follow-on attacks and so forth and aspen was the most secure facility at camp david. so we spent a couple days there after lunch. we sat in the living room, watch the television. i was accompanied by wife, lynn, daughter lives. but i can remember sitting there, focus obvious we and people were all over the country, watching the towers come down and the fires at the pentagon and so forth. ..

to be able to deal with and prevent a follow-on attack and to deal with those who were responsible for what had happened. we had a pretty good idea of the afternoon of the attack that this was al qaeda, belated. that was the advice we were getting from the intelligence community so it wasn't a big mystery about who was behind it. by then, pretty well focused in on osama bin laden, but there was a lot we didn't know about al qaeda.

now he know we have heard so much about it for 10 years. there's a bit of a 10 tatian to sort of think we know everything there is to know about al qaeda but the day of the attack, this was a group of terrorists, but there were a lot of key questions that nobody could answer. we didn't know how big they were and we didn't know who was financing them. we didn't know whereof they were operating and there was a lot we needed to learn. we drove our search for intelligence that generated some of the policies that took place, but i sat as i recall, and made a series of notes on a legal pad that night that i thought about what we would be faced with and how we would deal with it, and chewed over in my own mind what we needed to be doing. ultimately we met at the camp david national security council that weekend.

the attack i guess was on tuesday and by friday night, we pretty well gathered up at camp david and spent saturday and sunday up there with the president and pulled together what ultimately emerged as her their strategy for the global war on terror. >> in the days after the attacks, we saw various public officials and very public displays of emotion. we saw president bush almost come to tears in the oval office. we heard about condoleezza rice going back to the watergate and breaking down at one point. because of the emotional toll that this was taking. on a personal note i remember coming back from new york, driving across the roosevelt bridge hearing martin sexton's version of america but there will. i broke down. did you ever have a moment like that? >> not really.

[laughter] >> understand that people will find that strange. >> peculiar, yeah but. >> my wife and daughter were with me that evening. she had been downtown that morning when the attacks started and the secret service have brought her over to the west wing. she really sat beside me throughout the day. she would probably be the best person to comment on what my mental attitude was. i was focused very much on what we had to do. i was thinking of it in terms of what this meant with respect to policy and our military forces, what the targets were that we might go after and how we might go after them. what kind of intelligence we were going to need to be able to cope with this. but that is what i recall. it wasn't that it wasn't a

deeply moving event. it clearly was, but the other thing that influenced me from a personal standpoint was that i had spent a good deal of time over the years on the continuity of government program. i had been through exercises where the nature of the attack on the u.s. was far in excess of what we actually faced on 9/11. hundreds of thousands maybe millions of people were killed. so i had the benefit of having gone through those exercises over the years and training to sort of kicked in terms of thinking about what we had to do that morning and the next day. >> let's get to those policies. specifically, let's talk about the two that everybody i think thinks of as the most controversial, the terrorist surveillance program on the one-handed enhanced interrogation on the other. can you describe -- i think

there is a general sense among the public that you sort of brainstorm to these ideas. you came up with them. they were your ideas. you have been the most fierce public advocate of them. can you describe how the terrorist surveillance program came to be? >> sure. well it is important to keep in mind, they were initiated at different times. the terrorist surveillance program is something we moved to within days of our time after 9/11. the enhanced interrogation techniques really came in a year or two later when the business by then of capturing people like khalid sheikh ahamed who i believe we caught in the spring of 03 and it was the capture of certain kinds of individuals that led us to the point where we needed enhanced

interrogation. but coming back to the question of the tears surveillance program, the origin of the program came really from mike hayden and his people at the national security agency and george tenet was involved as well to me. there have been a conversation between the two of them. this is within a couple of days of 9/11. as i recall, the two of them had talked and george mentioned it to me, the basic question being are there additional things we can do with our capabilities and our capacity to read the mail. that would help us deal with the situation we have been faced. that led to a meeting in my office as i recall, where mike came in and generally and the

