Dick Cheney’s Dark History

Dick Cheney died November 4th, 2025. He leaves behind a life that served to harm others and enrich himself. He lied America and her allies into decades long wars which killed millions of people worldwide. He achieved this dark triumph by abusing the intelligence process and perverting the work product of dedicated national security professionals. His story should be taught in every service academy at Langley, at Quantico, and elsewhere as an example of national shame. Guys, it’s time for some game theory. Welcome back to Game Theory Today. I’m Eric Garland. Dick Cheney died at a ripe age, having experienced no justice despite decades of professional conduct that was exceptional in its breadth and intensity of toxicity to billions of people.

I want to be clear. I think life is hard and most people make choices based on the world they inherit and based on a reality they could neither choose nor change. And even if they make mistakes, when they are released from this mortal coil, their life should be viewed in context and many of our judgments about them should soften. But none of that applies to Dick Cheney. His crimes were too vast and too deliberate, and the damage he caused is going to be too lastingly felt for this whole world. There’s a lot of Dick Cheny’s career in its totality that could be covered in this video. Just for one example of his wrongdoing, while he was Secretary of Defense in 1991, Cheney paid the Hallebertton Corporation subsidiary Brown and Rroo 8.5 million to study the use of private military forces in combat zones right next to regular American troops doing their operations.

He subsequently magically became CEO of Hallebertton which then pioneered the new world of private for-profit military adventures and trading with America’s enemies. Did you know that as CEO of Hallebertton Cheney did business with Moamar Gaddafi himself in Libya and then Hallebertton opened up a subsidiary in Thrron Iran out of its Dubai office. They open this Iran office next to their t their Dubai office and eventually Dick Cheney just moves the whole company to Dubai even though the Emirates are doing business with Russia and China all over this place. That’s the kind of guy he was. But today I just want to cover what Dick Cheney did to American intelligence and it’s pretty cut and dry. Dick Cheney was a liar who made intelligence agencies in America out to be a bunch of liars as well.

He pushed for America to give up a century of moral superiority that we had compared with the Nazis and Soviets and drug lord desperates restraint and policy that was hard one and extremely valuable as we tried to convince people in other countries, bad guy countries, that we were the good guys and they needed to betray their country because we were not a bunch of rotten bastards. Dick Cheney made sure that we looked like rotten bastards, turning back decades of work from the CIA, the State Department, and everybody in America who wakes up and tries not to be a war criminal and a son of a every day. He deceived this nation into war. And he pushed for us to use torture. I already did a major video on how now declassified documents show that the Iraq war intelligence uh in the early 2000s wasn’t just fraudulent, it was worse.

Guys like Dick Cheney even lied about what the fraud said. It’s a long video, but it’s worth it as I unpack the top secret assessment of Iraq’s regime and I reveal that the CIA itself never even really thought Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. only a general desire to possess them. Dick Cheney didn’t just use the CIA’s fake intelligence. He helped create his own fake intelligence. Rafid Ahmed Alwan Aljanabi was an Iraqi defector to Germany in 1999 who was given the code name Curveball. The BND, that’s Germany’s intelligence agency, took Curveball’s information about Saddam Hussein’s supposed mobile bioweapons laboratories and passed it on to the United States with several serious caveats from the Germans about the Iraqi sources reliability.

US intelligence reportedly never interviewed Aljanabi personally, and the curveball reporting about Saddam’s puditive weapons of mass destruction was otherwise unconfirmed by other sources. Despite the warnings and with Cheny’s personal guidance, the curveball story made it into a 2002 national intelligence estimate about Iraq and into the United Nations Security Council through Powell’s testimony there. In 2011, Aljinabi recanted his reporting and publicly admitted he lied to the Germans about about Saddam Hussein and was proud that he tricked the United States into invading Iraq. No apology from Cheney was available. This was kind of his style, though. On March 24th, 2002, Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press with Tim Russard and claimed that Egyptian national Muhammad Ata, one of the supposed architects of the September 11th, 2001 attacks, met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague before the terrorist operation.

Cheney systematically repeated this claim, which was used to suggest a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks and justify the already decided upon invasion. Of course, anybody who knew about the Middle East in general, much less the actual Iraqi regime, would tell you that Saddam was a rigidly secular Muslim, and he hated the Quran thumpers of al-Qaeda. The religious nut jobs of al-Qaeda were literally his sworn enemies. And not only would he not support their terrorist activities, they hated his guts. And if Saddam Hussein give gave them money and bombs, they would probably turn around and kill Saddam way before they got to anyone in New York City. But that didn’t stop Dick Cheney from telling America, “Hey, wait, we have intelligence that Saddam met with al-Qaeda.” He was obviously in on 9/11 and and you know, we have to invade.

