Who Was Dick Cheney?

0:00 On the 13th of November 2001, a secret document is sent into the White House.

0:05 The content of the document is extremely sensitive.

0:08 After changing hands four times, it reaches President George W.

0:12 Bush.

0:13 He signs without sitting down.

0:16 The United States of America just decided to completely

0:19 ignore the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War.

0:23 This is one of many documents that will

0:25 justify American actions in a global war and terror.

0:31 actions that include limitless spying on American citizens,

0:34 widespread torture and invasions that will cost

0:37 more lives in the war in Vietnam.

0:39 Cabinet officials are shocked.

0:41 What the hell just happened?

0:43 Where did this come from?

0:45 President who signed it is not responsible for its contents.

0:48 It carries the fingerprints of a person

0:50 that aren't so many documents the president signed.

0:53 The fingerprints belong to Dick Cheney, the vice president.

0:58 Some call him the most powerful vice president in American history.

1:02 Am I the evil genius in a corner that nobody ever sees?

1:06 It's a nice way to operate.

1:10 How did Dick Cheney turn the vice presidency into a position of power?

1:14 And what did he do when he controlled the White House?

1:19 September 11th, 2001 changed everything for this country.

1:24 There's this moment when the attacks in New York are happening.

1:28 A moment that Cheney makes a decision he isn't supposed to make.

1:32 A moment that shows how he operates.

1:34 What's the most important decision you think

1:36 he made during the course of the day?

1:38 Well, the um I suppose the toughest decision was this question of whether or not

1:43 we would intercept uh incoming commercial aircraft

1:47 and you decided we decided to do it.

1:50 In fact, it was Cheney who took this decision.

1:53 This decision was only later corroborated by the president who

1:56 is the only person who should be making these calls.

1:58 This followed Chinese mantra you know dear unless otherwise directed.

2:04 The idea is simple.

2:05 You take action unless explicitly told not to.

2:09 How does this graylooking balding bureaucrat position

2:12 himself on the seat reserved for the president?

2:16 Cheney combined decades of experience

2:18 with a preference to operate from the shadows.

2:22 The current vice president does things differently.

2:24 JD Vans flew to Greenland to accuse longtime

2:27 NATO ally Denmark of failing to protect Greenland.

2:30 Whether you believe this is true or that Vans

2:32 was creating a crisis to justify America's power grab,

2:36 that depends on where you get your news from, which is

2:39 why I asked Ground News to partner with me for this video.

2:42 World news is dominated by American news outlets,

2:45 but not everyone lives in the States.

2:47 With ground news, you can see beyond this perspective because

2:50 they gather global news in their app and their website,

2:53 and it helps you compare the world's reaction to events like this.

2:58 Using the app, I can sort through hundreds

3:00 of reporting sources and see their political bias,

3:02 their credibility, or their location.

3:05 You can see how some American outlets are

3:07 leading with Vance accusing Denmark of underinvesting in Greenland.

3:10 while Denmark reports how this visit exposes the foreign

3:14 minister's failing strategy of not taking the US seriously.

3:18 Cheney knew how important it was to control the narrative.

3:20 So when American media dominates what we see and what we don't,

3:24 it can shape public opinion and even policy.

3:27 This is why I believe in what ground news is doing.

3:30 They help you zoom out, track global reactions,

3:32 and see what news is missing from your feed.

3:35 So I got my viewers 40% off the unlimited advantage plan.

3:39 This is the same one that I've been using.

3:41 Just click on the link in the description below, ground.news/tppp,

3:45 or scan the QR code to subscribe and bring the price down to $5 a month.

3:51 You' be part of our mission to see world issues

3:53 more clearly while also supporting my channel at the same time.

3:57 And now, let's get back to the video.

4:00 Cheny's career is like a crash course in rising through the ranks of Washington.

4:04 Remember that Forest Gump montage where he's edited in those famous moments?

4:07 So, are you enjoying yourself in our nation's capital, young man?

4:11 Yes, sir.

4:11 Yeah, Chen is like that, except he wasn't edited into history.

4:16 He was there shaping it.

4:18 Under President Nixon, he was a deputy assistant.

4:21 At age 34, he became the youngest chief of staff in US history.

4:24 He's been in Congress.

4:26 He's chaired the House.

4:27 He served on intelligence committees.

4:29 under George Bush Senior.

4:31 He was Secretary of Defense, overseeing Operation Desert Storm,

4:35 the military action to liberate Kuwait from the Iraq invasion.

4:38 One, if not the most successful US military action of the last 50 years.

4:43 This man has been around.

