Tag: dick cheney

Dick Cheney’s ghost has a playbook for war in Venezuela

Former Vice President Richard Cheney, who died a few days ago at the age of 84, gave a speech to a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002 in which the most noteworthy line was, “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”

The speech was essentially the kickoff of the intense campaign by the George W. Bush administration to sell a war in Iraq, which it would launch the following March. The campaign had to be intense, because it was selling a war of aggression — the first major offensive war that the United States would initiate in over a century. That war will forever be a major part of Cheney’s legacy.

The Donald Trump administration’s escalation of confrontation with Venezuela displays disturbing parallels with the run-up to the Iraq War. In some respects where the stories appear to differ, the circumstances involving Trump and Venezuela are even more alarming than was the case with Iraq.

One similarity involves corruption of the relationship between intelligence and policy. Instead of policymakers using intelligence as an input to their decisions, they have tried to use scraps of intelligence publicly to make a case for a predetermined policy. This part of the story of the Iraq War I have recounted in detail elsewhere.

Cheney’s speech to the VFW preceded and in effect pre-empted work by the intelligence community on a classified estimate, which would become notorious in its own right, about Iraqi weapons programs. When Bob Graham, who died last year and in 2002 was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, became one of the few members of Congress to bother to read that estimate, he was so taken aback by how far short the intelligence community’s judgments were from what the administration was saying publicly that he voted against the resolution authorizing the war.

The Trump administration is using the same tactic of preemptive messaging from the top, regardless of what the intelligence agencies may be saying about Venezuela, that the Bush administration used regarding Iraq. Trump’s declarations about the regime of Nicolás Maduro have a definitive tone similar to Cheney’s “no doubt” formulation about Iraqi weapons programs.

Besides weapons of mass destruction, the other big issue that the Bush administration attempted to pin on Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime — capitalizing on the American public’s furor over terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — was a supposed “alliance” between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda. No such alliance existed, and the administration’s assertions on that subject were contrary to the intelligence community’s judgments.

The parallel with the current situation regarding Venezuela is especially clear, given the Trump administration’s assertions about the relationship between Maduro’s regime and certain gangs or drug cartels, which the administration equates with terrorist groups. Trump has declared that the gang most often mentioned, Tren de Aragua, is “operating under the control of” Maduro. This assertion is contradicted by the intelligence community’s judgments, as incorporated in a memorandum that is now available in redacted form.

The Bush administration not only disregarded intelligence judgments that did not support its case for war but also actively tried to discredit those judgments, and Cheney’s office was a part of this. For example, the policymakers tried to make life difficult for a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, who, as a result of field research he performed for the intelligence community, was able to refute an administration assertion about Iraq buying uranium in Africa. The difficulties imposed on Wilson involved the career-ending outing of his wife, who was an intelligence officer under cover. Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was convicted and sentenced to prison for obstructing justice and lying under oath in connection with that affair.

Cheney unsuccessfully lobbied President Bush to pardon Libby. But in a further connection to the present, Trump pardoned Libby in 2018.

Keep reading

Dick Cheney’s Legacy Is One of Brutal Carnage

On March 15, 2006, the United States was nearly three years into its second Iraq war. After over a decade of brutal sanctions and continuous bombing, in spring 2003, the US had launched a full-scale invasion of the oil-rich Middle Eastern nation. The invasion was a flagrant violation of international law. After toppling Iraq’s Ba’athist government, a former on-again, off-again ally of Washington, the United States and its allies began a protracted military occupation of Iraq. The neocolonial affair was particularly brutal. Such is the nature of seeking to impose your presence by military force on a people who do not wish it and are willing to use force to oppose it.

That day, March 15, soldiers approached the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma’ee, an Iraqi farmer . Allegedly they were looking for an individual believed to be responsible for the deaths of two US soldiers and a facilitator for al-Qaeda recruitment in Iraq. In the version told by US troops, someone from the house fired on the approaching soldiers, prompting a twenty-five-minute confrontation. Eventually the soldiers entered the house, killing all of the residents.