And then we invaded Iraq without justification and without a plan that wouldn’t murder millions of people and mangle Americans. Then in 2009, Cheney turned around and went public and said, “Oops, I guess we didn’t have intelligence about Muhammad Ata anyhow. Sorry about that.” You know, there are people who not only dedicate their careers to making intelligence accurate, they’re willing to give their lives. Go check out the wall of stars at the CIA. These are people that are never going to get a funeral. They’re never going to get their name in the paper, but they’re willing to have horrible things happen to them just so we can get the right information. But that kind of thing meant nothing to Dick Cheney, who had positioned Hallebertton in Libya and Iran and Dubai and was intent on using the American military to make himself rich.

He couldn’t care less what he said about intelligence or anybody else said about intelligence or what they thought about it. as long as he made money, he didn’t care what happened to anyone in the military or in the intelligence services or a single citizen anywhere. Then there are the direct betrayals of intelligence agencies such as the Valerie Plame affair. During the run-up to war, Dick Cheney and his confederates were claiming that Saddam Hussein was acquiring yellow cake uranium in Africa. After the invasion, Ambassador Joe Wilson published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled, “What I didn’t find in Africa.” In the essay, he admits to working for the CIA on a discreet but not secret mission to Nyame Nger to explore the claims that Saddam was buying uranium war.

And in great detail, Wilson showed that no, no, none of the things that you would find if Saddam had bought uranium had actually happened. So, no, shut up. stopped trying to use it to cover for the invasion of the Middle East that Dick Cheney and his pals had been planning since the 1990s in the project for a new American century. Shortly thereafter, Scooter Libby, one of Cheny’s chief aids, leaked to columnist Robert Novak that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a nonofficial cover CIA officer. Uh that means nobody knew she was a CIA officer. She officially was like a corporate exec like many are. They do not have a badge that says, “Hello, I I am an operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency.” She was running around meeting with lots of people and it was not Mark.

She was with the CIA. Okay. And he blew her cover because of Dick Cheny’s crew. Novak turned around after the leak from from Scooter Libby and wrote, quote, “Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Pla, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Nger to investigate the Italian report. Cheney through Libby exposed a knock for the CIA and one working on weapons of mass destruction proliferation for real. Not the fake dudes that rolled in uh to the Germans one time, but people actually doing this work. He wrecked the real work, exposing Valerie Plain’s identity. not only jeopardized every mission that she’d ever been involved in, it could have put a target on the back of every collaborator she had ever had around the world.

The pla affair was prosecuted by then deputy attorney general James Comey, who went on to become director of the FBI. Scooter Libby was indicted by a grand jury, convicted, and sentenced to prison. His sentence was commuted by George W. Bush in 2007, but much to Cheny’s dismay, Libby was not pardoned by Bush. For reasons unknown, Trump pardoned Scooter Libby in 2018. Now, I want to back up from the specifics about Dick Cheny’s abuse of the intelligence community and look at the environment that the man created. These guys had no respect for anything. Not this country, not life, not truth, nothing. And in in DC back in the 2000s, Dick Cheney and his crew, John Bolton, Donald Ramsfeld, George Tennant, those guys would ruin the careers of anybody caught telling the truth or adhering to principles of intelligence trade craft.

If you weren’t a yes man to wararm mongering, they would mark you and your career would go badly. I was an intelligence professional in the DC area in those years and I remember when they were beating the drums of war because I knew real strategic intelligence professionals who had not thought of Saddam as a threat to Cleveland. I was pretty surprised when they started talking about Baghdad. I and others like me knew that the Taliban was a problem in Afghanistan and that eventually we were going to have to clean up our mess from the Charlie Wilson’s war. Period. So when Bin Laden turned up in Afghanistan, that really wasn’t a surprise for real analysts. But Iraq was for reasons I discussed in my famous game theory Twitter tre Twitter thread in 2016.

Anything funny ever anything funny looking happened in Iraq during the Clinton years. In came the rockets. Nobody serious thought Iraq was the same threat as Afghanistan. Certainly not one that justified invasion. But then when Cheny’s crew was skullking around DC, they wanted you to know that if you would not go along with their Iraq war nonsense. They were gonna wreck your life in DC. If if you went along with them, you got invited to stuff. You got job offers. If you didn’t, people said things to me like, “Come on, man. I thought you were a Republican.” As if that had anything to do with doing your analysis correctly. I mean, at the time, like Iraq was selling its crude oil for like Pop-Tarts and Slim Gyms, and I’m supposed to believe that they can hit Salt Lake City.

