Dick Cheney

Cheney was the primary advocate within the Bush administration for the Iraq War and the principal salesman of the pre-war WMD claims. He made at least five visits to CIA headquarters to pressure analysts, made public claims about Iraq-Al Qaeda links that his own intelligence briefings contradicted, and cited the aluminum tubes and Niger yellowcake stories after they had been flagged as highly uncertain or false by US intelligence. The Senate Intelligence Committee Phase II Report (2008) found that "administration officials made repeated statements that were inconsistent with the underlying intelligence assessments." An estimated 200,000–500,000+ Iraqi civilians died as a result of the war and its aftermath. Approximately 4,500 US service members were killed.

• —Cheney's August 26, 2002 VFW speech: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." The Intelligence Community assessment at the time was that Iraq's nuclear program had been dormant.
• —Cheney made multiple visits to CIA headquarters between 2002 and 2003 — more than any previous vice president — to personally review and challenge intelligence analysis. Career analysts described the visits as pressure to conform assessments to policy preferences.
• —The aluminum tubes claim: Cheney publicly stated that Iraq had attempted to purchase aluminum tubes that could "only" be used for uranium enrichment. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's technical experts had assessed the tubes were almost certainly for conventional rockets. Cheney cited the claim anyway.
• —The Niger yellowcake claim: Ambassador Joseph Wilson was sent to investigate; he found no evidence and reported his findings. The administration cited the claim in the 2003 State of the Union address regardless.
• —Senate Intelligence Committee Phase II Report (2008): stated that "the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was uncertain" and documented specific false claims by senior officials.
• —The Chilcot Inquiry (UK, 2016) — an independent review of Britain's involvement — concluded that military action in March 2003 was "not a last resort" and that intelligence was used to make a case for a war that had already been decided.
• —Iraq Body Count documented at least 200,000 civilian deaths. The Lancet (2006) and ORB (2007) studies estimated 600,000+ excess deaths. The US government has never issued an official estimate of Iraqi civilian casualties.

Source:Senate Intelligence Committee Phase II Report (2008); Chilcot Inquiry Final Report (UK, 2016); Iraq Body Count database

The Senate Intelligence Committee Study of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program — the SSCI Torture Report, with a 525-page executive summary declassified in December 2014 — documented systematic torture of detainees including waterboarding, rectal feeding, sleep deprivation (up to 180 hours), confinement in small boxes, walling, facial slapping, and threats against family members. Cheney was the primary White House advocate for the program. He worked with David Addington (his chief of staff and legal counsel) to obtain the Office of Legal Counsel memos (Yoo/Bybee, 2002) that purported to authorize the techniques. The SSCI report found the program was more brutal than the CIA represented to Congress, that it produced no unique actionable intelligence that could not have been obtained otherwise, and that the CIA actively deceived the White House and congressional oversight about the program's effectiveness.

• —Cheney has publicly and repeatedly defended the torture program. In a December 2014 NBC interview, days after the SSCI report was released, he said: "I would do it again in a minute."
• —Waterboarding: the SSCI report documented that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and Abu Zubaydah 83 times. These are not Cheney's numbers — they are the CIA's own records.
• —The SSCI report found: "The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees."
• —The Yoo/Bybee OLC memos (August 2002): Cheney and Addington pressured the Office of Legal Counsel to produce legal authorization for techniques that would otherwise have been federal crimes. The memos were later withdrawn by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility as legally deficient.
• —The "hospital scene" (March 2004): when DOJ Acting AG James Comey refused to reauthorize the warrantless surveillance program (Stellar Wind), Cheney and Alberto Gonzales went to the hospital bedside of incapacitated AG John Ashcroft to obtain his signature. Ashcroft refused. The program was briefly halted before a revised authorization was obtained.
• —The SSCI report was the result of a six-year investigation with access to 6.3 million pages of CIA documents. The CIA disputed its findings; the underlying documents support the report's conclusions.
• —No one involved in designing, authorizing, or conducting the torture program has been criminally charged. Obama's DOJ declined to prosecute in 2012.

Source:Senate Intelligence Committee Study of CIA Detention and Interrogation Program — Executive Summary (2014, declassified); DOJ OLC Bybee Memo (August 1, 2002, FOIA)

Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. When he became Vice President, he held approximately $8 million in deferred compensation and stock options from Halliburton. During his vice presidency, Halliburton's subsidiary KBR received the LOGCAP III contract — a no-bid "cost-plus" arrangement — worth approximately $39.5 billion in Iraq reconstruction contracts. Multiple GAO audits and Army audits documented significant overcharging and contract irregularities. Cheney's office disclosed the financial arrangements and defended them as legal; independent government auditors consistently found problems with the contracts.

• —Cheney held deferred compensation from Halliburton totaling approximately $8 million at the time he took office as VP, payable in annual installments. He took out an insurance policy to offset any impact on his income from Halliburton's stock performance — which critics noted still created a financial interest in the company's success.
• —KBR (Kellogg Brown & Root), a Halliburton subsidiary, received the LOGCAP III (Logistics Civil Augmentation Program) contract in 2001 — before the Iraq War — through a competitive bid. The Pentagon then awarded KBR sole-source task orders worth tens of billions without competitive bidding.
• —The Army audit agency found in 2004 that KBR had been overpaid by at least $1.4 billion for dining services in Iraq. A subsequent DCAA audit found $1.8 billion in questioned costs.
• —KBR was paid $2.16 per gallon to deliver gasoline to Iraq from Kuwait; a Pentagon audit found a Kuwaiti company was charging $0.96/gallon for the same service.
• —The Army's civilian procurement chief, Bunnatine Greenhouse, publicly stated that the LOGCAP extensions were "the most blatant and improper contract abuse" she had witnessed in her 20-year career. She was demoted.
• —Total KBR Iraq-related contracts: approximately $39.5 billion through 2009, according to House Oversight Committee analysis. No criminal charges were filed against Halliburton or KBR executives.