This included not just Al-Majma’ee, but his wife; his three children, Hawra’a, Aisha, and Husam, who were between the ages of five months and five years old; his seventy-four-year-old mother, Turkiya Majeed Ali; and two nieces, Asma’a Yousif Ma’arouf and Usama Yousif Ma’arouf, who were five and three years old. An autopsy performed on the deceased “revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.” After slaughtering the family execution style, US soldiers called in an air strike, destroying the house. The presumed reason for the bombardment was to cover up evidence of the extrajudicial killings.

Keep reading

History Will Not Be Kind to Dick Cheney

Dick Cheney died this week. He leaves behind a wretched legacy.

Cheney reached the pinnacle of his influence as George W. Bush’s vice president, a position from which he orchestrated the Iraq War and helped bring about one of the most intrusive pieces of legislation ever to have been leveled against the American people.

Democrats reflexively abhorred Cheney as veep, but as GOP voters became more averse to foreign intervention, he became a symbol of everything that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy. As Jack Kenny said in 2011, “[Cheney’s] impact on and, to a large extent, direction of foreign policy during the Bush presidency suggests that if he was and is a conservative, his is the kind of conservatism George Will described as believing that ‘government can’t run Amtrak, but it can run the Middle East.’”

Iraq Intervention: Why?

As vice president, Cheney was the loudest voice to advocate the invasion of Iraq. He broadcast the false narrative that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction with great zeal. But that wasn’t his first foray into Iraq, or the first time he led an invasion under a Bush. Cheney oversaw Operation Desert Storm in 1991 as secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush. And in between Bush presidencies, when he wasn’t busy planning invasions into Iraq, Cheney worked as the CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil companies.

It just so happens that Iraq is considered one of the top five oil-rich countries. And if it were up to Cheney, American soldiers would’ve been sent into other oil-rich Middle Eastern nations. According to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Cheney had grand plans to deploy American soldiers all over the Middle East. Kenny writes:

In his new book, A Journey: My Political Life, Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recalls that Cheney wanted the United States to go to war not only with Afghanistan and Iraq, but with a number of other countries in the Middle East, as he believed the world must be “made anew.” “He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,” Blair wrote. “In other words, [Cheney] thought the world had to be made anew, and that after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.”

Journalist and author Robert Parry also suspected these wider ambitions, which had been kept out of earshot of the American public. He wrote:

There have been indications of this larger neoconservative strategy to attack America’s — and Israel’s — “enemies” starting with Iraq and then moving on to Syria and Iran, but rarely has this more expansive plan for regional war been shared explicitly with the American public.

“Agency of the President”

Cheney once said, “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It’s a nice way to operate, actually.” This is related to the common perception that he was more powerful than the president. “At the minimum, Cheney was a co-equal to Bush and is widely understood to be perhaps the most effective vice president in history,” renowned left-wing journalist Seymour Hersh recently wrote. Kenny pointed out that one of the nicknames Cheney acquired as veep was “’Management,’ as in ‘Better check with management first.’” He wrote:

Former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) described the free hand Cheney appeared to have in his dealings with Congress. “Dick could make a deal,” Gramm told [Barton Gellman], author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. “He didn’t have to check with the president, not as far as I could tell. I’m sure at the end of the day, he would fill the president in on what happened. But Dick had the agency of the president.”

CFR Ties

While Cheney is rightly recognized, even by mainstream standards, as a negative influence on American policies, one important element that’s been widely overlooked in his ties to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a subversive foreign-policy think tank that we like to refer to as the “Deep State nervous system.” Cheney was a CFR life member. He served on its board of directors from 1987 to 1989 and again from 1993 to 1995, and was also its director at one point. Interestingly, he mentioned none of this in his 500-plus-page memoir, In My Time. In 2011, the former Wyoming lawmaker admitted during a visit to CFR headquarters that he had intentionally kept his ties to the organization a secret:

It’s good to be back at the Council on Foreign Relations. I’ve been a member for a long time, and was actually a director for some period of time. I never mentioned that when I was campaigning for reelection back home in Wyoming, but it stood me in good stead.