4:46 He knows exactly how political power works.

4:48 So when George Bush needed a running mate,

4:51 he he asked the one guy who knows Washington best.

4:55 I am honored by your nomination and I accept it.

4:58 [Applause] What's weird looking at these clips is

5:05 that Cheney wasn't even supposed to be the vice president.

5:08 When Bush calls Cheney, he didn't ask to be his running mate.

5:11 He wants Cheney to find him one.

5:14 And the second weird thing is being vice president is mostly ceremonial.

5:18 You attend funerals and stuff.

5:20 You're close to the most powerful person in the world,

5:23 but you don't have that much power yourself.

5:26 or in the words of a former VP, not worth a bucket of warm piss.

5:31 Why would such an experienced man want this ceremonial position?

5:36 Well, let's first see how he got there.

5:39 Dick Cheney knows more about me than my mother, father, and wife.

5:43 Normally, when you find a running mate,

5:44 it's not so different from a job interview.

5:46 You just also need to pass the top secret security clearance.

5:51 These are 30 questions with stuff like if you

5:54 you know have ever been part of a terrorist organization.

5:57 But Cheney, he works differently.

5:59 He created his own system, a document containing some 200 questions.

6:03 Next to that, he wanted full medical records,

6:05 unredacted legal documents, detailed financial disclosures,

6:09 and even intimate details about family members,

6:12 things that are usually protected by privacy laws.

6:16 He even pressed the candidates if there might be

6:18 anything that could mean they were open to blackmail.

6:20 He didn't say who would do the blackmailing.

6:23 By the end of the search, Bush concluded the best candidate was Cheney himself.

6:27 And Cheney, well, he never completed his own questionnaire.

6:31 And here's where it gets interesting for Cheney.

6:33 Bush didn't have this big network that Cheney had.

6:36 So, he tells him, "You form the cabinet." And this gave Cheney a chance,

6:41 a chance to form a team that, like him,

6:44 believed there should only ever be one superpower in the world.

6:47 A world where international laws and alliances are all fine,

6:50 but projecting power is better.

6:53 A world ruled by the United States of [Applause] America.

7:06 Cheney went to old allies and people who agreed with his vision.

7:09 His old friend Don Rumsfeld returned as Secretary of Defense.

7:13 He balanced a moderate Colin Powell for Secretary

7:15 of State with a more hardline John Bolton.

7:18 Everywhere else, justice, energy, even trade,

7:22 Cheney inserted people who shared his priorities.

7:25 And then he seated people all over the system to make sure he

7:28 was in some way involved with every decision the Bush administration would make.

7:32 Take his chief of staff, Scooter Libby.

7:35 He was both Cheny's national security adviser

7:37 and a key player in White House policy.

7:40 It gave Cheney control over both foreign and domestic matters,

7:44 creating what he later called a single executive office.

7:48 Many called it a parallel administration.

7:53 You might ask where George W.

7:54 Bush is in all of this.

7:56 Well, Bush was very inexperienced, especially in international affairs.

8:01 You can see that in his campaign.

8:03 It's based on vibes.

8:04 Education reform.

8:06 Huge domestic issue for America as we head into the 21st century.

8:09 is to make sure every single child is educated and not one child is left behind.

8:15 And dad jokes.

8:17 I'm running against a tough opponent.

8:19 Make no mistake about it.

8:20 He's a good campaigner and he's got a lot of confidence.

8:25 So much so that he thinks he invented the internet.

8:30 But if the man was so smart, how come every internet address begins with W?

8:37 Cheney used the president's inexperience to his advantage.

8:40 He decided what the options were before Bush

8:43 even knew he had to make a decision.

8:45 And there were some big decisions coming up.

8:52 Before the dust even settled in New York,

8:54 Cheney and his legal council David Editing asked a question.

8:58 What extraordinary powers would the president need in the coming war?

9:02 Do you believe that the president in time of war that anything he does is legal?

9:08 I think we do and we have historic precedent

9:12 of taking action that you wouldn't take in peace time

9:16 but that you will take sometimes in wartime is to support

9:19 and defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.

9:22 The thing is Janie believed that to keep America

9:24 on top the president needs to be as powerful as possible.

9:27 Congress shouldn't be in the way.

9:30 And this was something he'd already believed a long time.

9:33 In the 1980s, there's this political scandal.

9:35 There's a rebel group in Nicaragua that the US Congress has forbidden to fund.

9:39 Uh the president is then caught funding them anyway.

9:42 Whoops.

9:43 Congress is pissed.

9:45 They immediately step in to take some presidential power away.

