Radio: Dick Cheney – Gone But Not Forgiven

Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo and on other related topics over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

It’s over two weeks since Dick Cheney, the former US Vice President, died at the age of 84, and, after a brief flurry of mainstream media activity, in which the immensity of his war crimes and crimes against humanity (for which he was never indicted)  was largely whitewashed through mentions of how, although he was a “divisive” figure, he was also a towering presence in US politics, the media moved on, only waking up again yesterday when his funeral service was held in Washington, D.C., at which former presidents and vice presidents, lawmakers and Supreme Court Justices all ignored the horrors of his legacy.

Former Presidents George W. Bush and Joe Biden attended, as did former Vice Presidents Kamala Harris, Al Gore, Dan Quayle and Mike Pence. Also present were the Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, Democratic Senator Nancy Pelosi. former House Speaker John Boehner, former national security advisor John Bolton, and Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Elena Kagan.

Biden’s attendance struck me as particularly grimly appropriate, because his “ironclad” support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in which he referred to the attacks of October 7, 2023 as Israel’s 9/11, has always struck me as nothing less than a transfer of Cheney’s lawless and violent post-9/11 policies of vengeance from the US itself to Israel, a parallel made all the more alarming because, of course, Israel is a foreign country, even though Biden’s actions did more than any previous president to foster the illusion that, actually, the US is nothing more than a colony of Israel.

Notable absences were Barack Obama, who had, nevertheless, posted condolences on November 5, in which he stated that, “Although Dick Cheney and I represented very different political traditions, I respected his lifelong devotion to public service and his deep love of country”, and both Donald Trump and JD Vance, who had not been invited. Trump has, noticeably, made no public comments whatsoever about Cheney’s death, although Vance expressed his condolences at a Breitbart News event on Thursday, in which he also made reference to “some political disagreements” between Trump and Cheney. 

That was something of an understatement, as Cheney had condemned Trump’s 2020 vote-rigging claims and his subsequent support for the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and had endorsed Kamala Harris over Trump in last year’s Presidential Election, when he said that “there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.” In response, in a rare moment of clarity, Trump shot back that Cheney was the “King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars, wasting Lives and Trillions of Dollars.”

In some ways, of course, Cheney was undoubtedly correct about the threat posed by Trump, as Trump’s concept of the presidency seems mainly to be that he perceives the role as granting him the power to act like an erratic and completely unaccountable emperor, although, as the primary architect of the post-9/11 “war on terror”, the unapologetic driver of the CIA’s repulsive “black site” torture program, and the chief instigator of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, which led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, Cheney himself posed an extraordinary threat to the US republic, which he never acknowledged, and which has been noticeably absent from mainstream media coverage since his death.

As well as tearing up all domestic and international laws and treaties regarding the pursuit of war and the treatment of prisoners, Cheney maintained a lifelong obsession with unfettered executive power, which, for the republic, was his most devastating legacy, as it so fundamentally weakened the checks and balances built into the Constitution, and, ironically, paved the way for Donald Trump to so breezily assume that there ought to be no constraints on his own power.

I’m pleased to have marked Cheney’s passing with critical commentary about the multitude of crimes for which he was never held accountable — in my article on my website here about how his death coincided with the latest monthly global vigils for Guantánamo’s closure, as well as 8,700 days of the prison’s existence, as well as in a follow-up article on the Close Guantánamo website, No Tears for Dick Cheney on Guantánamo’s 8,700th Day of Existence.

I’m also pleased to note that, shortly after, I was asked by Rebecca Myles to appear on the “Frontline Voices” show on WBAI Pacifica in New York. The full show, from November 14, is available here, but my 20-minute interview is embedded below, and I hope that you have time to listen to it.

I’m delighted that Rebecca gave me free rein to discuss Cheney’s horrific legacy, including his deliberate use of torture to manufacture a false reason to illegally invade Iraq, and also allowed me to speak about how shamefully forgotten Guantánamo is, and its remaining 15 prisoners, all of whom are held in varying states of fundamental lawlessness, for which, in every case, Dick Cheney bore some or almost all of the responsibility.

I was also pleased to be asked to discuss Guantánamo under Donald Trump, as part of his disgusting, racist “war on migrants”, and to be able to note how the ongoing use of the naval base and the prison for migrants — althrough admittedly in quite small numbers — has also been largely sidelined in the US media after an initial flurry of interest in February.

I could write more, but I hope you’ll listen to the interview instead.

Thanks, as always, for your interest.

Note: If it’s of interest, please feel free to listen to my song ’81 Million Dollars’, recorded with my band The Four Fathers, about the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, calling for those responsible to be held accountable. Dick Cheney and his partner in crime Donald Rumsfeld have now evaded responsibility through their deaths, but the need for accountability remains as necessary as ever.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation via PayPal or via Stripe.