Former US vice president Dick Cheney dies aged 84

Deeply polarising figure shaped America's response to the September 11, 2001 attacks and pushed for war with Iraq

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  Former US vice president Dick Cheney, who has died aged 84, is interviewed for 'The Presidents' Gatekeepers' project about White House chiefs of staff, in Jackson, Wyoming, in 2011. Getty Images

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  President George Bush with his defence secretary Cheney. Getty Images

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  President George W. Bush delivers the State of the Union address to Congress in 2008. Looking on is vice president Cheney. EPA

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  Vice president Cheney takes to the stage in 2008 to boost the morale of US troops stationed at Balad Airbase, Iraq. AFP

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  Republican presidential candidate and Texas governor George W. Bush with Colin Powell and Cheney, at a rally in November 2000 in Dearborn, Michigan. AFP

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  Cheney, as CEO of the Halliburton oil and gas company, speaks to reporters in 1998. Reuters

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  Cheney appears on the Today show on NBC News in 2013. Getty Images

Dick Cheney, whose campaign for a military response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks cleared the path for an unpopular war in Iraq and established him as one of the most powerful and polarising vice presidents in US history, has died. He was 84.

He died "due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease", according to a family statement released early on Tuesday. His wife, Lynne, and daughters Liz and Mary, as well as other relatives, were with him when he died on Monday night, the family said.

As George W Bush’s vice president from 2001 to 2009, Mr Cheney embodied the single-minded determination to do whatever was necessary to prevent further acts of terrorism on US soil.

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He came to office intent on reinvigorating the US presidency, which he believed had been weakened by the War Powers Act and other legislation in the 1970s inspired by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.

The 9/11 attack by Al Qaeda, which killed about 3,000 people, infused his longstanding political goal with a new focus on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Those weapons were often cited as the justification to attack Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein, but no WMDs were ever found in the country.

According to Brown University, at least 4.5 million people were killed either directly or indirectly in post-9/11 conflicts, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere around the globe.

With his chief counsel, David Addington, Mr Cheney took the lead in crafting the policies that guided the administration’s approach to terrorism.

Secretly, with minimal congressional involvement, they asserted broad new powers to monitor Americans at home and to use methods that many considered torture – including the drowning simulation called waterboarding – to interrogate military prisoners overseas.

“Cheney freed Bush to fight the ‘war on terror’ as he saw fit, driven by a shared belief that the government had to shake off old habits of self-restraint,” Barton Gellman wrote in Angler, his 2008 book on the vice president.

In a statement on Tuesday, Mr Bush said history will remember Mr Cheney "as among the finest public servants of his generation – a patriot who brought integrity, high intelligence and seriousness of purpose to every position he held".

Mr Cheney "was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. We’re coming after you, so change or be changed", Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who committed his nation’s troops to the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, wrote in his memoir.

Mr Cheney consistently defended the tools of surveillance, detention and interrogation used in response to 9/11.

Years after leaving office, he became a target of President Donald Trump, especially after daughter Liz Cheney became the leading Republican critic and examiner of Mr Trump's desperate attempts to stay in power after his election defeat, and his actions in the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Mr Cheney said in a television advertisement for his daughter.

“He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward.”

In 1989, Mr Cheney became defence secretary under the president George H W Bush and led the Pentagon during the 1990-1991 Arabian Gulf War that drove Iraq's troops from Kuwait. Between working for the two Bush administrations, Mr Cheney led Dallas-based Halliburton, a large engineering and construction company for the oil industry.

He was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, son of a longtime Agriculture Department worker. Senior class president and football co-captain in Casper, he went to the University of Yale on a full scholarship for a year but left with failing grades.

He moved back to Wyoming, eventually enrolled at the University of Wyoming and renewed a relationship with high school sweetheart Lynne Anne Vincent, marrying her in 1964.

– with input from wires