Dick Cheney and the sanitising of a war criminal

[Celerity]

As US media try to whitewash his legacy in death, the world continues to grapple with the horrors he helped unleash.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/11/5/dick-cheney-and-the-sanitising-of-a-war-criminal



And so another member of the old “war on terror” team has left the world. Dick Cheney, who served as the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States during the two-term administration of George W Bush (2001-2009), died on Monday at the age of 84. According to a memorial statement issued by his family, Cheney was “a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing”.

And yet many inhabitants of the Earth will remember the late VP for rather less warm and fuzzy things than love and fly fishing. As the chief architect of the “global war on terror” – which was launched in 2001 and enabled the US to terrorise various locations worldwide under the guise of fighting “terrorists” – Cheney died with untold quantities of blood on his hands, particularly in Iraq. In the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Cheney swore that the “Iraqi regime” had been “very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents” and that the country had continued “to pursue the nuclear programme they began so many years ago”. Per the vice president’s hallucinations, this pursuit of weaponry was “for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale”.

As Foreign Policy magazine charmingly noted in its 2012 compilation of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers”, which included Cheney as well as numerous other characters with objectively dubious credentials in terms of thinking: “If scaring us silly were a religion, Dick Cheney would be its high priest.” But Cheney’s fearmongering – and repeated lies concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction – worked like a charm in paving the way for the infliction of “death on a massive scale” in the country. It also paved the way for the lining of certain pockets, such as those associated with the US oil and engineering firm Halliburton, where Cheney himself served as CEO from 1995 until 2000 and which just happened to win $7bn in no-bid contracts in post-invasion Iraq.

Anyway, it was business as usual in the land of conflicts of interest and revolving doors. Until his dying day, Cheney espoused a no-regrets approach to the illegal perpetration of mass slaughter and attendant suffering, telling CNN 12 years after the effective pulverisation of Iraq: “It was the right thing to do then. I believed it then, and I believe it now.” Never mind the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, the forcible displacement of millions, and the dousing of the country in toxic and radioactive munitions that will continue to impact Iraqi health basically for eternity. Escalating cancer rates among the population have been attributed in part to the US military’s use of depleted uranium weapons, the traces of which “represent a formidable long-term environmental hazard as they will remain radioactive for more than 4.5 billion years”, as Al Jazeera has observed. But, hey, I hear the fly fishing is great in Baghdad.

snip

[RockRaven]

1. Not just the media. Look at the attendance list of the funeral.

George Carlin: "It's a big club, and you ain't in it!"

[marble falls]

4. Ain't in, but we the people pay pay their freaking dues. Eat the rich before they eat you and yours.

[Celerity]

5. Yes, this article was written around a fortnight ago.

[leftstreet]

2. DURec

[malaise]

3. Get thee to the greatest page

for visibility

[moniss]

6. Indeed the media do roll their desired memes.

Kissinger was one of the most notorious and heinous human beings but the media just kept on kissing his feet and talking about how brilliant, powerful and respected he was.

[Chasstev365]

7. Because Trump and the current GOP are so bad, we've forgotten the criminality of Bush and Cheney.

[displacedvermoter]

8. People got mad at Charles Pierce last

year over his criticism of our candidate being endorsed by a war criminal. Seems like Cheney's late in the day endorsement of Harris has earned him a general pass on his past crimes and depravity (he voted against Headstart, I believe one of only two nays) from people who should know much better.

[hlthe2b]

9. True enough, but in the face of competing current horrors, to focus too much on the threats of the past...

(beyond any lessons we might learn), seems, at the risk of deadly understatement, "ill-advised."

[totodeinhere]

11. We should be capable of multitasking.

We can address present crimes AND crimes of the past,

[hlthe2b]

13. Do you believe those who were not even born when he was in office feel that way? THAT is my point.

And do not DARE claim I am excusing Cheney. I am one of a few on this website--maybe the ONLY one--who has actually had to be in the same room with him--interviewing him after his time in Congress and well before his time as VP. I have posted about this before, and how he made my skin crawl, even then.

But perhaps you might reread what I actually wrote rather than dismissing me as not able to "multitask..."

[Solly Mack]

10. Well, you know what I think.

[Deep State Witch]

12. Remember When He was The Worst Evil on the Planet?

Yeah. Good times.