Dick Cheney, who served as vice president under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009, died yesterday at the age of 84 from complications with pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease.

Though Cheney is known for citing his lesbian daughter while voicing his public support for same-sex marriage — at a time when Bush’s re-election campaign sought a national ban on the unions — Cheney is also remembered for lying to support the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and for supporting torture despite the United State’s numerous international agreements opposing it.

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During his young adulthood, Cheney received five draft deferments to avoid fighting in the decades-long Vietnam War. He served as White House chief of staff from 1975 to 1977 under then-President Gerald Ford. In 1978, Cheney was elected to represent Wyoming in the U.S. House; he was re-elected five times and served in the role until 1989.

In 1980, Cheney endorsed Governor Ronald Reagan for president. Reagan went on to ignore the deaths of tens of thousands of LGBTQ+ people and others who perished during the opening years of the AIDS epidemic.

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Cheney served as President George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense from 1989 to 1993 and oversaw the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama as well as the 1990 Gulf War to end Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s invasion of oil-rich Kuwait.

From 1995 to 2001, Cheney served as chairman of the board and CEO of the oil extraction company Halliburton. He resigned the day that George W. Bush named him as his running mate, but Cheney faced continual allegations of taking actions as vice president to benefit Halliburton’s business in the Middle East.

After a controversial December 2000 Supreme Court decision, Bush and Cheney became the first presidential ticket since 1888 to win the presidency despite losing the national popular vote; a feat then repeated by the current president in 2016.

Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Cheney oversaw the opening of the Guantánamo Bay internment camp, which indefinitely held suspected terrorists and enemy combatants without any due legal process. Trump has since used the facility to detain suspected undocumented immigrants without due process.

After the 2001 attacks, Cheney repeatedly lied that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that Hussein had “a 10-year relationship” with the radical Islamic terrorist organization Al Qaeda. Cheney and other Bush administration officials repeated these falsehoods to justify the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. At the time, U.S. intelligence allies disavowed U.S. claims of Iraq’s WMD, and the U.S. 9/11 Commission later found no “collaborative relationship” whatsoever between Hussein and Al Qaeda.

Nevertheless, Cheney reportedly pressured U.S. intelligence agencies to support his baseless claims and cheered the 2003 invasion, saying it would be an “enormous success story” and that U.S. forces would “be greeted as liberators.” The invasion, which lacked an exit strategy, turned into an eight-year quagmire that resulted in an estimated 103,160 Iraqi civilian deaths and cost trillions in U.S. taxpayer funds.

Around the same time, Cheney also claimed that torture “kept us safe,” even though intelligence experts said that the U.S. use of torture resulted in no actionable anti-terrorist intelligence during Cheney’s vice presidency and merely provided justifications for other countries to torture their prisoners.

“When Dick Cheney was twisting international and domestic law into knots to expand executive power, build up the camps at Guantánamo, and empower the U.S. torture program, we human rights lawyers predicted that we’d end up where we are now: with an executive that claims power to name any opposition ‘terrorism’, and any state action a ‘war’ to escape accountability,” said Alka Pradhan, a defense lawyer at the Guantánamo Bay military tribunals, told The Guardian following Cheney’s death.

“Every subsequent president, via the drone or extraordinary surveillance programs, has built on Cheney’s legacy to get to the present moment in U.S. history,” Pradhan added.

Cheney supported same-sex marriage, shot hunting buddy in the face

During Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, Bush supported a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Bush blamed “activist judges” for approving same-sex unions and pledged only to appoint federal judges who opposed the unions. To galvanize Republican voters during that year’s national elections, 11 states had ballot measures to ban same-sex marriage — all 11 passed.

In August 2004, Cheney said, “Lynne and I have a gay daughter [Mary], so it’s an issue our family is very familiar with. With the respect to the question of relationships, my general view is freedom means freedom for everyone…. People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to.”

“The question that comes up with the issue of marriage is what kind of official sanction or approval is going to be granted by government? Historically, that’s been a relationship that has been handled by the states,” he added. “The states have made that fundamental decision of what constitutes a marriage.”

In February 2006, Cheney accidentally shot his 78-year-old hunting companion Harry Whittington in the face and chest with a 28-gauge shotgun, causing Whittington to suffer a mild heart attack and a collapsed lung. Cheney had admitted to drinking a beer hours before the shooting occurred. Whittington survived.

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