head of nsa and later the head of the cia and george tenet, the three of us talked. there were things that nsa thought they could do if they had -- and so i took that package and that her puzzle and went to see the president. i sat down and went through it with him, and he signed up to it, but with the caveat that it was very carefully manage. he wanted to make certain he purse -- personally approved it each step of the way and that they had to come and back for approval on a regular basis. what emerged out of that was a significantly enhanced capacity for us to be able to intercept communications originating outside of the united states possibly from what we referred to as a dirty number. hugh capture al qaeda, he has a

computer and a rolodex or whatever it is. he has his group of phone numbers on it and he wanted to know who he was talking to in the united states for example. and, the safeguards that we built into them and the direction of the president involved the fact that every 30 or 45 days -- excuse me -- it buried from time to time. i think the secretary of defense and the director of the cia and nsa all had to sign off on continuing the program. it didn't get renewed automatically. they all had to say in writing to the president that they thought we should continue the program from the standpoint of the nation's security at etc.. the attorney general had to sign off on it. all of that and onto the president dave addington, who

worked for me, who was responsible for carrying it around and he would get all the signatures. the president, once he had received as input from his senior advisers, then he would sign up and extend the program for another 30 or 45 days. that is the way we operated it for years. i briefed the key members of congress. i had the chairman and ranking member of the house and senate intelligence committees come down every couple of months to my office, and mike hayden would come in and george tenet and we would race the key for members of congress who had jurisdiction of this area over what we were doing and what kind of results would be produced so they were from the beginning. later on some controversy arose inside the program in the justice department. we expanded that group of four

into nine. we had the speaker, majority and minority leaders of the house and senate and have all of them and, brief them as well and then i went around at that point and asked them all at that.-- nancy pelosi was a member on, jay rockefeller, on the democratic side, asked them if they thought we should continue to program. they said absolutely. then i said, do you think we ought to go back to the congress with the additional legislative authority to continue to operate the way we are operating and they said, absolutely not. they were in a unanimous on both points. they were concerned if we went up and asked congress for a vote on the subject, that the fact that we were doing it would leak and we would in effect be telling the enemy we were reading their mail. so, it was well noticed in the congress. there was some controversy later

on internally that the president dealt with but it was i am convinced a key part of our success in terms of preventing further attacks against the united states. i think we save thousands of lives but what we were doing, think it is one of the greatest success stories especially with respect to nsa and how they put the program together and develop the capability, one of the great success stories of american intelligence and maybe someday it will all be told. >> us-made the same argument about enhanced interrogation. you've made the argument that the policies work. let's go beyond that part of the debate and talk about the effects of enhanced interrogation and the perceptions around the world that it is torture, that the things that we did amounted to torture. and the sense that maybe the moral position of the united states was united states was eroded because of the things that we did.

here in this country. how do you respond to those arguments? >> is that in question or an invitation to argue? >> i always offer you an invitation to argue. i think there are sort of crazy critiques in there are more thoughtful critiques. i think that is a more thoughtful critique. do you? >> i do not. i am persuaded that the way we went about seeking the authority to be able to extract more intelligence from a handful of individuals. we are talking here not about your rank-and-file enemy troop soldier. this does not involve the military. this does not involve the department of defense. this is a program that was authorized by the president, signed up to by the national security council, carried out

with all the safeguards by the central intelligence agency. we had a case -- excuse me -- where we had a handful of individuals who clearly had knowledge of what was in the works from the standpoint of al qaeda and what they hope to be able to do, how they function, who the key members were in but their plans were. it was people like college shake mohammed, abu zubaydah, man named -- the notion that somehow the united states was wildly torturing anybody is not true. if anybody takes the time to look at the program, i think that we will come to the same conclusion which is that people out there who differ with respect to that respect but when we get into the whole area of the controversial techniques such as waterboarding, i think

there is a protester out front this morning when i drove in commenting on waterboarding. three people were waterboarded. not dozens, not hundreds, three. and the one who was subjected most often do that was khalid sheikh mohammed and it produced phenomenal results for us. there are reports that the intelligence community did of the results of the program, which were declassified and at my request are now available on the internet that talk about quality of information that we got as a result of our enhanced interrogation techniques. it was applied to a handful of individuals. we were talking about only a handful of people who were indeed a part of the al qaeda organization. and khalid sheikh mohammed was not only the man who we then had reason to believe correctly had daniel pearl, the reporter from