Source:GAO — "Rebuilding Iraq: Actions Still Needed to Improve the Use of Private Security Providers" (2005); House Oversight Committee — "Halliburton's Iraq Contracts" (2005)

Days after September 11, 2001, Cheney and David Addington began pushing to establish a warrantless domestic surveillance program that would become NSA Stellar Wind. The program — which involved mass collection of phone call metadata, email content, and internet communications — bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. When Acting AG James Comey refused to reauthorize the program in March 2004 on grounds that it lacked lawful authority, Cheney sent Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card to the hospital bedside of incapacitated AG John Ashcroft to obtain his authorization directly. Ashcroft refused. Cheney proposed reauthorizing the program without DOJ approval; FBI Director Robert Mueller threatened to resign. The program was temporarily halted and later modified. It remained secret until it was exposed by the New York Times in December 2005.

• —Stellar Wind operated from October 2001. It involved collection of metadata for millions of Americans' phone calls and collection of content from electronic communications without individual warrants.
• —The program was authorized through a series of classified presidential orders and OLC opinions — bypassing FISA, the court designed specifically to authorize surveillance of foreign intelligence targets.
• —When the New York Times reported Stellar Wind in December 2005, Bush acknowledged the program and called reporting on it a violation of national security. The Times had held the story for over a year at the administration's request.
• —The exposure of Stellar Wind by the Times was a precondition for Edward Snowden's later revelations about NSA PRISM and XKeyscore — which showed the mass surveillance architecture had grown substantially after 2001.
• —Cheney's autobiography explicitly defends Stellar Wind and states he believes the program should have been continued without the modifications forced by DOJ.
• —The USA FREEDOM Act (2015), passed after Snowden's disclosures, placed new restrictions on bulk phone metadata collection — reforms Cheney opposed.

Source:James Risen & Eric Lichtblau, "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts," New York Times (December 16, 2005); Charlie Savage, "Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency" (2007)

After Ambassador Joseph Wilson published an op-ed in the New York Times in July 2003 stating that his 2002 trip to Niger had found no evidence Iraq sought uranium, columnist Robert Novak published that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA officer — effectively ending her career and burning her contacts and networks. The leak traced back to officials in the White House and State Department. Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was convicted in March 2007 on four counts of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements to the FBI. President Bush commuted his 30-month prison sentence in July 2007, calling it "excessive." President Trump pardoned Libby in 2018.

• —Plame was a NOC — a CIA officer under non-official cover, meaning her agency affiliation was classified. Outing a NOC is a federal crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
• —Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald investigated the leak for nearly two years. He concluded that Richard Armitage (Deputy Secretary of State) was the original leaker to Novak, and that Libby had lied to investigators to protect Cheney.
• —Libby's conviction: four counts of obstruction of justice, perjury (two counts), and false statements. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison and a $250,000 fine.
• —Bush's commutation: days after Libby exhausted his immediate appeal and was required to report to prison, Bush commuted the prison sentence. Libby paid the fine and served two years of probation.
• —Fitzgerald stated at the sentencing that "there is a cloud over the vice president" and that Libby's obstruction had prevented the investigation from fully determining Cheney's role.
• —Trump's 2018 pardon removed all legal consequences. Libby's law license — revoked following conviction — was restored.
• —Plame later sued Cheney, Libby, and others for the leak. The civil case was dismissed on procedural grounds in 2007.

Source:US v. Libby (DDC 2007) — trial record; Special Counsel Fitzgerald's closing statements; Valerie Plame Wilson, "Fair Game" (2007)

Within days of taking office, Cheney convened the National Energy Policy Development Group — a task force that met secretly with oil company executives, gas company representatives, and coal industry lobbyists to write the administration's energy policy. Cheney refused to disclose the participants or their recommendations to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which issued a subpoena. GAO sued; Cheney refused. The case went to the Supreme Court (Cheney v. US District Court, 2004), which ruled the lower courts had erred in requiring disclosure without more evidence of wrongdoing. Documents eventually obtained through FOIA litigation showed maps of Iraqi oil fields — distributed before the Iraq War — among the materials reviewed by the task force.

• —The task force participants (never officially disclosed) included executives from ExxonMobil, Conoco, Shell, BP, and Enron — companies that directly benefited from the resulting energy policy.
• —GAO Comptroller General David Walker issued a subpoena for task force records. Cheney refused to comply. It was the first time in GAO's 80-year history that a federal official had refused to comply with a GAO investigation.
• —FOIA litigation by the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch eventually produced some documents. Among them: maps of Iraqi oil fields with notations about production capacity, dated March 2001 — nearly two years before the Iraq War.
• —The Bush administration's 2001 energy policy contained 105 recommendations, the majority of which favored fossil fuel production. It rolled back Clinton-era conservation standards and opened public lands to drilling.
• —Enron CEO Ken Lay — a major Bush donor — participated in the task force. Enron collapsed in December 2001. The energy policy recommendations remained.
• —Justice Scalia, who recused himself in many matters, refused to recuse himself from Cheney v. US District Court despite having taken a private duck-hunting trip with Cheney while the case was pending.

Source:GAO v. Cheney (2002); Cheney v. US District Court (2004); NRDC FOIA litigation — energy task force documents; Judicial Watch document releases