The malign Dick Cheney is in Toronto this week, having apparently conquered his fear of Canada and the anti-torture protests that made him cancel an April speech last year. I don’t know how another war criminal has made it across our border — Kissinger visits often — but there Cheney will be on Halloween at noon, speaking to the Toronto Forum of the International Economic Forum of the Americas in the glassy erotic climes of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

What ho! Blood will run from the taps. A sudden chill will envelop the city.

There had been worries. “God forbid there was ever a [health] emergency,” his speech booker said of the April cancellation, given that the last time Cheney was in Canada, he had had to hide inside for simply hours from Vancouver anti-torture demonstrators.

Did he think they were going to shoot him in the face? Cheney himself shot a 78-year-old man in the face in 2006 (the victim apologized) and in this country, he’d be in jail for that. Cheney does not get us. Canadian anti-torture demonstrators are usually hooded and kneeling because they know full well that violence would destroy the point they’re making. They don’t even throw pies. Cheney Halloween masks are fun though.

In 2007 Cheney had doctors alter the defibrillator implanted near his heart so that “terrorists” could not give it a wireless shock. It could have happened, Cheney insisted. He saw it in an episode of the TV show Homeland once.

Cheney, 71, has had six heart attacks and a transplant and has co-written a book about his hearts. I would make the obvious joke about a heartless man insisting he has two, but who would laugh.

He spent 9/11 cowering in a bunker . For a man who made torture part of what the U.S. is famous for, who came up with the cowardly term “enhanced interrogation,” who established “black site” secret prisons and laid waste to the freedoms Americans once loved, Cheney is awfully frightened of being personally hurt.

This is torture: drowning as men pour water into you, going mad from sleep deprivation, noise and lights, being stripped naked and beaten until you vomit, being sodomized with bottles, fed on bread and water, given urine to drink, being beaten across the face with an iron bar, terrorized by dogs, enduring stress positions, being kicked until you ... just ... die. This was official interrogation, not the offhand naked piling of prisoners by uniformed hillbillies who had lucked into a gig at the Abu Ghraib funhouse.

This was the punitive world Cheney created, a world the Nazis and Japanese built but the Allies refused to countenance. He has never fought in a war (like George W. Bush, he managed to skip Vietnam) but he has started them and directed them and enjoyed them.

It is not his fault that President Obama has kept Guantanamo open and has institutionalized the drone strikes Cheney began. By 2009 Obama had “already authorized as many drone strikes in 10 months as Bush had in his entire eight years in office,” writes Jeremy Scahill in his stunning new atlas of pointless self-destructive American murder, Dirty Wars . Cheney cannot be blamed by the Pakistani family testifying in Washington this week about their grandmother being killed by a drone likely personally okayed by Obama in his “Terror Tuesday” kill lists.

But Cheney began this. American citizens are assassinated by their own government without charge or trial. The entire planet has become a battlefield across which drones fly freely, slaughtering anyone who lies beneath.

The world has become measurably more awful thanks to Cheney, the man who wanted Nelson Mandela kept in jail. He is a terrible man, a slab of congealed venom who has brought misery and pain to every aspect of American governance he has been allowed to touch since 1969.

What can he say on economics to his business audience? “Get very rich so people like me can’t do you harm,” would be the gist of it.

Medical science keeps a dead man’s heart pumping. He beats on, a boat sailing with the moral current, floating in the blood of others.