Yeah. Okay, guys. You know, in in some ways, the Cheney crew is finally facing justice with this indictment of John Bolton. Yeah, I I get it. It’s It’s not for what he did back then. It’s for retaining classified uh intelligence illegally while he was national security adviser for Trump in 2019 and for sending classified intelligence out over the AOL email system where the ironically the Iranians could read it. Uh but to me it’s really an indictment of the whole Cheney crew and their ethos. Those guys did whatever they wanted. They became millionaires by compromising American interests. They used intelligence products as their wetnaps and threw them and the professionals behind them away like garbage as soon as they were done.

They used the military, the spies, the natural wealth, and the Constitution of the United States as one big patriotism Ponzi scheme. And virtually nobody has had as much as a parking ticket over it. In fact, the only guy I think that has really paid for that era is probably John Kiryaku, who blew the whistle on the CIA using torture and was opposed to it for the same reason that I’m opposed to it and the same reason that every other serious intelligence person, not cuz they’re nice, because they’re effective and they’re good Americans, was opposed to it because it doesn’t work and it makes us look like crap and it makes everybody’s life worse and our jobs harder. The only people that have paid for the Cheney era are guys like Kiryaku and everybody else that got their face stepped on because they didn’t want to be a wararmongering douchebag.

So now Dick Cheney has escaped this plane of existence and with it the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice. But I still think it’s important for the rest of us to account for what those guys did because there are Cheni’s spiritual and moral children still in the halls of power and they remain a threat to us all. Be a good guy. That’s all I’m saying. That’s what I learned in those years. Be a good guy no matter what costs. Be a good guy even it will not get you the big money. And tell the truth even if it’s unpopular. It’s not just the the the route to being a good intelligence professional. It’s just being a good American and a good person. Don’t don’t be a wararmongering douchebag no matter what you do.

That’s it for this episode. Don’t start any wars between this and the next episode. Promise me. Click like and subscribe. Dick Cheney died November 4th, 2025. He leaves behind a life that served to harm others and enrich himself. He lied America and her allies into decades long wars which killed millions of people worldwide. He achieved this dark triumph by abusing the intelligence process and perverting the work product of dedicated national security professionals. His story should be taught in every service academy at Langley, at Quantico, and elsewhere as an example of national shame. Guys, it’s time for some game theory. Welcome back to Game Theory Today. I’m Eric Garland. Dick Cheney died at a ripe age, having experienced no justice despite decades of professional conduct that was exceptional in its breadth and intensity of toxicity to billions of people.

I want to be clear. I think life is hard and most people make choices based on the world they inherit and based on a reality they could neither choose nor change. And even if they make mistakes, when they are released from this mortal coil, their life should be viewed in context and many of our judgments about them should soften. But none of that applies to Dick Cheney. His crimes were too vast and too deliberate, and the damage he caused is going to be too lastingly felt for this whole world. There’s a lot of Dick Cheny’s career in its totality that could be covered in this video. Just for one example of his wrongdoing, while he was Secretary of Defense in 1991, Cheney paid the Hallebertton Corporation subsidiary Brown and Rroo 8.5 million to study the use of private military forces in combat zones right next to regular American troops doing their operations.

He subsequently magically became CEO of Hallebertton which then pioneered the new world of private for-profit military adventures and trading with America’s enemies. Did you know that as CEO of Hallebertton Cheney did business with Moamar Gaddafi himself in Libya and then Hallebertton opened up a subsidiary in Thrron Iran out of its Dubai office. They open this Iran office next to their t their Dubai office and eventually Dick Cheney just moves the whole company to Dubai even though the Emirates are doing business with Russia and China all over this place. That’s the kind of guy he was. But today I just want to cover what Dick Cheney did to American intelligence and it’s pretty cut and dry. Dick Cheney was a liar who made intelligence agencies in America out to be a bunch of liars as well.

