Dick Cheney has died. The former vice president and war criminal will be hailed in the corporate controlled press as the last “reasonable” voice in the Republican Party along with his daughter, Liz. Here’s some things the media won’t mention about this warmonger . . .
1. Cheney was a member of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). This group of neoconservatives and imperialists called for America to rapidly expand the Pentagon budget, fight multiple wars and specifically overthrow Iraq. They do mention none of this would happen, “absent a catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.” Lucky for Cheney, he happened to be inside the Bush administration after 9/11.
2. The vice president helped lie America into Iraq. According to then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil, shortly after the Bush administration was sworn in, they met for their first national security council meeting. There, before 9/11, they openly brainstormed how to start a war with Iraq. O’Neil even provided documents on how they could steal the oil of the Middle Eastern nation. Cheney invited oil and gas executives to the White House during and after the invasion of Iraq. He declined to make the content of those meetings available to the public.
3. Following the disastrous war in Iraq, Cheney tried to start a war with Iran. According to Seymour Hersh’s reporting for the New Yorker in 2006, Cheney tried to create a Gulf of Tonkin incident. He believed it could be a pretext to launch bombing campaigns on Iran. Thankfully, that never happened. After he left the Bush administration, Cheney bragged he was one of the most vocal voices for bombing Iran.
4. No one was a louder proponent of torture than Dick Cheney. The vice president repeatedly defended its practice and claimed that it saved lives. For the record, it never did. We now know that definitively from the Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. To highlight Cheney’s hypocrisy on this issue, he was once asked by NBC’s Matt Lauer if Iran would be justified in water boarding an American spy if he had information on possible activities inside their nation. Cheney, unsurprisingly, said he would be opposed to such tactics on Americans. Cheney’s philosophy was it’s okay when we do it. It’s not okay when they do it.
Cheney’s legacy of blood, carnage and war crimes is still felt at American tables who have one less child returning home from the Middle East, and the one million Iraqis who died. As I stated at the beginning of this post, many will mourn him as a man who represented a time when the GOP was reasonable. I dare those same people to interview a family member who lost a child in Iraq or an Iraqi who lost a family member following that HORRIFIC war. They will give you a different answer.
Dick Cheney rose from many government roles including U.S. Representative from Wyoming to Defense Secretary under George H. W. Bush, then became CEO of oil corporation Halliburton before serving as Vice President under George W. Bush.
As vice president, Cheney was one of the main forces behind the 2003 Iraq invasion. He pushed claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which later proved false, and pressured intelligence officials to lie in order to support the case for war.
After the invasion, Cheney’s former company Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR received about $39.5 billion dollars in Iraq contracts, many awarded without competition. Audits later found overbilling and waste, fueling accusations of war profiteering.
Cheney also defended the CIA’s use of torture, backed secret prisons, and supported private contractors like Blackwater that were later tied to civilian killings.
In 2012, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission found Cheney guilty in absentia of war crimes for authorizing torture, and Amnesty International urged that he be investigated if he traveled abroad.
Today, both liberals and conservatives will try to paint him as a good man, even though his decisions led to the deaths of millions of innocent Iraqi civilians.
Dick Cheney is dead at 84. He did not die in disgrace, though he should have. He died wealthy, respected in certain circles, and utterly unrepentant. The man who once declared that the United States would have to go to “the dark side” after 9/11 lived long enough to see that darkness normalized, monetized, and weaponized against his own countrymen.
Cheney’s fingerprints are all over the machinery of our current decline. The torture memos that redefined cruelty as legality. The surveillance architecture that turned privacy into a privilege. The doctrine of preemptive war that made deceit a tool of statecraft. His genius was not in leadership but in the quiet conversion of fear into policy and secrecy into power. Halliburton profited as Baghdad burned, and a generation of Americans learned that truth could be suspended if the lie was wrapped in a flag.
He taught a generation to confuse vengeance with justice. He convinced them that brutality was strength, that secrecy was safety, and that democracy could survive anything so long as the right people were in charge. The corrosion of conscience that began in those years never left us. It calcified into cynicism, and that cynicism became the oxygen of the authoritarian movement that followed. In his time, Cheney was often caricatured as Darth Vader, a moniker he wore with amusement. In hindsight, it stands as one of the most fitting apologies in modern political history. The cruelty that once required justification now parades as virtue, a moral inversion born in the shadow of Cheney’s America.
Two decades later, that same machinery hums under a new operator. The Trump administration took Cheney’s hidden authoritarian blueprint and removed its disguises. Where Cheney cultivated plausible deniability, Trump cultivates spectacle. Where Cheney institutionalized secrecy, Trump broadcasts vengeance. Both rely on the same architecture: the executive branch as weapon, the law as accessory, the lie as gospel.
. . . History should not remember Cheney as a statesman. It should remember him as a technician of empire, a man who perfected the mechanics of control and handed them, like loaded weapons, to those who came after him. His legacy lives not in monuments or memoirs, but in the machinery of the American police state he helped design.
Dick Cheney is gone. But his shadow still governs. Until we dismantle what he built, America will remain what he made it, a democracy in name, an empire in practice, and a lie we keep telling ourselves.
– Tony Pentimalli
via social media
November 4, 2025
via social media
November 4, 2025
Related Off-site Links:
War Criminal Dick Cheney Dead at 84 – Common Dreams (November 4, 2025).
“The Dark Side”: Dick Cheney’s Legacy from Iraq Invasion to U.S. Torture Program – Democracy Now! (November 4, 2025).
The Worst Crime of the 21st Century – Nathan J. Robinson and Noam Chomsky (Current Affairs, May 12, 2023).
It Wasn’t About Oil, and It Wasn’t About the Free Market: Why We Invaded Iraq – Danny Postel (In These Times, February 11, 2015).
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Joseph Wilson on the Bush Administration: "Corrupt from Top to Bottom" (2007)
• The Tenth Anniversary of the Iraq Invasion (2013)
• Something to Think About – June 18, 2014
• Progressive Perspectives on Liz Cheney (2022)
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