LONDON, Oct 25: US President George Bush "has been adroit" at exploiting the suffering caused by the Sept 11 attacks, his predecessor Jimmy Carter said in an interview with the Guardian published on Monday.

The United States "suffered, in 9/11, a terrible and shocking attack ... and George Bush has been adroit at exploiting that attack, and he has elevated himself, in the consciousness of many Americans, to a heroic commander-in-chief, fighting a global threat against America," Carter said.

"He's repeatedly played that card, and to some degree quite successfully. I think that success has dissipated. I don't know if it's dissipating fast enough to affect the (November 2 presidential) election. We'll soon know."

Carter, 80, was president from 1977-1981, but was not re-elected amid a US hostage crisis in Iran.

By comparison, support for Mr Bush's Iraq invasion is widespread, something Carter attributed to a transformation in America's national mood, the newspaper said.

"When your troops go to war, the prime minister or the president change overnight from an administrator, dealing with taxation and welfare and health and deteriorating roads, into the commander-in-chief," he said. "And it's just become almost unpatriotic to describe Bush's fallacious and ill-advised and mistaken and sometimes misleading actions."

Carter also criticized US media for having "been cowed, because they didn't want to be unpatriotic after the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

"There has been a lack of inquisitive journalism. In fact, it's hard to think of a major medium in the United States that has been objective and fair and balanced, and critical when criticism was deserved," he said.

Carter's interview marked the publication in Britain of his book "The Hornet's Nest", a story of the American revolutionary war and the first novel to be published by a former president.

In his interview he noted that ironically those fighting for US independence could never have triumphed were it not for an alliance with the French.-AFP