He pushed for America to give up a century of moral superiority that we had compared with the Nazis and Soviets and drug lord desperates restraint and policy that was hard one and extremely valuable as we tried to convince people in other countries, bad guy countries, that we were the good guys and they needed to betray their country because we were not a bunch of rotten bastards. Dick Cheney made sure that we looked like rotten bastards, turning back decades of work from the CIA, the State Department, and everybody in America who wakes up and tries not to be a war criminal and a son of a every day. He deceived this nation into war. And he pushed for us to use torture. I already did a major video on how now declassified documents show that the Iraq war intelligence uh in the early 2000s wasn’t just fraudulent, it was worse.

Guys like Dick Cheney even lied about what the fraud said. It’s a long video, but it’s worth it as I unpack the top secret assessment of Iraq’s regime and I reveal that the CIA itself never even really thought Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. only a general desire to possess them. Dick Cheney didn’t just use the CIA’s fake intelligence. He helped create his own fake intelligence. Rafid Ahmed Alwan Aljanabi was an Iraqi defector to Germany in 1999 who was given the code name Curveball. The BND, that’s Germany’s intelligence agency, took Curveball’s information about Saddam Hussein’s supposed mobile bioweapons laboratories and passed it on to the United States with several serious caveats from the Germans about the Iraqi sources reliability.

US intelligence reportedly never interviewed Aljanabi personally, and the curveball reporting about Saddam’s puditive weapons of mass destruction was otherwise unconfirmed by other sources. Despite the warnings and with Cheny’s personal guidance, the curveball story made it into a 2002 national intelligence estimate about Iraq and into the United Nations Security Council through Powell’s testimony there. In 2011, Aljinabi recanted his reporting and publicly admitted he lied to the Germans about about Saddam Hussein and was proud that he tricked the United States into invading Iraq. No apology from Cheney was available. This was kind of his style, though. On March 24th, 2002, Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press with Tim Russard and claimed that Egyptian national Muhammad Ata, one of the supposed architects of the September 11th, 2001 attacks, met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague before the terrorist operation.

Cheney systematically repeated this claim, which was used to suggest a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks and justify the already decided upon invasion. Of course, anybody who knew about the Middle East in general, much less the actual Iraqi regime, would tell you that Saddam was a rigidly secular Muslim, and he hated the Quran thumpers of al-Qaeda. The religious nut jobs of al-Qaeda were literally his sworn enemies. And not only would he not support their terrorist activities, they hated his guts. And if Saddam Hussein give gave them money and bombs, they would probably turn around and kill Saddam way before they got to anyone in New York City. But that didn’t stop Dick Cheney from telling America, “Hey, wait, we have intelligence that Saddam met with al-Qaeda.” He was obviously in on 9/11 and and you know, we have to invade.

And then we invaded Iraq without justification and without a plan that wouldn’t murder millions of people and mangle Americans. Then in 2009, Cheney turned around and went public and said, “Oops, I guess we didn’t have intelligence about Muhammad Ata anyhow. Sorry about that.” You know, there are people who not only dedicate their careers to making intelligence accurate, they’re willing to give their lives. Go check out the wall of stars at the CIA. These are people that are never going to get a funeral. They’re never going to get their name in the paper, but they’re willing to have horrible things happen to them just so we can get the right information. But that kind of thing meant nothing to Dick Cheney, who had positioned Hallebertton in Libya and Iran and Dubai and was intent on using the American military to make himself rich.

He couldn’t care less what he said about intelligence or anybody else said about intelligence or what they thought about it. as long as he made money, he didn’t care what happened to anyone in the military or in the intelligence services or a single citizen anywhere. Then there are the direct betrayals of intelligence agencies such as the Valerie Plame affair. During the run-up to war, Dick Cheney and his confederates were claiming that Saddam Hussein was acquiring yellow cake uranium in Africa. After the invasion, Ambassador Joe Wilson published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled, “What I didn’t find in Africa.” In the essay, he admits to working for the CIA on a discreet but not secret mission to Nyame Nger to explore the claims that Saddam was buying uranium war.

And in great detail, Wilson showed that no, no, none of the things that you would find if Saddam had bought uranium had actually happened. So, no, shut up. stopped trying to use it to cover for the invasion of the Middle East that Dick Cheney and his pals had been planning since the 1990s in the project for a new American century. Shortly thereafter, Scooter Libby, one of Cheny’s chief aids, leaked to columnist Robert Novak that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a nonofficial cover CIA officer. Uh that means nobody knew she was a CIA officer. She officially was like a corporate exec like many are. They do not have a badge that says, “Hello, I I am an operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency.” She was running around meeting with lots of people and it was not Mark.

