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Former vice president and defense secretary Dick Cheney has died, at 84, with the blood of millions on his hands.

Cheney’s family said he died from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease on Monday, November 3. He passed in peace, surrounded by his family, who lauded him as a “good man” and a “noble giant.”

In reality, Cheney’s legacy will far outlive him as the man responsible for wars that have killed, injured, and displaced millions abroad; and who worked diligently to wrest freedoms from Americans and lay the groundwork for fascist authoritarianism in the U.S.

Cheney is perhaps best known for his work as the architect of the “war on terror,” leading the U.S. into the post-9/11 wars that have killed at least 4.5 million people and counting over two decades, and displaced 38 million people so far.

Under President George W. Bush and alongside Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney forever changed the U.S.’s approach to war, the hunt for “terrorists,” and the surveillance and criminalization of Muslim communities across the U.S.

Cheney exercised unprecedented power in the office of the vice president, acting as the de facto president as he propagated the lie of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and subsequently laid waste to Afghanistan, Iraq, and numerous other countries across the Middle East. When reports uncovered the U.S. military’s horrific abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, Cheney sought to use the umbrella of “fighting terrorism” to justify what others called war crimes.

The war on terror is still ongoing in a literal way in war-torn countries such as Yemen, Syria, and........

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