9:48 But Cheney, well, he saw that a bit differently.

9:51 Some will argue that these events

9:53 justify the imposition of additional restrictions

9:55 on presidents to prohibit the possibility of similar occurrences in the future.

10:01 In my opinion, that would be a mistake.

10:03 In completing our task, we should seek above all to find ways

10:08 to strengthen the capacity of future presidents and future

10:11 congresses to meet the often dangerous and difficult challenges

10:15 that are bound to arise in the years ahead.

10:19 In 2001, Cheney sees an opportunity to make his dream come true.

10:22 A powerful presidential office that isn't too worried about the law,

10:26 but one that takes action.

10:30 There have been restrictions placed on the United States intelligence gathering.

10:34 A reluctance to use unsavory characters,

10:37 those who violated human rights to assist in intelligence gathering.

10:40 Will we lift some of those restrictions?

10:42 Well, I think so.

10:43 Well, I think uh the um one of the byproducts, if you will,

10:47 of uh this uh tragic set of circumstances is that we'll see a a very

10:53 thorough sort of reassessment of how we operate

10:56 and the kinds of people we deal with.

10:57 There's if if you're going to deal only with um uh sort of officially approved,

11:03 certified good guys,

11:05 uh you're not going to find out what the bad guys are doing.

11:07 We also have to work though sort of the the dark side, if you will.

11:10 We want to spend time in the shadows and in the intelligence world.

11:14 In late 2001, Cheney was at the National Security Agency.

11:17 This is the place that's all about intercepting signals, messages,

11:21 phone calls, and emails to find out threats to national security.

11:25 He applied Unodier to break the law on surveillance.

11:28 NSA director Michael Hayden briefed Cheney used

11:31 ven diagram to explain the agency's operation.

11:34 One circle showed what data the NSA wanted to collect,

11:37 another what was technologically possible,

11:39 and a third what was legally permissible.

11:43 Hayden said it was important to stay within the overlap of these circles.

11:46 But Cheney, he saw that differently.

11:49 Set aside the third one, for purposes of discussion, forget about the law.

11:54 What could you accomplish if you stopped closing

11:57 your eyes and ears to communications inside the United States?

12:02 under Yunodere Cheney and his team started

12:04 the biggest spy operation on American citizens in history.

12:08 Do you feel you went too far, Mr.

12:10 Vice President in in in your surveillance?

12:13 Absolutely not.

12:14 I think what we did was was uh one of the great

12:17 success stories of the intelligence business in the last century.

12:20 I don't believe we violated anybody's civil liberties.

12:23 The government could tap your phone without needing any approval from a judge,

12:27 but Cheney would do much worse to suspected enemies of America.

12:32 With help from his legal team, he created Guantanamo Bay,

12:35 a place that was run by America, but wasn't actually on American soil.

12:39 A place illegal outer space.

12:42 According to Chinese legal advices,

12:44 the people that were arrested all over the world were not prisoners of war.

12:47 They had rights.

12:48 These people were unlawful combatants.

12:51 Let me uh talk to you a little bit about torture.

12:53 You have said uh that you do not believe that water boarding,

12:57 for example, was torture.

13:01 uh you and members of the cabinet uh sat in the White House and approved

13:06 the methods of the of interrogation uh uh that were used by the CIA.

13:12 Why would something like that reach your level, Mr.

13:15 Vice President?

13:16 Well, because the CIA did not want to proceed without having

13:20 a very clear understanding of what was authorized and what was was appropriate.

13:26 It was again Cheney that made

13:27 sure these enhanced interrogation techniques, water boarding,

13:31 sleep deprivation, stress positions,

13:34 all got legal justification from the justice department.

13:37 So the president could violate US and international

13:39 law at will if the nation was at war.

13:43 Now some people would say desperate times call for desperate measures, right?

13:48 But torture does not just violate international law.

13:51 It gives bad intelligence.

13:53 If you torture someone, they will just say what you want to hear.

13:56 Later reports made clear that intelligence

13:58 gained by torture was practically useless.

14:02 But Cheney didn't stop at torture.

14:05 North Korea, Iran, and Iraq.

14:08 States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil,

14:15 arming to threaten the peace of the world

14:18 by seeking weapons of mass destruction.

14:20 America was attacked by a terrorist group.

14:23 So why did the Bush administration suddenly start talking about an axis of evil?

14:28 Why did they go to war in Iraq?

14:30 For this you have to understand two things.

14:33 Cheney was obsessed with worst case scenarios.

