Richard Gere and his wife Carey Lowell in Venice on Tuesday. (Reuters)

Venice, Sept. 4 (AP): Richard Gere and Charlize Theron added their voices today to a chorus of stars at the Venice Film Festival who are taking swipes at the administration of President George W. Bush.

“How did we elect Bush twice?” Gere as ked rhetorically while promoting his new film, The Hunting Party.

In the film, Gere plays a reporter who is determined to track down Radovan Karadizic, who has been hiding for more than a decade and who is charged with genocide and crimes against humanity for his role as an alleged architect of the Bosnian war.

“What’s interesting to me is how do the bad people among us end up our leaders?” Gere said. “Even in my own country — how did we elect Bush twice? How is this possible?” the actor said at a news conference.

In The Valley of Elah, Theron plays a New Mexico detective who is drawn into the case of a US soldier who disappears just days after returning from a tour of duty in Iraq. “The decision-making process for going into Iraq was very hastily done, and I think the facts weren’t there, and I just don’t think you go to war for those reasons,” Theron said.

“I think the thing that upset me most was the manipulation that our government did towards our people, manipulating them to believe that if they weren’t for the war, they weren’t patriotic,” the actress said.

In The Hunting Party, Gere takes on another contentious international issue — fugitives from the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Gere plays war reporter Simon Hunt. In 2000 Hunt, cameraman Duck, played by Terrence Howard, and rookie reporter Benjamin, played by Jesse Eisenberg, set off on a sometimes humourous search for Bosnia’s most wanted war criminal — “The Fox.”

The movie was developed from an Esquire magazine article by war correspondent Scott Anderson. Anderson and four other journalists reunited in Sarajevo in 2000 and came up with a sketchy plan to find top war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic. To their surprise they came closer than they ever thought they would to finding Karadzic.