Dick Cheney Dying a Free Man Shames Us All

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Dick Cheney died a free man today, which should shame us all. Cheney’s long-awaited death finally came on November 4, 2025, Election Day in many states and municipalities, at the age of 84. It was 46 years since the first of Cheney’s four heart attacks, at the age of 37; 13 years since he received a heart transplant at the age of 71. It was also 19 years since he shot his friend in his face during a quail-hunting accident, probably Cheney’s best-remembered public act, though certainly not his most consequential.

People my age have all heard 700 iterations of Dick Cheney quail-hunting jokes by now, and so it’s tempting to write the incident off as one of the least evil things Dick Cheney did in the course of his public life. That’s probably true, but the details of the event still reveal his essential character. As a man who managed to survive almost 50 years on a damaged and increasingly mechanical heart, who lied us into a disastrous war that killed at least 600,000 civilians and destabilized an entire region for decades to come, Cheney had a well-earned reputation for being a real-life Darth Vader. But it’s important to remember that, first and foremost, he was also incompetent.

From the Washington Post, in 2010:

[Harry] Whittington recalls that he was standing off to Cheney’s right, looking for a downed bird. He doesn’t remember exactly how far away he was when Cheney, tracking a bird, twisted quickly in his direction and fired. Whittington was angled toward Cheney at the time; hence, the wounds on his right side. Cheney later told a police investigator that he was standing in a slightly elevated position relative to Whittington, meaning he was aiming downward. The police report notes that Whittington would have been wounded on the lower half of his body if he and Cheney had been on same level.

This violates two basic rules of hunting safety, says Ralph Stuart, the editor of Shooting Sportsman, a hunting magazine. The first is the shooter’s obligation to ensure that he has a clear line of fire before pulling the trigger. The second is the “blue-sky rule,” meaning that a hunter shouldn’t fire until he can see blue sky beneath a bird, thus greatly reducing the chances of hitting another hunter or dog. “Quail often fly low and demand lower shots,” Stuart points out, but that makes it “doubly important” that the shooter is aware of what’s between him and the bird and just beyond.

This is all, I would argue, a long way of saying that the first rule of hunting is “don’t shoot your friend.”

It’s also quite possible that Cheney was drunk at the time.

Whether alcohol played any role in the shooting has long been a point of speculation. Eyewitnesses, including ranch owner Anne Armstrong and her daughter Katharine, strongly denied it. Cheney did, too, although he later told Fox News that he had had “one beer” during a picnic lunch some five hours earlier.

Is there any more frequently told lie in the aftermath of an accident than “I had one beer?” A few small beers, perhaps.

Whittington says alcohol “was available” at the picnic, but he didn’t notice if anyone was drinking at lunch or afterward when the hunting party took a midafternoon break. The police investigation was useless on this point; even if Cheney had been given a Breathalyzer test, the result would have been meaningless since authorities didn’t speak to Cheney until the next morning.

Whether Cheney was drunk, buzzed, or mostly sober can’t be proven, but seems in any case irrelevant. Every day, thousands of piss-drunk American hunters easily manage not to violate the number one rule of hunting, which is, again, “don’t shoot your friend.”

Dick Cheney couldn’t manage this though, because he was shortsighted, cruel, and above all, an incompetent man, who spent his life hand waving the collateral damage from his own actions. After the fact, he did what he had done and would continue to do throughout his public life: deflect blame, attempt to cover up the truth, and deny responsibility.

Despite his scars, Whittington bears no ill will toward Cheney. He calls him “a very capable and honorable man” and adds, “He’s said some very kind things to me.”

But did Cheney ever say in private what he didn’t say in public? Did he ever apologize?

Whittington, who has been talking about his life and career for hours, suddenly draws silent.

“I’m not going to go into that,” he says sharply after a short pause.

Not apologizing seems both true to Cheney’s character and legally expedient (a Venn diagram that is so often a perfect circle in Dick Cheney’s case), but in so doing Cheney arguably violated the first rule of accidentally shooting your friend in the face: apologize early and often. That is, at minimum, what a decent person would do. But aside from being incompetent, probably the second most important thing to remember about Dick Cheney was that he was not a decent person.

