The War Criminal Dick Cheney is dead and people gave him hell when he visited Grand Rapids while he was Vice President

Former US Vice President Dick Cheney is now dead, but as journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote, “He should have died in The Hague.”

There are already some good indy media posts about the legacy of Dick Cheney, such as this post from Democracy Now earlier today.

Dick Cheney, the former vice president and one of the key architects of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, died Monday at age 84. Cheney served six terms in Congress as Wyoming’s lone representative before serving as defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush, when he oversaw the first Gulf War and the bloody U.S. invasion of Panama that deposed former U.S. ally Manuel Noriega. 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 leading proponent of invading and occupying Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and destabilized the entire region. Dick Cheney also steadfastly defended warantless mass surveillance programs and the use of torture against detainees of the so-called war on terror.

For the rest of this post I want to focus on how people organized against Cheney while he was Vice President and one of the main architects of the US invasion/occupation of Iraq beginning in 2003 every time he came to Grand Rapids.

In May of 2003, the group the People’s Alliance for Justice and Change, which did the bulk of the early opposition to the US invasion/occupation of Iraq, organized a protest at a fundraiser in downtown Grand Rapids, where Dick Cheney spoke. The protest was organized under the banner of Occupation is Not Liberation.

In September of 2006, Vice President Dick Cheney again came to West Michigan, this time attending a GOP fundraiser at the home of Peter Secchia in East Grand Rapids. The group ACTIVATE organized an action near Secchia’s home, but were confronted by police and told that they could not protest since the City of East Grand Rapids had a “no picketing ordinance,” which was later contested by the ACLU and the ordinance was done away with.

In September of 2007, around 75 protestors gathered outside the Gerald R. Ford Museum to tell Vice President Dick Cheney that they support an immediate end to the United States’ occupation of Iraq, as was reported by the Indy Media site Media Mouse.  

This protest, organized by the Grand Rapids antiwar group ACTIVATE/SDS, began at Rosa Parks Circle. Shortly after 10:00am, the group–led by a banner reading “US Out of Iraq”–marched to the Gerald R. Ford Museum to attempt to let Cheney know that they support an immediate end to the war. The group was able to get surprisingly close to site of Cheney’s speech–being stopped by police only fifteen feet from the Museum’s front door. Throughout the protest the protestors chanted “Cheney Out of Grand Rapids, US Out of Iraq,” “No Justice, No Peace, US Out of the Middle East,” and “War and Occupation does not bring Liberation.” The protestors made use of whistles and noisemakers to accompany their chanting in an effort to make themselves heard. After being moved from the Museum’s property (essentially twenty-five feet), the protestors continued to chant and wave signs before half of the crowd marched to the intersection of Michigan and Monroe where they waited until Cheney’s motorcade passed them on its way out of town.

For an overview of anti-Iraq occupation organizing that targeted the Bush Administration see part seven in the ten part series on organized opposition of that war/occupation by the Grand Rapids People’s History Project.