After his death, the CFR posted a warm tribute to him:

A steadfast steward of the Council, Cheney brought to our community the same seriousness of purpose, strategic insight, and commitment to public service that defined his distinguished career in government and the private sector. Cheney’s decades of leadership — as vice president of the United States, secretary of defense, member of Congress, and senior White House official — reflected a lifetime devoted to strengthening the United States’ national security and its role in the world. The Council is grateful to have counted Cheney as a member, director, and friend. We extend our deepest condolences to his family and loved ones.

Many would disagree with the CFR’s characterization. It’s difficult to see how sacrificing thousands of American lives and racking up debt to pay for overseas wars and fueling legislation that allows the government to spy on Americans have made the country stronger. Cheney was a key architect of the post-9/11 response. And as such, he helped finagle congressional approval for the PATRIOT Act, a wholly un-American piece of legislation that has greatly expanded the government’s ability to surveil Americans. He coordinated amendments with administration officials and reconciled the House and Senate versions. His chief of staff,  Scooter Libby, was also involved in high-level meetings about the act.

Keep reading

Dick Cheney (1941–2025): The Dark Legacy of a War Criminal

Former U.S. vice president Richard “Dick” Cheney died on 3 November 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 “war on terror” that unleashed torture, preventive 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. Cheney’s legacy is one of unprecedented destruction and the erosion of civil liberties.

From prudence to preemption

During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell resisted calls to topple Saddam Hussein. Cheney argued that invading Baghdad would force the U.S. 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 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 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.”

Torture and the repudiation of law

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 U.S. 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.

The road to Baghdad and the case for war

He cautioned against occupying Iraq in 1994 but became the administration’s leading voice for war nine years later. On March 16, 2003 he declared that Saddam had “reconstituted nuclear weapons” and that Americans would be greeted as liberators. These claims proved false. He insisted there was “no doubt” Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and ties to al‑Qaeda, yet evidence was lacking. Retired colonel Lawrence Wilkerson later alleged the administration manipulated intelligence to justify invasion and suggested that Cheney’s push to ignore the Geneva Conventions may constitute a war crime.

Cheney’s radicalism was not limited to Iraq. He championed a “unitary executive” theory contending that the president alone decides matters within the executive branch. Legal scholar Martin Lederman observed that he sidelined dissenting views in the military and intelligence agencies. Chip Gibbons, writing in Jacobin, describes him as an enemy of democracy whose agenda included war, indefinite detention, warrantless surveillance, and torture.

Human cost: war, death, and permanent surveillance

The human toll of Cheney’s policies is staggering. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that more than 940,000 people have been killed by direct post‑9/11 violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan, including over 432,000 civilians. Indirect deaths raise the toll into the millions. In Iraq alone, about 29,199 bombs were dropped, causing heavy civilian casualties, and a 2006 survey estimated over 600,000 civilian deaths. Current Affairs compares Cheney’s record to that of serial killer Samuel Little, concluding that “Little was strictly an amateur.”

The costs extended beyond foreign battlefields. Ryan McMaken of the Mises Institute writes that in a more reasonable world, people like Cheney would be forgotten, shamed, and disgraced. The post‑9/11 wars did nothing to enhance freedom, yet thousands of American families paid with their blood and millions continue to pay through taxes and inflation. McMaken lists domestic infringements such as the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, TSA groping, and FISA abuses, and none of the architects have been held accountable.

Colonel Wilkerson, Powell’s former chief of staff, told ABC News that Cheney “was president for all practical purposes” during Bush’s first term and feared being tried as a war criminal. The Washington Post dubbed him the “vice-president for torture,” and Wilkerson said his push to disregard the Geneva Conventions amounted to an international crime. Chip Gibbons asserts that he “reduced nations to rubble, shredded the Bill of Rights, and enacted programs of surveillance, abduction, detention, and torture.”

The culture of impunity Cheney helped foster has not faded. Politicians continued to accept his endorsements despite his record, while he insisted the CIA’s interrogation techniques did not violate international agreements and his allies still argued for expansive presidential war powers.

