Dick Cheney Has Died. The War Criminal in His Own Words
10 quotes from a former vice president who pushed for a murderous invasion of Iraq, lied about the WMD threat, and defended torture.
The ‘Prince of Darkness’ is gone.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney died at the age of 84 on Monday, his family said, surrounded by his wife and daughters.
Like fellow war criminal Slobodan Milošević, Cheney should have died alone in a prison cell at The Hague. But, like the rest of the gang behind the invasion of Iraq (George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, et al.), Cheney never faced any legal or even political accountability for his war crimes over the past two decades. In recent years, he even became a hero in some liberal and Democratic Party circles after denouncing Donald Trump and endorsing Kamala Harris for president.
Yet the Bush-Cheney administration, between 2001 and 2009, was one of the worst in American history, overseeing skyrocketing deficits and tax cuts for the rich, the abuse of executive power and politicization of the Justice Department, the Hurricane Katrina debacle, and, of course, the global financial crisis.
But it was the so-called “War on Terror” and the illegal invasion of Iraq, based on lies about “weapons of mass destruction,” that Cheney must be remembered for. It was Dick, more than Dubya, who was the driving force behind one of the bloodiest wars of the 21st century. Cheney was a hawkish ideologue – one of the most belligerent politicians of our lifetimes, despite dodging the Vietnam draft on multiple occasions (“I had other priorities in the sixties than military service,” he later said). It was Dick, more than Dubya, who was also the unapologetic architect of America’s post-9/11 torture regime.
It is difficult to quantify just how many people are dead because of Cheney. Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? The legacy media won’t tell us. They will likely engage in hagiography when it comes to covering his death because that is what the legacy media does when the powerful pass away. Reputations are laundered; careers are whitewashed; crimes are ignored.
Let us remember who Richard Bruce Cheney really was.
Below are 10 quotes from the former vice president that should define his horrific, blood-stained legacy: a litany of shameless lies and false predictions, as well as a total lack of regret or contrition.