Former Vice President, Dick Cheney, Dies at 84
Death of Architect of US Invasion of Iraq Revives Global Outrage Over War Crimes & Mass Surveillance
Former Vice President and one of the architects of the US invasion of Iraq, Dick Cheney, died at age 84 on Monday 14 November. He passed away due to complications from pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease.
Cheney is an internationally controversial figure who has faced decades of global pressure to be held accountable for war crimes.
These include his central role as an architect in the so-called “War on Terror” in the post-9/11 era. The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates the broader death toll from post-9/11 war zones, including Iraq, to be up to 4.7 million and counting.
In marking his death, many referenced Cheney’s crimes. “Even hell wouldn’t take that war criminal,” wrote actor and activist Liam Cunningham in a post on X.
“The man was an undeniable and unrepentant war criminal,” wrote journalist Mehdi Hasan.
Establishment political figures in the US issued immediate tributes. Cheney’s “passing marks the loss of a figure who, with a strong sense of dedication, gave so much of his life to the country he loved,” wrote former Vice President Kamala Harris on X. During her 2024 campaign for the presidency, Harris came under fire from progressives after receiving the support of Cheney and his daughter, Liz.
Cheney’s war crimes
In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, then-Vice President Dick Cheney played a central role in making the case for war. On August 26, 2002, he declared in a major speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd National Convention, in San Antonio, Texas: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”
However, as subsequent investigations revealed, the intelligence community did not share the same certainty Cheney and the administration presented. Take a secret Defense Intelligence Agency report from September 2002: it told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that there was no credible evidence Iraq was making, storing, or planning to produce chemical weapons.
Intelligence officials later said they felt pressured by Cheney’s office. An article by Walter Pincus and Dana Priest in The Washington Post from 4 June 2003 reported that Dick Cheney and his chief of staff I. Lewis Libby made multiple visits to CIA headquarters in 2002, questioning analysts studying Iraq’s weapons-programs and alleged links to al-Qaeda.
The article cites senior intelligence officials who said the visits conveyed, whether deliberately or not, that the vice president’s office expected a particular conclusion.
The George W. Bush administration, which Cheney was a part of, oversaw the creation of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program,” in which detainees allegedly suspected of terrorism were subjected to torture and inhumane treatment. These so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques included waterboarding, a recognized method of torture; walling, a method which uses a collar or towel around the detainee’s neck to forcefully hurl them against a wall; sleep deprivation; an forcing detainees to stand on broken feet.
Cheney was also key in the construction of the US’ mass surveillance program developed as part of the so-called “War on Terror”. “The High Costs of Post-9/11 US Mass Surveillance”, a detailed report produced by the Watson Institute states: “With authorization from Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Agency (NSA) director Michael Hayden instituted Stellar Wind, a program that collected in bulk Americans’ and foreigners’ communications metadata from phone records, emails, and browser histories.”
Despite the human toll of Cheney and the Bush administration’s policies, leaders of that administration have thus far faced zero accountability for their many crimes—including implementing forms of torture prohibited by the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
No formal arrest warrant from the ICC was ever issued against Bush or Cheney. In 2022, the aging former President George W. Bush made a stunning gaff—during an address in Dallas regarding the war in Ukraine, he criticized “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq—I mean, Ukraine.” He then muttered, “Iraq too.”
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