Dick Cheney: A Profile in Impunity

From Bagram Air Base and Abu Ghraib to Guantánamo and countless clandestine dungeons, Cheney oversaw the build-up of the U.S. empire’s archipelago of repression.

Not only did Cheney avoid any accountability for the violence he unleashed on the world and for his corruptions inside the country, he was also a crucial proponent of a monarchical interpretation of the presidency that treats executive power as immune from redress or challenge. Though defending the political honor of his daughter Liz Cheney led him to eventually declare that ​“there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump” — and to endorse a publicly grateful Kamala Harris for president — Trump’s increasingly authoritarian administration is part of the world that Cheney made.

Cheney served as an aide in the Nixon White House after an internship in Congress, then became President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, from 1975 to 1977. It was in this role that, alongside then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney fought against the curbs on the prerogatives of the presidency that Congress had implemented in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, above all the 1973 War Powers Resolution — the same act that the Trump administration (following the example of Obama’s 2011 bombing of Libya) says does not apply to its lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean. Cheney was an early and steadfast proponent of Unitary Executive Theory, which aims to dispense with all constitutional checks and balances on the president’s monopoly of executive power, especially when it comes to warmaking.

In 1979, Cheney began a 10-year stint as Wyoming’s congressman, where he was a staunch defender of President Ronald Reagan’s counter-insurgency wars. In Cheney’s minority report on the Iran-Contra affair, he argued the Reagan administration’s covert arms trafficking — to Iran via Israel, to fund right-wing Contras against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government — fell under ​“constitutionally protected exercises of inherent Presidential powers.”

During the George H.W. Bush presidency, Cheney served as secretary of defense, overseeing the invasion of Panama (which he called ​“the template for how we should do things”) and Operation Desert Storm. It was during this period that, with his undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney set out a blueprint for permanent U.S. geopolitical hegemony and endless military intervention. This vision of imperialist strategy, the Defense Planning Guidance, would spawn the Project for the New American Century — the hawkish neoconservative foreign policy think tank that would spearhead the expansion of U.S. state violence, under the guise of counter-terrorism, in the wake of 9/11.

Between the father-son Bush presidencies, Cheney — always a staunch proponent of tax cuts and corporate welfare — served as CEO of the Texas hydrocarbon multinational Halliburton. When Cheney returned to the White House as vice president, he would lead an energy task force that secured the ​“Halliburton loophole” to exempt the injection of fracking fluid from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Staff from Halliburton, which remains a world leader in fracking, were involved in the Environmental Protection Agency’s review of the technology. Halliburton’s subsidiary KBR netted billions from a ​“sweetheart deal” with the US government during the occupation of Iraq. 

As vice president, Cheney — well-known to be a micromanaging control freak obsessed with secrecy (destroying visitor logs, multiplying safes for documents) — assembled a legal team to avoid prohibitions on warrantless wiretaps at home and to bypass the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war abroad, transforming enemy belligerents into ​“unlawful combatants” who could be thrown into a legal black hole. In a notorious interview on Meet the Press, Cheney stressed the need, in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, to ​“work the dark side” and spend ​“time in the shadows.” 

As the current administration gloats about Alligator Alcatraz and drone strikes on fishermen in the Caribbean, that ​“dark side” is crudely hogging the limelight. Though Trump aptly derided Cheney as ​“the king of endless, nonsensical wars, wasting lives and trillions of dollars,” the Trump presidency and its pathologies would be unthinkable without the groundwork laid by George W. Bush’s ​“co-president.”