War Criminal Dick Cheney Dead at 84, With Blood of Millions on His Hands

Former vice president and defense secretary Dick Cheney has died, at 84, with the blood of millions on his hands.

Cheney’s family said he died from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease on Monday, November 3. He passed in peace, surrounded by his family, who lauded him as a “good man” and a “noble giant.”

In reality, Cheney’s legacy will far outlive him as the man responsible for wars that have killed, injured, and displaced millions abroad; and who worked diligently to wrest freedoms from Americans and lay the groundwork for fascist authoritarianism in the U.S.

Cheney is perhaps best known for his work as the architect of the “war on terror,” leading the U.S. into the post-9/11 wars that have killed at least 4.5 million people and counting over two decades, and displaced 38 million people so far.

Under President George W. Bush and alongside Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney forever changed the U.S.’s approach to war, the hunt for “terrorists,” and the surveillance and criminalization of Muslim communities across the U.S.

Cheney exercised unprecedented power in the office of the vice president, acting as the de facto president as he propagated the lie of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and subsequently laid waste to Afghanistan, Iraq, and numerous other countries across the Middle East. When reports uncovered the U.S. military’s horrific abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, Cheney sought to use the umbrella of “fighting terrorism” to justify what others called war crimes.

The war on terror is still ongoing in a literal way in war-torn countries such as Yemen, Syria, and Somalia, and in an indirect way through the refugee and humanitarian crises it’s created. It also laid out the principles used by figures like President Joe Biden and Donald Trump to justify U.S. support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Cheney and his cohort effectively reshaped the very structure of U.S. policy and practice to enact the war on terror. He used post-9/11 legislation like the Patriot Act to launch a widespread campaign of mass surveillance of Americans, especially Muslims, with the Bush administration’s authorization of the National Security Agency’s Stellar Wind program.

His advancement of the “unitary executive” theory — a once-fringe theory that effectively claims that the president has sole jurisdiction over the executive branch — was used to allow the Bush administration to massively expand its war powers and bypass Congress to do so.

These wars were Cheney’s marquee achievement — but were an extension of his life’s work up until that point. As Secretary of Defense under President George H.W. Bush, Cheney was instrumental in the profligate buildup and conduct of the Gulf War, overseeing the paradigm-shifting operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

Between roles serving in Bush presidencies, Cheney served as the CEO of multinational oil company Halliburton, which had benefited from the Gulf War, and which would later secure tens of billions of dollars’ worth of contracts amid the Iraq war, largely through its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, or KBR.

Through it all, Cheney maintained an air of shamelessness that incensed opponents to the wars and even, eventually, George H.W. Bush himself. Ahead of the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Cheney predicted that the U.S. military would be “greeted as liberators” to the Iraqi people — hundreds of thousands of whom would then be slaughtered by the U.S.

In 2011, after Bush’s term ended, Cheney released a book called In My Time in which he doubled down on his legacy of torture, even as public opinion sharply turned against the wars. He was adamant about his position on the wars until he died.

Cheney’s impact on presidential power has been enormous — in fact, many of the most heinous crimes committed by subsequent administrations were enabled in part or in whole by Cheney’s actions. Among these crimes are President Barack Obama’s drone wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Trump’s wanton targeting of civilians in warfare, and Biden’s continuation of tensions and U.S.-sponsored assaults against Bush’s “axis of evil.”

In many ways, Cheney laid the groundwork for the slow-moving coup that has led to Trump’s current campaign to consolidate power under the executive branch. Trump has used the unitary executive theory extensively across various court battles that have granted him wide-reaching power.

In his later years, Cheney tried to distance himself from the fruits of his own legacy by coming out in favor of a Democrat in 2024, Kamala Harris, who critics say is also implicated in war crimes.

Perhaps most illustrative of the direct impacts of Cheney’s terrorism war mongering is the Homeland Security Act, a bill passed after 9/11 that drastically reshaped U.S. immigration and border control policies. That bill birthed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — which Trump is using now, two decades later, as an unchecked federal police force, with the agency violently abducting people and wreaking havoc in communities across the U.S.

Millions of peoples’ lives were cut short or otherwise forever changed for the worse by Cheney. But, much like those who continue carrying out his wars today, he enjoyed impunity for his imperial crimes. He lived out his life as part of the 1 percent, availing himself of luxuries funded by atrocities so vast they are almost impossible to describe in full.

Or, as Truthout columnist in memoriam William Rivers Pitt wrote upon the release of In My Time in 2011:

Dick Cheney is the ultimate American terrorist, one who not only lacks respect for American law and government, but who spent his eight years in office actively working to destroy and dismember the functions of that government. He tore the place up, deliberately and with intent, because he hated the law and the government it supported, and we will be a long time recovering from his deeds. He is directly and personally responsible for thousands of deaths and injuries. If this is not terrorism in the raw, then the word has no meaning.