14:36 One aid said whatever stuff was scariest,

14:38 the vice president was directly grappling with it

14:42 and he was also obsessed with threats to America.

14:45 One member of al-Qaeda said 9/11 was the beginning of the end of America.

14:51 And we know to a certainty that terrorists are doing

14:54 everything they can to gain even deadlier means of striking us.

14:59 From the training manuals we found in the caves

15:01 of Afghanistan to the interrogations of terrorists that we've captured,

15:05 we have learned of their ambitions to develop or acquire chemical,

15:09 biological, or nuclear weapons.

15:11 So what if a next al Qaeda attack

15:13 was with chemical or biological weapons or even nukes?

15:17 These weapons, you couldn't produce them

15:19 in the caves of Afghanistan, you needed states.

15:22 A close adviser came up with sketchy

15:24 intelligence linking states to terror groups.

15:28 And if terrorists ever do acquire that capability

15:31 on their own or with help from a terror regime,

15:35 they will use it without the slightest constraint of reason or morality.

15:40 Terrorists were hard to find, maybe impossible to deter.

15:44 States were neither.

15:46 To break potential links between them,

15:47 it made sense to concentrate on the latter.

15:50 Government had known addresses, interests that could be held at risk.

15:56 The address with the most easy access turned out to be Iraq.

16:03 Saddam was not the biggest threat.

16:05 He was just the weakest link in the axis of evil.

16:08 An action against Iraq would show the world what

16:10 it meant to be on the wrong side of America.

16:13 The problem is, how would you justify an invasion?

16:16 Cheney did two things.

16:17 Connect Saddam's regime to al-Qaeda by claiming it harbored terrorists.

16:21 And second, well, you know it.

16:23 He focused on alleged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

16:28 Cheney kept on saying that he had intelligence

16:31 that Saddam had resumed his nuclear weapons program.

16:34 even though other parts of the intelligence community

16:37 and United Nations inspectors weren't so sure of that.

16:40 But he personally briefed senators to convince them

16:43 of the nuclear capabilities and ambitions of Saddam's regime.

16:46 And even though the CIA and others did not back these claims,

16:49 he showed such confidence that they believed him.

16:52 And a final speech by the respected Colin Powell gave the last push.

16:56 Indeed, the facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime

17:01 are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.

17:05 Saddam was a supporter of terrorism long

17:07 before these terrorist networks had a name.

17:11 And this support continues.

17:14 It is all a web of lies.

17:16 Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.

17:20 In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.

17:27 Because of you, the tyrant has fallen and Iraq is free.

17:36 Manufacturing an invasion of a country without any hard evidence.

17:40 This showed the height of Chinese power.

17:42 But when the mission turned out, in fact,

17:44 not to be accomplished, Chinese power began to decline.

17:48 The never- ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were bad for public support.

17:52 That the US never found weapons of mass destruction was not

17:55 a good look for the man that told everyone they were there.

17:58 Chinese policies from Guantanamo to surveillance drew

18:01 international domination and strained Americans alliances in America.

18:05 They sparked debates about freedom and government power,

18:08 about the betrayal of American values.

18:10 Even within the Bush administration,

18:12 his influence faded and Bush turned to advisers like Condisa Rice,

18:16 preferring diplomacy over Cheny's aggressive strategies.

18:19 By 2006, Cheny's influence had significantly diminished.

18:23 When he left office, he had an approval rating of 13%.

18:27 What did he leave behind?

18:29 He spent 8 years hiding in the shadows,

18:31 but he is a veteran Washington insider who knew exactly how

18:34 to pull the levers of power behind a remarkably inexperienced president.

18:39 What makes Dick Cheney's vice presidency so special is how

18:42 he made a ceremonial job into a powerful hub of influence.

18:46 He showed what can happen when

18:47 an imperial presidency meets a Congress that's uninformed,

18:51 unwilling, or unable to act.

18:54 But the irony is with all this power, he did not succeed in his goal,

18:58 making sure America remained the undisputed superpower.

19:02 the global war on terror.

19:03 It alienated allies.

19:05 It fueled anti-American sentiment.

19:07 It cost millions of lives.

19:09 And it showed how little these supposed

19:11 American values of freedom and democracy were worth.

19:14 And it made clear what can happen when

19:16 too much power is concentrated in too little hands.

19:21 Yet Cheney remained convinced that this was the right thing to do.

19:26 over the previous eight years,

19:27 what's the worst mistake that you and President Bush

19:30 made that's still having an impact on the Middle East?

19:32 Well, I think uh um we got it right with respect to Iraq.

19:37 And when we left, Iraq was in pretty good shape.