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

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."

A report last month found that US and NATO troops killed more Afghan civilians in the first half of this year than the Taliban.

Roberts said the media is too concerned with stories like Sen. Larry Craig's (R-ID) arrest for allegedly soliciting sex, and Miss Teen South Carolina's inability to answer a question.

"The war criminal is in the living room, and no official notice is taken of the fact," Roberts writes. "Lacking US troops with which to invade Iran, the Bush administration has decided to bomb Iran 'back into the stone age.'"

Roberts cites a recent RAW STORY report that the US is preparing a "massive" military strike against Iran to support his assertions.

"Encouraged by the indifference of both the American media and Christian churches to the massive casualties inflicted on Iraqi civilians, the Bush administration will not be deterred by the prospect of its air attacks inflicting massive casualties on Iranian civilians. ... Clearly, turning the Muslim Middle East into a wasteland is the Bush policy," Roberts writes. "For Bush, civilian casualties are a non-issue. Hegemony uber alles."