"the wall street journal," but also had claimed credit for being the architect of 9/11. killed 3000 americans that morning. another key point that needs to be made was that the tech makes meeks that we used were all previously used on american military personnel. not all of them, but all of them that they have used in training for a lot of our own specialists in the military area. so there wasn't any technique that we used on any al qaeda individual that hadn't been used on our own troops first. just to give you some idea whether or not we were quote torturing the people we captured. the way to program -- the way the program works was the agency came in primarily george tenet

and the director of the cia came in. he talked to me and talk to it couple of other people. basically he wanted to know how far they could go in terms of interrogation of the individuals that we captured. and, for two -- you really needed to sign off, one with the signoff by the president and secondly was the ruling from the justice department which is where that line was that you could not cross. and, we saw it and obtained both of those. the president signed up to it as did the other members of the national security council. some of my colleagues may have forgotten that, but in fact everybody who was a member of the national security council was informed about the essence of the program and signed up to

it. so you had the proper governmental authorities agreeing that this was necessary and worthwhile, and we had the key people over in the justice department, people like john yoo who has been severely harassed because of the fact the legal opinion he and others issued but they were legitimate legal opinions from the justice department that said this is okay and appropriate and this is an. it gave us very clear guidance that we could follow. and the folks out of the agency insisted on that kind of guidance before they were willing to go forward. now, one of the things that i found most objectionable was -- with respect to the obama administration when they came in was the initial decision by the president and attorney general holder that they were going to investigate and prosecute the people in the intelligence community who had carried out

this interrogation program at our direction. and, it was a terrible thing to say. you have the president of the united states who signed up to it. he was the legitimate authority and the justice department had signed up to it. these guys have gone out at our direction and use this authority to collect intelligence that we badly needed to have, and the next thing you know you get a change in administration and the new crowd coming in and says we are going to prosecute those guys who were responsible for carrying out those policies. well, i came here to aei at one point about two years ago and spoke on the subject. i will say the administration appears to have reversed course. all of those activities were investigated i lawyers in the justice department into the bush

administration. they had all been looked at before. to be sure it was copacetic and the obama administration did finally, and i think, hope the matter is now resolved, back off and those people that frankly i think didn't deserve to be prosecuted deserve to be decorated for the work they did for us that saved again many many lies. >> let's jump forward to that speech which as you say was may of 2009 here at aei. it was imparted critique of the administration's decisions on those things that you mentioned but it was also at least the way i heard it, a warning. by stepping back from the kinds of things that your administration had done, you were in effect saying we are putting -- we are choosing to put ourselves at greater risk, and yet here we are some two and a half years later. we had of course the attack at fort hood, but in spite of all

the things that you warned against, we haven't been attacked again. somma bin laden has been killed. rockman has apparently been taken out. u.s. had a series of successes on al qaeda central in afghanistan and pakistan that has by most accounts been decimated over pretty thoroughly taken apart. were you wrong when you made those warnings in may of 2009? >> i don't think so, steve. i would argue that the policies we put in place back in those days that were available to us and were utilized over time, and i have seen some comments to this effect from current officials of the government, helped produce for example the intelligence that allowed us to get osama bin laden. it was out of the hands of the

interrogation techniques that some of the leeds game that ultimately produced the result when president obama was able to kill bin laden. so i think it has been a continuum if you will between administrations focused especially on the part of the career folks in the intelligence community and in the special ops community and the military that have worked overtime. it wasn't just that the new administration came in and all of a sudden we got bin laden. they had the benefit of all the work they had done. >> shirt at the same time the terrorist surveillance program was operating and there were no more enhanced interrogations. we are broadcasting to outside another is exactly how we would interrogate them and read miranda warnings to farouk abdulmutallab. we have not been attacked again

and we have had these major successes. when the bush administration came to an end i remember you making the argument that you should be judged by the facts at least in large part that we hadn't been attacked and that was a sign of success. why can we assess same standard for the obama administration and say the things they are doing have been successful? >> i guess i make the case that they have been successful in part because the capabilities we left them with and the intelligence we left them with from what we learned from those like khalid sheikh mohammad back when he was subjected i think is a mistake for example not to have enhanced interrogation programs available and the president when he enhanced the interrogation program said they were going to set up their own for high-value detainees but as best i can tell i don't think they ever have. i don't know what they would do today if they captured the equivalent of khalid sheikh mohammad.