She was with the CIA. Okay. And he blew her cover because of Dick Cheny’s crew. Novak turned around after the leak from from Scooter Libby and wrote, quote, “Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Pla, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Nger to investigate the Italian report. Cheney through Libby exposed a knock for the CIA and one working on weapons of mass destruction proliferation for real. Not the fake dudes that rolled in uh to the Germans one time, but people actually doing this work. He wrecked the real work, exposing Valerie Plain’s identity. not only jeopardized every mission that she’d ever been involved in, it could have put a target on the back of every collaborator she had ever had around the world.

The pla affair was prosecuted by then deputy attorney general James Comey, who went on to become director of the FBI. Scooter Libby was indicted by a grand jury, convicted, and sentenced to prison. His sentence was commuted by George W. Bush in 2007, but much to Cheny’s dismay, Libby was not pardoned by Bush. For reasons unknown, Trump pardoned Scooter Libby in 2018. Now, I want to back up from the specifics about Dick Cheny’s abuse of the intelligence community and look at the environment that the man created. These guys had no respect for anything. Not this country, not life, not truth, nothing. And in in DC back in the 2000s, Dick Cheney and his crew, John Bolton, Donald Ramsfeld, George Tennant, those guys would ruin the careers of anybody caught telling the truth or adhering to principles of intelligence trade craft.

If you weren’t a yes man to wararm mongering, they would mark you and your career would go badly. I was an intelligence professional in the DC area in those years and I remember when they were beating the drums of war because I knew real strategic intelligence professionals who had not thought of Saddam as a threat to Cleveland. I was pretty surprised when they started talking about Baghdad. I and others like me knew that the Taliban was a problem in Afghanistan and that eventually we were going to have to clean up our mess from the Charlie Wilson’s war. Period. So when Bin Laden turned up in Afghanistan, that really wasn’t a surprise for real analysts. But Iraq was for reasons I discussed in my famous game theory Twitter tre Twitter thread in 2016.

Anything funny ever anything funny looking happened in Iraq during the Clinton years. In came the rockets. Nobody serious thought Iraq was the same threat as Afghanistan. Certainly not one that justified invasion. But then when Cheny’s crew was skullking around DC, they wanted you to know that if you would not go along with their Iraq war nonsense. They were gonna wreck your life in DC. If if you went along with them, you got invited to stuff. You got job offers. If you didn’t, people said things to me like, “Come on, man. I thought you were a Republican.” As if that had anything to do with doing your analysis correctly. I mean, at the time, like Iraq was selling its crude oil for like Pop-Tarts and Slim Gyms, and I’m supposed to believe that they can hit Salt Lake City.

Yeah. Okay, guys. You know, in in some ways, the Cheney crew is finally facing justice with this indictment of John Bolton. Yeah, I I get it. It’s It’s not for what he did back then. It’s for retaining classified uh intelligence illegally while he was national security adviser for Trump in 2019 and for sending classified intelligence out over the AOL email system where the ironically the Iranians could read it. Uh but to me it’s really an indictment of the whole Cheney crew and their ethos. Those guys did whatever they wanted. They became millionaires by compromising American interests. They used intelligence products as their wetnaps and threw them and the professionals behind them away like garbage as soon as they were done.

They used the military, the spies, the natural wealth, and the Constitution of the United States as one big patriotism Ponzi scheme. And virtually nobody has had as much as a parking ticket over it. In fact, the only guy I think that has really paid for that era is probably John Kiryaku, who blew the whistle on the CIA using torture and was opposed to it for the same reason that I’m opposed to it and the same reason that every other serious intelligence person, not cuz they’re nice, because they’re effective and they’re good Americans, was opposed to it because it doesn’t work and it makes us look like crap and it makes everybody’s life worse and our jobs harder. The only people that have paid for the Cheney era are guys like Kiryaku and everybody else that got their face stepped on because they didn’t want to be a wararmongering douchebag.

So now Dick Cheney has escaped this plane of existence and with it the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice. But I still think it’s important for the rest of us to account for what those guys did because there are Cheni’s spiritual and moral children still in the halls of power and they remain a threat to us all. Be a good guy. That’s all I’m saying. That’s what I learned in those years. Be a good guy no matter what costs. Be a good guy even it will not get you the big money. And tell the truth even if it’s unpopular. It’s not just the the the route to being a good intelligence professional. It’s just being a good American and a good person. Don’t don’t be a wararmongering douchebag no matter what you do.

That’s it for this episode. Don’t start any wars between this and the next episode. Promise me. Click like and subscribe.