Former Reagan aide: 'Brownshirt' Bush among top 'mass murderers of all time'

President Bush's apparent plans for a preemptive nuclear strike on Iran will only add to the civilian death toll as a result of US intervention that has placed the president "high on the list of mass murders of all time," a former aide in President Ronald Reagan's administration known for strident anti-Bush rhetoric said Friday.

"Bush is too self-righteous to see the dark humor in his denunciations of Iran for threatening 'the security of nations everywhere' and of the Iraqi resistance for 'a vision that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women, and children in the pursuit of political power,'" writes Paul Craig Roberts, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury. "Those are precisely the words that most of the world applies to Bush and his Brownshirt administration."

Roberts, who has emerged as a fierce critic of Bush's war policies, accused the president of ignoring habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions, justifying torture and demonizing critics as anti-American.

"Bush ... is responsible, according to Information Clearing House, for over one million deaths of Iraqi civilians, which puts Bush high on the list of mass murderers of all time," Roberts writes in a column published Friday on antiwar.com. "The vast majority of 'kills' by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan are civilians."...[Open in new window]