A full accounting of Dick Cheney’s many crimes, as a warmongering politician and a war profiteering CEO, is above my pay grade—supporting Apartheid South Africa, directing the incredibly shady invasion of Panama; many such instances—but to focus on just one, he was also once the nation’s most powerful torture apologist.

In the years when the pellets from Dick Cheney’s shotgun were still gradually working their way out of Harry Whittington’s face, scalp, and neck (Whittington lived to be 95, dying in 2023), former FBI investigator Daniel J. Jones was combing through 6.3 million pages of documents for what would eventually become The Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. Aka “The Torture Report.”

The full 6,700-page report is still classified, but the 525-page executive summary was released in 2014, detailing a series of tactics that Cheney, his staff, the CIA and other officials worked to legalize through a succession of memos. All the numbers and memos and lawsuits tend only to further euphemize the horrible details of what actually happened.

To wit:

In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,” scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten. In November 2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected hypothermia.” [NYTimes]

“Rectal feeding” is just what it sounds like: shoving a feeding tube up someone’s asshole to punish them for a hunger strike.

The same officer described how the procedure was carried out:

“Regarding the rectal tube, if you place it and open up the IV tubing, the flow will self-regulate, sloshing up the large intestines,” he wrote. […] Another detainee was held for 17 days in the dark without anybody knowing he was there. [Bloomberg]

Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times a month and spent “11 days and two hours” in a coffin-sized box. Another detainee was “subjected to ‘ice water baths’ and 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation before being released because the CIA discovered he was likely not the person he was believed to be.”

When the report came out, Cheney called it “a bunch of hooey.”

Many of these techniques were the brainchild of James Mitchell, an Air Force survivor school expert with no interrogation experience. The Torture Report eventually concluded that this torture never yielded a single piece of intelligence that averted a terror attack, which was its entire justification. According to the report, “at least 26 detainees were later determined to have been ‘wrongfully held.’”

That quote comes from a 2014 New York Times editorial calling for the prosecution of those responsible for the US’s torture regime. The banner image they chose for the editorial was, of course, of Dick Cheney, who was also the first name mentioned on the list of officials suggested for prosecution.

This is the same New York Times editorial board, mind you, that has been so wary of straying from the centrist path that they issued a dual endorsement of Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Democratic primary (is there anything more pointless and self-defeating than endorsing multiple candidates in a primary?) and tried to warn their readers against voting for Zohran Mamdani in “the vexing race for New York mayor” just this June.

Yes, these people, were nonetheless firm in their demand: they wanted Dick Cheney prosecuted for war crimes. And at least on this score, they were right.

…any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos. There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen. [link]

Nevertheless Cheney persisted, living another 11 years as a free man, thanks in part to Barack Obama and Eric Holder’s decision not to make too many waves by prosecuting any of the War on Terror torture gang (much as they did with architects of the 2009 financial crisis). What political capital did they gain from not rocking the boat?

Now Dick Cheney is dead, and along with him virtually all of the former Republican establishment who would’ve mourned him. It’s hard to imagine the Trump administration cranking up the pyrotechnics for Dick Cheney the way they did for Charlie Kirk, let alone trying to deport or prosecute anyone for speaking ill of him. Certainly not after Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz publicly campaigned against Trump in 2024, which turned out to be less a late Cheney redemption arc than the retroactive death knell for the Kamala Harris campaign. About the best anyone can say about Dick Cheney now that he’s dead is that he helped his daughter “put country over party” during this doomed effort.

Incompetent until the bitter end.

What is to be Dick Cheney’s legacy, other than the millions he helped to kill, the entire regions he helped to destabilize, and the hundreds or thousands whose torture he authorized? Probably it will be something like the way Omar El Akkad described the destruction of Gaza: “One day, everyone will always have been against this.”

One day, everyone will have always hated Dick Cheney. It’s some consolation that Cheney himself lived to see that day. It’s less consolation that, unlike so many of his victims, Dick Cheney will actually be dead when they stuff him into a coffin.

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