An opinion essay by law professor Ziyad Motala in Al Jazeera argues that Cheney is the architect of some of the most disastrous foreign and domestic policies of the early twenty‑first century. Motala contends that Cheney’s policies left “a trail of death and destabilization” and that the havoc unleashed by the Iraq War and the broader “war on terror” continues to reverberate, causing “suffering and instability far surpassing anything Trump has wrought.” He notes that estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths range from hundreds of thousands to well over a million and that the war destabilized an entire region, paving the way for extremist groups like ISIL and ongoing cycles of violence and displacement. The war drained trillions from the U.S. economy and left thousands of U.S. troops dead and many more with life‑altering physical and psychological wounds.

The economic burden of these wars is also staggering. Nearly twenty years after the United States invaded Afghanistan, the global war on terror had cost about $8 trillion. That figure includes not only Department of Defense spending but also State Department expenditures, care for veterans, Department of Homeland Security funds, and interest payments on war borrowing. Brown’s Cost of War Project Co‑director Catherine Lutz said the Pentagon now absorbs the majority of federal discretionary spending, yet most people do not realize the scale of this funding. She warned that these costs will continue for decades as the country pays for veterans’ care and the environmental damage wrought by the wars.

Cheney championed the Patriot Act as a key pillar of the “war on terror” and campaigned aggressively to renew its provisions. In January 2006 he and President Bush launched a “double‑barrelled assault” on critics of domestic surveillance and opponents of the law; Cheney told the Heritage Foundation that Americans could not afford “one day” without the Patriot Act. Civil liberties groups argue that the Patriot Act dramatically expanded government surveillance powers at the expense of constitutional freedoms. Under the law, investigators can monitor online communications on an extremely low legal standard, and secret court orders can compel companies to hand over lists of what people read or which websites they visit. The American Civil Liberties Union notes that the law is enforced in secret, weakens judicial review, and allows agents to seize business and communications records without probable cause. By 2004 the ACLU had filed lawsuits challenging these provisions and denounced the administration’s claim that there were no abuses as a “red herring.” The Patriot Act turned ordinary Americans into subjects of a vast dragnet, chilling free speech and giving the executive branch powers reminiscent of past crises.

Keep reading

Dick Cheney, War Criminal and Torturer, Dead at 84

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.

Keep reading

Tim Walz Claims Dick Cheney’s Endorsement Is The Same As Taylor Swift’s

During an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Tim Walz attempted to defend Kamala Harris’ endorsement by Dick and Liz Cheney, claiming that it is just the same thing as Taylor Swift endorsing her.

“The Cheney thing. Do we really have to do that?” Stewart asked in an exasperated voice, clearly referring to the fact that Dick Cheney has bizarrely gone from being despised by the left as a profiteering warmonger authoritarian to suddenly being painted as some sort of respected wise figure.

Walz initially stumbled around trying to think of a response, but then suggested “it goes broader than that.”

Then came the kicker.

“Bernie Sanders, Dick Cheney, Taylor Swift…” Walz stated before Stewart interjected.

Keep reading

Kamala Harris’ Gushing Praise For Dick Cheney Backfires Terribly On Campaign

Former Vice President Dick Cheney made headlines last month after declaring he would vote for Democrat Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in the upcoming November election. Cheney, a long-time Republican, expressed his concerns over Trump’s leadership, stating the former president “can never be trusted with power again.”

“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again,” Cheney said in a statement on September 6. “As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.”

On Thursday, former Republican Representative Liz Cheney introduced Kamala Harris at a Wisconsin rally, marking her first public endorsement of a Democrat. “We may disagree on some things, but we are bound together by the other thing that matters to us as Americans more than any other, and that is our duty to our Constitution and our belief in the miracle and the blessing of this great nation,” Liz said to the crowd.

Liz served three terms as Wyoming’s representative in the House before losing her 2022 primary to Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman, who was once an adviser to her father. Liz cited the “critical moment in our nation’s history” as the reason behind her decision, further highlighting the political shift within some factions of the Republican Party.

As a result, Harris faced backlash following the rally for her praise of her father, Dick Cheney. “I also want to thank your father, Vice President Dick Cheney, for his support, and what he has done to serve our country,” Harris said, while acknowledging Liz Cheney’s backing. Although Harris’ partnership with Liz Cheney might have ruffled some Democratic feathers, it was her commendation of Dick Cheney that drew sharp criticism from both quarters.

