbell kept a diary which reportedly totalled some two million words. Selected extracts, entitled ''The Blair Years'', were published on 9 July 2007. Subsequent press coverage of the book's release included coverage of what Campbell had chosen to leave out, particularly in respect of the relationship between Blair and his Chancellor and successor, Gordon Brown. Campbell expressed an intention to one day publish the diaries in fuller form, and indicated in the introduction to the book that he did not wish to make matters harder for Brown in his new role as Prime Minister, or to damage the Labour Party.

Campbell has his own website and blog, as well as several pages on social networking websites. He uses these platforms to discuss British politics and other topics close to his heart. So far, Campbell's commentaries and views have garnered media attention and generated ample interest among various on-line communities. In October 2008, he broadcast the personal story of his mental illness in a television documentary partly to reduce the stigma of that illness. He has written a novel on the subject entitled ''All in the Mind''.

Campbell appeared as a mentor in the BBC Two series ''The Speaker'' in April 2009 offering his advice on persuasive speaking. He is a lifelong supporter of Burnley Football Club and writes about their exploits in a column called "Turf Moor Diaries" for the FanHouse UK football blog . He is regularly involved in many different events with Burnley Football Club.

Campbell made his first appearance on the BBC One political discussion programme ''Question Time'' on 27 May 2010. At the opening of the edition, presenter David Dimbleby said that Downing Street would not allow a front bench member of the government to appear on the show unless Campbell was dropped. The BBC refused to do this. The Government later accused the BBC of behaving improperly for allowing Campbell to appear as a more in-depth version of his diaries was due to be published the following week, and a Downing Street spokesman told ''The Guardian'', "Campbell seemed to be on because he's flogging a book next week, so the BBC haven't behaved entirely properly here." Campbell said that he had waited until Labour were in opposition before appearing on the show and that the date was a coincidence as it was the only time he was free. He suggested the discord was part of a Conservative anti-BBC agenda. The Minister who had been scheduled to appear was the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury David Laws who Campbell produced a picture of during the programme. Three days later Laws resigned his post following revelations about possible irregularities in his expenses claims in ''The Telegraph'' the day before.

Campbell appeared on BBC's Top Gear in July 2010 and set a time of 1:47 around the Top Gear Test Track in the Star in a Reasonably-Priced Car segment, setting the second fastest time around the track at that time.

He also took part in the 2011 Channel Four television series Jamie's Dream School.

In 2011, Campbell contacted the Metropolitan Police with suspicions that his phone was hacked by the ''News of the World'' in 2003.

Stage and screen portrayals

A regular feature of ''Bremner, Bird and Fortune'' is a satirical version of Campbell's discussions with Tony Blair, in which Rory Bremner plays Blair and Andrew Dunn plays Campbell. In 2005, Campbell was played by Jonathan Cake in the Channel 4 television film ''The Government Inspector'', based on the David Kelly Case. The following year, he was portrayed by Mark Bazeley in the Stephen Frears film ''The Queen'' - a role reprised by Bazeley in 2010 follow-up ''The Special Relationship'', also written by Peter Morgan but this time directed by Richard Loncraine. Alex Jennings, who portrayed Prince Charles in ''The Queen'', portrayed Campbell in the television drama ''A Very Social Secretary''. In an episode of Dead Ringers his close relationship with Tony Blair is satirized in an imaginary scenario where Tony is divorcing his wife. He is asked if it will be difficult to sack the person he most loves and cherishes replying "I'm not sacking Alistair Campbell"

It is also hinted that the character of Malcolm Tucker from the BBC political satire comedy ''The Thick of It'' is loosely based on Campbell. Tucker is famous for his short fuse and use of very strong language. Campbell himself seems to have a few qualms about being associated with the character. In an interview with Mark Kermode on BBC2's The Culture Show, he denied that the two are similar in any relevant way, but admitted to his liberal use of profanities in the workplace.

Selected works

''The Blair Years'' (2007). Random House. ISBN 0-09-951475-3 ''All in the Mind'' (2008). Hutchinson. ISBN 0-09-192578-9 ''Maya'' (2010). Hutchinson. ISBN 0-09-193087-1

References

Further reading

Jones, Nicholas (2000). ''Sultans of Spin: The Media and the New Labour Government''. Orion Books. ISBN 0-7528-2769-3.

Oborne, Peter and Simon Walters (2004). ''Alastair Campbell''. Aurum. ISBN 1-84513-001-4

Rawnsley, Andrew (2001). ''Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour''. Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-027850-8.

Seldon, Anthony (2005). ''Blair''. The Free Press. ISBN 0-7432-3212-7.

External links

www.alastaircampbell.org official website

Article archive at ''The Guardian''

Article archive at Journalisted

Profile: Alastair Campbell, ''BBC News'', 29 August 2003

Campbell defiant over Lions role, ''BBC News'', 20 July 2005

Leukaemia Research, the charity Alastair Campbell fundraises for

Category:1957 births Category:Living people Category:Alumni of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Category:English people of Scottish descent Category:British newspaper editors Category:British public relations people Category:British special advisers Category:English atheists Category:Labour Party (UK) officials Category:People from Leicester Category:Witnesses of the Iraq Inquiry

de:Alastair Campbell es:Alastair Campbell fr:Alastair Campbell it:Alastair Campbell la:Alexander Campbell nl:Alastair Campbell no:Alastair Campbell simple:Alastair Campbell fi:Alastair Campbell