Former US vice president Dick Cheney, who helped shape Washington’s response to the 9/11 attacks and emerged as the chief architect of America’s war on terror, died late Monday night (US time), the Washington Post reported, citing a statement from his family. He was 84.

Cheney turned the role of the US Vice President, traditionally inconsequential in nature, into a unusually muscular job and observers of American politics and foreign policy saw him “as a major power behind the throne", according to a report by AFP.

He played a key role as George W. Bush’s number two during 9/11 and catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and thrust the US into the so-called war on terror, a campaign that came to be defined by secret renditions, torture allegations and the creation of the Guantanamo Bay

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