probably read him his miranda rights, i don't know. that is not in my mind -- to give up those capabilities. i hope that there are no more attacks, but even as we meet here today everybody drove to work with their car radio on this morning. there is a threat that is sufficient credibility, at least at this stage that the authorities are saying you know, this is unconfirmed but we are taking it very seriously. so, i think, i do think it was a mistake for them not to stay as actively and aggressively involved. krauthammer wrote a brilliant piece on the notion that somehow we overreacted. i don't think we did. i think we did exactly what we had to do, and the results speak for themselves. >> we will do one or two more for me and then we will open it up to questions from others. you often made the case that

iraq was a central front in the war on terror. looking back on iraq, one of the things that people have focused on in reading your book and in the reviews of your book is the fact that you don't think that a lot of mistakes were made, that there is not much you would change about the way that the iraq war was conducted and i noticed in my reading of the book that's in the criticism of what the state department did, you often focused on secretary powell and later secretary rice but in the criticism of what the pentagon did, you focused on generals casey and abizaid and didn't focus on your friend and mentor don rumsfeld. why is that? >> well, i thought it was a pretty good book. [laughter] i thought it was relatively balanced. i chose not to dwell at length

sort of on what transpired in the immediate aftermath of our going into iraq. there have been a lot of books written that are pretty good i think about the policy and terms of setting up the government in iraq. jerry bremer has written one. several other books have been written. rumsfeld has written pretty extensively about it. and i basically took the approach that i could focus on a few things and what i really wanted to focus on was the surge and the counterinsurgency doctrine, a surge we put in place at the beginning of 07. so there is a lot written about that in the book, but i didn't spend a lot of time going back over what the state department did with respect to managing situation in iraq but the

pentagon did outside the normal military activities. >> be re-jerry bremer's book and i have talked to people on your staff and elsewhere who said that you are asking questions about the u.s. military strategy in iraq during those years. things obviously weren't going well. asking tough questions, what is their strategy? do we know how to win? why are we doing the same thing? is the training effective? and i guess i'm interested on a personal level, when did you start asking those questions? >> well, on a personal level at some point we will sit down and talk about a. >> i thought now was as good a time as any. >> no, i could have -- you have to make choices. we wrote about a little less than 600 pages and as they point

out, in my earlier remarks, have material for four or five looks. what i chose was to focus on the highlights as i saw them and what i thought was vital in that regard and obviously i wrote it from my perspective in terms of what i saw and what i believed. i exercised a certain amount of discretion. i didn't put down everything i know about what transpired and a whole range of different areas. >> will there be a second volume? >> i don't know. it depends on how this one does. [laughter] no, there things i didn't talk about, not just on iraq but throughout my 40 year career. when you you are chief of staff to the president of the united states, you know, there are things you were involved in where he expects discretion and deserves it.

and, i didn't write about those things. that is generally true lots of times. i had a connection with the president bushes. i think it is fair to say in both cases, there are competences that they had of me and certain issues and i'm honored -- i have honored those. >> on the second term, foreign-policy writing the book in a chapter that you not so subtly called said back about iran and north korea and about syria and non-proliferation issues. and you suggest that various points in the chapter that the bush administration lost its way. had essentially veered away from the bush doctrine that was so well established in the first-term. i wonder if you think resident bush himself lost his nerve? >> i didn't say that in my book.

