Former Vice President Dick Cheney has died at the age of 84. Beginning in 1978, Cheney served six terms as Wyoming’s lone U.S. congressmember, where he voted against a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa and against a holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. He left Congress in 1989 to serve as defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush, overseeing the first Gulf War and the bloody U.S. invasion of Panama that deposed leader and former U.S. ally Manuel Noriega, while killing hundreds of people. From 1995 to 2000, Cheney served as chair and CEO of the oil services company Halliburton, before George W. Bush tapped him as his running mate. As vice president, Cheney was a key architect of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq under the false pretext of preventing Saddam Hussein from developing weapons of mass destruction. The invasion led to more than 650,000 deaths, according to a study by The Lancet. As the occupation of Iraq foundered, Cheney argued for the “Salvador option” of using death squads similar to U.S.-supported paramilitaries in El Salvador and other Central American countries in the 1980s. Dick Cheney steadfastly defended the use of torture against detainees of the so-called war on terror. This is Cheney speaking to “Meet the Press” just days after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Vice President Dick Cheney: “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful.”

We’ll have more on Vice President Dick Cheney’s life and legacy later in the broadcast.