Former U.S. Vice President Richard “Dick” Cheney died on November 3, 2025 at age 84; his family said he had suffered from pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease. Best known for steering national security policy after the 9/11 attacks, he became the dominant force behind a Global War on Terror that unleashed torture, preemptive war, and mass surveillance. Amnesty International has described him as one of the principal architects of a program that amounted to torture, while the Brown University Costs of War project attributes more than 900,000 deaths and trillions of dollars in spending to the post‑9/11 wars he championed. Dick Cheney’s legacy is one of unprecedented destruction and the erosion of civil liberties.
During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, then-Defense Secretary Cheney and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell resisted calls to topple Saddam Hussein. Cheney argued that invading Baghdad would force the United States to occupy Iraq alone, risk its territorial integrity, and require unacceptable casualties. “It’s a quagmire if you go that far,” he told PBS’s Frontline in 1994, asking how many additional dead Americans Saddam was worth. Those words reflect a prudence that vanished after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Within days, the vice president laid out a radical new doctrine. On NBC’s Meet the Press he said America must operate on the “dark side,” spend time in the shadows, and use “any means at our disposal” to achieve its objectives.
Cheney’s longtime counsel, David Addington, and Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee drafted memos arguing that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees captured in the Global War on Terror. The State Department’s legal advisor warned that claiming the president could suspend the Geneva Conventions was legally flawed and would reverse over a century of U.S. policy. Cheney pressed ahead, telling The Washington Times that he “signed off” on the CIA’s secret detention and rendition program and, as a principal participant in National Security Council meetings, he authorized the agency’s interrogation program, including waterboarding. In 2006 he called waterboarding a “no‑brainer,” and in 2009 he acknowledged knowing about the practice “as a general policy that we had approved.”
The vice president’s embrace of waterboarding ignored that the technique has long been treated as torture under U.S. and international law. Amnesty International notes that Japanese officials were convicted at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials for subjecting American pilots to waterboarding, and U.S. courts have sentenced sheriffs to prison for using the technique. Amnesty stresses that its status as torture is “not a matter of opinion.” The Senate Armed Services Committee concluded that approving aggressive interrogation techniques sent a message that physical pressure and degradation were acceptable treatment for detainees. Amnesty calls Cheney “one of the principal architects of a policy that amounted to torture.”
Cheney’s legal defense of the program was rife with distortions. He misrepresented Justice Department opinions, falsely suggested Japanese waterboarders were never prosecuted, overstated detainee recidivism, insisted detainees had no rights under the Geneva Conventions, and repeated unproven claims of ties between Saddam Hussein and al‑Qaeda.
Hellbound and Down 