It was sadly ironic that the death of McClatchy’s Washington bureau was announced on the same day as that of former Vice President Dick Cheney. Because it was McClatchy — then known as Knight Ridder — that did more than any news organization to expose the Bush-Cheney administration’s lies and falsehoods in the run-up to the disastrous war in Iraq. Cheney, through frequent speeches and media interviews, became the public face of the war and its subsequent horrors, including the torture of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of American forces.
Following the attack by Al Qaeda in the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush-Cheney administration invaded Afghanistan, which the terrorist group had made as its base. But the White House wanted to expand the war to Iraq, claiming that dictator Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction and had ties to Al Qaeda. Neither of those allegations proved to be true, but the U.S. nevertheless marched into Iraq in the spring of 2003, a debacle that ended, more or less, in 2011. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, mostly Iraqi civilians.