>> that is why i'm asking you now. >> no, i did write a chapter called said that, and i thought it was important to because it was, it was a source of frustration for me. it also demonstrated that he clearly that i didn't win all the arguments and i thought that was important. and this was an area having to do with north korea's nuclear aspirations and activities, building a nuclear reactor for the syrians that would allow them ultimately to produce nuclear weapons and so forth. .. and

now, in the final analysis, the president made the decision he had to make choices. that's why he got the big bucks are looking at a big house. it's the responsibility of the president of the united states. obviously come he didn't know not disagree with my advice and in this particular case he opted to pretty much the state department view of how we should proceed rather than what i was recommending. it's not the first time i've lost an argument with the president. >> you think we're less safe because of that decision?

>> guest: well, i think the way to put it would be but i believe -- i gave an interview before 9/11 and april may of 2001. we'd only been in office a couple of months. and basically in new york were excited as the biggest threat the united states faced as a terrorist organization, acquiring weapons of mass destruction and al qaeda with nukes, but i believe deeply, especially in the aftermath of 9/11 and they think it's important on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 to remind ourselves that that it is still very real. one of the things i thought we did well up to a point was when

we went in and took down saddam hussein. obviously we omitted one of the guys had been a prime source of terrorism as time went in, he clearly was a proliferator, a potential proliferator with that kind of capability. so we got rid of saddam hussein as a threat. five days after we went in and captured saddam, wal-mart dokki at a price announces that he was surrendering his nuclear materials. he had centrifuges, uranium feedstock, a weapons design and he surrendered all of those and they are not in the possession of the united states. so we took him out of the nuclear business. pretty good given what i've been libya since. it would not do good to have the

difficulties they had over there if moammar gadhafi. we also took down the khan network. the mastermind of the pakistani nuclear program. then he went into business for himself like moammar gadhafi, selling nuclear vitelli rails. his biggest customer is libya, but he was always dealing with north korea and china on trade to some extent with iraq because saddam, but market off the a.q. khan alternative business from the standpoint of having to worry about than producing and or proliferating in using those materials. and we didn't get a handle on with north korea. in the chapter we were or two is basically a story dealing with the north korean threat. so i think if you're keeping score, three out of four is not

bad. but the problem of the threat is very real north is especially dangerous because they have not tested to have kids. we caught them red-handed with respect to their providing a plutonium reactor to one of the worst terror sponsoring regimes on the face of the earth, syria. unfortunately for us the israelis took that out so we didn't have to worry about that anymore. but the north koreans clearly established that they will proliferate nuclear materials to terror sponsoring regimes. and the problem we are faced with is that it's still very much there and we do not yet have a handle on north korea. the other problem obviously is still iraq. we've got to be front and center as well as far as our concerns

about that threat. and i believe still too today that is the most dangerous threat the united states faces is that technology will fall into the hands of an al qaeda type organization and nuclear weapons will no longer be a deterrent. they'll be an incentive. >> maybe we'll take a few questions and then maybe get a few questions about iran. please, when you are called on, wait for the microphone. give your name and affiliation and ask a question rather than making a long statement appeared thank you. yes, ma'am. >> were you surprised when he found out that osama bin laden was in and in terms of your talking with resident musharaff at arafat that time, the cooperation you had between both countries, did you at any point feel that the pakistani authorities have been hiding something from the bush administration? >> i never had reason to believe that president musharraf was

involved in anything like that. i think there was a general video that bin laden was in some remote section of pakistan, a short ways from islamabad. i think what was startling was to find that he was living where he was. he wasn't hiding in a cave someplace. there is a lot of imagery that somehow he had gone underground. but in my dealings with president musharraf and i took with him quite a bit to question his commitment to the work he was doing with us to help by steel and you think you can't

leave that al qaeda threatened him personally as well as his regime as much as the united states and i think that was true. in a matter of weeks, al qaeda affiliated organizations while he was still president. >> another question. yes, sir. right down here on the front. >> mr. vice president, i'm jason stern, a graduate student in middle east studies at george washington university. i think it's fair to say that no matter who is in the white house, the airport has a big challenge both to protect interest in a challenge to uphold our values. how well has the obama administration responded to arab string and how the bus administration responded differently if they had filled in the power? thank you.