Keep reading

TWILIGHT ZONE: Journalist Stunned to Hear Democrats Defending Dick Cheney, a Man They Once Called Evil 

Journalist Michael Tracey recently spoke to some Democrats about Dick Cheney and his endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Tracey was stunned by the knots that Democrats would tie themselves into in order to ignore the fact that for years, Democrats and the media called Cheney an evil person.

Now they say that he has the wisdom to know that Kamala Harris will ‘save democracy’ or something like that.

It’s all very bizarre.

Townhall has details:

Dem Senator Says the Quiet Part Out Loud When Asked About Kamala’s Cheney Endorsement

Progressive reporter Michael Tracey can’t believe what he’s hearing: Democrats are embracing Dick Cheney. The man who Joe Biden called the most dangerous vice president we’ve ever had in 2008 is now some rampart for democracy. Vice President Kamala Harris touted Cheney’s endorsement during the ABC News debate. His daughter Liz, a former congresswoman, also backed Harris. It’s not a shock; one must wonder what took her so long, but it’s beyond comical that liberals think this is some flex.

Conservatives are done with the Cheney family, and it’s not like this endorsement is going to carry a lot of weight; Harris isn’t winning Pennsylvania because of it. Yet, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said the quiet part out loud, saying that Kamala is trying to win an election.

Keep reading

Cheney Backs Harris: The War Hawk’s Blessing Reveals Continuity in Foreign Policy

If there is one eternal rule in Washington, it is that “politics makes for strange bedfellows.” If you were to presume twenty years ago, that former Vice President Dick Cheney would one day endorse a progressive Democrat from California for president, you would be sent to an insane asylum. The idea that a diehard neoconservative and perhaps the biggest war criminal in recent American history would one day endorse someone like Kamala Harris would have been laughable. But due to the prevalence of “Trump derangement syndrome” amongst many neoconservatives, this has become the political reality.

As someone who generally considers himself a member of the political left and who does not support Donald Trump, “Trump derangement syndrome” is not a term I use flippantly. Nevertheless, I cannot seem to find any other phrase to describe the type of voter who would view an endorsement from Dick Cheney for Kamala Harris as a positive. Former Vice President Cheney’s support of Harris is emblematic of a deeper, unsettling continuity in American foreign policy that transcends partisan boundaries.

Dick Cheney is not the only member of his family who has thrown their support behind Harris. His daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney, has also endorsed Kamala Harris after voting for Trump in 2020. In a recent episode of System Update, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out that Liz Cheney – whose entire political career revolved around her defending her father’s depraved imperialism – has become a useful idiot for the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. This shift is par for the course, as proponents of military adventurism have increasingly found a home in a Democratic Party committed to providing endless military aid to both Israel and Ukraine.

This is not surprising as the GOP has moved towards isolationism, ostensibly at least in Ukraine, with Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance, stating that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” But both Liz Cheney and her father “care” about Ukraine, as they have an ideological interest in spreading the tentacles of American imperialism across the world. But in the modern Republican Party under Donald Trump, the Cheney family likely believes they have no tenable political future. Dick Cheney is a decrepit reminder of a time long ago, and Liz Cheney lost in the Republican primary for her district by 32 points.

Keep reading

THE ARCHITECTS OF THE IRAQ WAR: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

THE U.S. AND its allies invaded Iraq 20 years ago in Operation Iraqi Freedom. President George W. Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleischer twice accidentally referred to it as Operation Iraqi Liberation, which was definitely not its official name and would have generated an unfortunate acronym.

The men and women who launched this catastrophic, criminal war have paid no price over the past two decades. On the contrary, they’ve been showered with promotions and cash. There are two ways to look at this.

One is that their job was to make the right decisions for America (politicians) and to tell the truth (journalists). This would mean that since then, the system has malfunctioned over and over again, accidentally promoting people who are blatantly incompetent failures.

Another way to look at it is that their job was to start a war that would extend the U.S. empire and be extremely profitable for the U.S. defense establishment and oil industry, with no regard for what’s best for America or telling the truth. This would mean that they were extremely competent, and the system has not been making hundreds of terrible mistakes, but rather has done exactly the right thing by promoting them.

You can read this and then decide for yourself which perspective makes the most sense.

Keep reading