Dick Cheney has passed. The NYT article on him is extremely long. I have selected parts I found important to remember.

The NYT article on the death of Dick Cheney at 84 was balanced (!) and contained some interesting paragraphs on the growth of the US’ unconstitutional behaviors.

This paragraph on the Patriotic Act efficiently tells us how undemocratic it is and how we need to get rid of it:

Later, it became clear that the act was being used to underpin secret courts, wiretaps without warrants, the unlimited detention of suspects without hearings or charges, and interrogation methods that skirted bans on torture in the Geneva Conventions. There were wide protests and even constitutional challenges. But Mr. Cheney strongly defended the law and its expansion of presidential power, and it remained in force. [And Congress keeps renewing it—Nass]

This paragraph tells us how a problem is created to implement a wildly aggressive solution:

In the aftermath [of 9/11/01, which Cheney had most likely instigated—Nass] , Mr. Cheney became the strategist behind a rapid expansion of presidential power to fight terrorism and a forceful proponent of Mr. Bush’s doctrinal warning to the world: that nations and regimes would be counted as for or against the United States in the new age of terrorism, and that pre-emptive military action would be taken against anyone who posed a threat to the security of the country.

Chickenhawk Cheney (who received 4 student deferments and one parental deferment to avoid serving in the Vietnam War) was as warlike as they come. He used false pretenses to invade nations with valuable resources. Afghanistan was said to harbor $1Trillion in minerals, and more in gas, oil and potential pipelines from the Caspian Basin, and Iraq had oil and a high standard of living. Here is what I documented in 2011:

Mr. Cheney also strongly influenced Mr. Bush’s decision to invade Afghanistan to hunt for Osama bin Laden, the Qaeda leader who masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks, and to suppress a fanatical Taliban regime that had sheltered terrorists and imposed a brutal theocracy on the Afghan people.

And it was Mr. Cheney who was a dominant voice behind Mr. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and then to justify the war. He insisted that Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, had ties to Qaeda terrorists, possessed weapons of mass destruction and would threaten America and its allies with nuclear blackmail.

What began as a one-month combat operation in Iraq gave way to a nearly nine-year occupation, a struggle against Iraqi insurgents and internecine warfare that would claim nearly 4,500 American lives and cost more than $2 trillion, according to some estimates.

The outlines of an enormous intelligence “failure” (my quotation marks—Nass) began to emerge. The Sept. 11 commission, an independent panel given the task of investigating the 2001 attacks, found no evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and the chief weapons inspector of the Central Intelligence Agency, a White House appointee, concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. [And recall that the Sept. 11 Commission was run by Condoleeza’s close associate Philip Zelikow, and covered up quite a bit of even more damning information.—Nass]

Cheney and Bush cared naught for the will of Congress or the People:

… The president also spoke of cooperating with Congress and said he would consider proposals from a bipartisan Iraq Study Group calling for gradual disengagement from Iraq.

But it soon became clear that Mr. Bush intended to do neither. In early 2007, with Mr. Cheney’s endorsement, the president sent tens of thousands of American troops to Iraq, augmenting the 132,000 there, in a surge to help the government quell violence around Baghdad. The House passed a nonbinding resolution against the plan, to which Mr. Cheney declared, “It won’t stop us.”

It seemed nothing would. After years of carnage and sectarian violence that had left Iraq on the brink of civil war, Mr. Cheney dismissed suggestions that the country was on the verge of collapse. “The reality on the ground is that we’ve made major progress,” he said. [Cheney preferred lies to truth, it seems—Nass]

Cheney loved torture:

And when the Senate Intelligence Committee accused the C.I.A. of torturing terrorism suspects during the Bush years, Mr. Cheney rose to defend the agency, arguing that its interrogations had been legally authorized and “absolutely, totally justified.” He roundly dismissed allegations that the C.I.A. had misled the White House about its methods or inflated the value of the information obtained from prisoners.

And he cared not a whit for the law or the Constitution:

In Congress, Mr. Cheney defended domestic spying against charges that it might be unconstitutional and in violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs intelligence gathering in the United States.

Congress also had problems protecting the Constitution:

Over Mr. Cheney’s objections, the Senate adopted a proposal by Mr. McCain, once a prisoner of war in Vietnam, to ban “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of detainees. Outrage over Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison where naked prisoners had been photographed stacked in human pyramids and cowering before dogs, and reports of other abuses had led to bipartisan pressure for the ban.

In June 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the administration another setback, ruling that it had violated the Geneva Conventions and American law by creating military commissions to try terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay without judicial process. The court said Congress had not authorized such tribunals. Critics of the Bush-Cheney drive to expand presidential powers hailed the ruling.

But within months, Congress, still controlled by Republicans, gave the administration a comeback victory, passing legislation shaped by Mr. Cheney that authorized the military commissions, renewed Mr. Bush’s power to designate detainees “unlawful enemy combatants” and allowed the government to imprison, interrogate and try them without judicial review indefinitely.

While many wondered what Cheney was really like, this is the most personal information that could be gleaned:

In the 1950s, Friday nights in Casper meant football games, a dance and a trip to the root beer stand. At Natrona County High School, Dick was captain of the football team and president of his senior class, but not a top student. His yearbook picture shows a beefy teenager with a crew cut and a tight smile. His girlfriend was the homecoming queen, Lynne Vincent, whom he would marry in 1964.

After graduation, he went to Yale, but his grades were poor; he flunked out twice and left after three semesters. He traveled around the West, at one point laying lines for a power company, and was arrested twice for drunken driving before settling down at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965 and a master’s in 1966, both in political science. America was at war in Vietnam, but Mr. Cheney never served in the military, winning four deferments as a student and one as a married parent.