>> well, it's difficult to judge the quality and the current effort without having to speculate about what's going to come out at the far end of the process. and frankly, i don't have answers to the questions. i don't know who's going to be in charge when the dust settles and new governments are established. what are these regimes going to be like? how are they going to look at the u.s.? what kind of relationships are we going to have? in some cases, some of the regimes have been replaced by president mubarak in egypt for example in the united states over the years were closely in the gulf war.

so if you are evaluating the outcome in terms of u.s. interest, i think there's a lot we don't yet know about the outcome. in terms of whether or not we should be supportive, i think that it is important for us to continue to express our support, certain values that we believe people ought to have the opportunity to live by. we believe in freedom and democracy and i think that needs to come through europe and i'm got to come back and be cautious here in terms of automotive, the process with respect to islamic fundamentalist come into groups and organizations that may have won the election and then shut down the electoral process and you'll have the will of hamas

run gaza. we don't know yet. i think difficult to make a final judgment instantly see how some of the things develop. >> should the united states take a more alpha role in promoting the aerospace? >> well, i'm cautious, steve, partly because there's things we don't know, but also i think it's important for us to be a little cautious about lumping them all together. in my experience over the years but that part of the world is it's very important to remember these are different countries in some cases there is linguistic differences. in some cases there are religious differences, splits between shia and sunni. some cases you've got governments that i think are probably viewed as legitimate in the eyes of governments and others who are clearly commissariat comes to mind.

you've got a brutal dictator who was in charge in using vaster kind of preserve his power and most of us can agree that bashir assad ought to go. so we need to make those kinds of judgment. when we talk about the arab spring, i think i understand what that means. and i think generally it has been welcomed as a fundamental change and reform if he wills to the region, but i do think it's important to keep in mind as we evaluate these developments that each and every one of these countries is different and needs to be dealt with accordingly. >> next question. yes, over there in the front. >> allison, i am the average citizen here. i do question, when do we know

we've won the global war on terror? >> when do we know we've won the global war on terror? well, it's not similar to what we think of as a conventional war, where, you know, we get the battleship in tokyo harbor, that's not going to happen. and i think there is evidence out there that were making significant progress. i think getting osama bin laden was very important and very useful demonstrated part of that process. but i think also it may be the kind of thing that gradually fades over time. but i don't think there's going to be or is likely to be an ha ha moments you say they are,

it's done. >> i'll take a couple more. >> sure. >> vice president, if we could take you back your earlier comments about the middle east and bring it back in history, the great controversy at the close of bush 41 administration was for assertion that had we continued the march was the phrase he'd used, it might've been a different outcome. what do you think the outcome might've been had his advice and pursued in that regard? how would that have changed the course of events? wow, john stockman, he and i were in charge of the pentagon. as the secretary and he was the comptroller. and as i think back on that, and careful here not to challenge my

colleagues from that area because they think they all did good work. but my recollection of the close of the gulf war was that there was unanimity on the part of the president, his senior civilian and military appraisers, that we gathered around the desk in the oval office. we had the secure line open to riyadh, where our senior military commander general schwarzkopf was. and you could look back on it later and say well, we should ms or we should not let them have helicopters or there were things we didn't know at the time. but there was a general sense that we done what we set out to do. it's what the congress authorize call it the u.n. security

council to find out. as we told the coalition and our troops were going to do and i promise when i got over there initially to get permission to put u.s. forces into saudi, it also promised them as soon as we completed the mission we go home and were not looking for permanent bases in saudi arabia. and so there was a general sense that now, should we have got all the way to bed had been? circumstances are pretty dramatically different 10 years later after we have the events of 9/11, after we had seen saddam thought of 16 of the 17 u.n. security resolutions and produce and use weapons of mass destruction against his own people. you know, the world had shifted 10 years later. and if we had gone in, if there was a way, one thing i could think of that i would like to

have changed, it would've been to have saddam at the table signing the surrender document. one of the things that emerged out of the way it was built with lucy was very creative and didn't have any qualms about misrepresenting the situation. but for years afterwards, he paddled himself as somebody you had to defied and successfully decided united states of america because after all we've done to him he was still standing and the fact he was still standing, that used demonstrated the value that he was able to peddle that are not part of the world. so if i could think of one thing i might've liked using different, it would have not been going to baghdad at that

point. it would have been president signed the surrender document. on the way over. >> yes, sir. i'm from the daily newspaper. >> my name is david from the daily local newspaper, but i also served in iraq for five years as the united states notion in. i can tell you back as a disaster zone with very little chance to recover for decades to come. iran has almost totally gemini. in retrospect, was there a mistake in iraq? >> welcome it would be a mistake to cut and run. i don't think we should turn our back on iraq at this stage and the efforts that we've mounted over the years, i think it's very important for us to complete the mission.

and i think my own personal view is that there is a danger here to rush for the exits under the current administration. and that would be really unfortunate. >> one more quick one. >> sure. >> fernwood aei and the "washtington examiner." president rush in his memoir, which doesn't report to cover his whole administration doesn't mention iraq from the spring of 03 and spring of 06. what do you say to the criticism that the president was insufficiently monitoring his general and not investing early enough or as early as desirable something on the order of the surge strategy, which was ultimately developed at the end of 06 and 07? could that have been done earlier? >> well, i'm inclined, michael.

first of all what i remember is the president was heavily engaged during that period of time. he was not by any means ignoring what was going on in operations in iraq. we had fairly regular sessions, where he would get on the secure hookah to bag dad, not only with their own senior people, but also with senior iraq use. i've got a picture here did well, it's a picture i put in my book rumsfeld and rice and i up at camp david and it doesn't show the president because he's on the other end in that and we've got a secure hookup in baghdad during that period of time. he's coming to baghdad and is over there visiting with then prime minister maliki.

so the notion that somehow he turned his back on her wasn't focused on, wasn't engaged, i would challenge that. i don't think that's true. >> ltd. the prerogative of westby momus questioned in sort of bring this back to 9/11. you make the case that 9/11 is change the government. in many respects they change the country, clearly changed the world. did it change you? >> did 9/11 change made? well, i don't think it changed me in the sense that some have suggested, you know, i've got friends out there, used to be friends, who said agnew cheney when he was a nice guy, was warm and fuzzy. i don't know him now. and the other night they did jay leno. i don't know whether anybody

here sallet, but they have what they call a cold open and the program begins with jay and greeting his guess for that evening wearing blue jeans. i'm asking to wear this suit that's on a hanger on the show that night. i'm dressed as a darth vader. , which he was part of the joke. but it didn't help my image any. [laughter] >> i suppose i can't say it didn't change me. it's part of my life and it was an important milestone for all of us. obviously i spent the next seven and a half years working with the president and our colleagues

to try to make absolutely certain that that never happened again on our watch. and that meant we had to take steps and enact policies that were going to guarantee the safety and security of the american people. i started seeing is okay, here's the problem. this is ever going to do about it. and then we did it. the notion of change mainly came to the folks in my mind who said that before about this problem as a 9/11 style attack, terrorist attack with deadlier weapons, something other than box cutters and airline tickets. at the events of 9/11 really brought that home. and i think it heightened my concern would be a fair way to put it, about the potentially

devastating consequences. we had anthrax attacks at the same time. it turned out those words domestically initiated. we had one night i remember being knocked off smith dinner at the new york a month after 9/11. and as we landed that day to go down to the waldorf, where i was the guest speaker for the evening, received word that there had been a botulism attack at the white house. one of the detectives had, say we had been exposed to a botulism toxin, which is deadly. we didn't know for several hours whether that was true or not. it turned out to be a false reading fortunately. so there is a level of heightened concern in the immediate aftermath that we have to deal with. it was like on 9/11 you get a

report that there are six planes hijacked. it turns out they're only four. that was enough. her report that there is a car bomb at the state department. turned out there was no car bomb at the state department. turns out it was a question of the plane that had gone down on the ohio west virginia border. now, that was simply dropped off the radar. there was a report to the plane down in pennsylvania. shanksville, turned out that was true. that was united 93. so as we went through that process in the immediate aftermath, putting together policies and so forth, there's no question there is a significantly elevated level of concern. i felt like i think most of the state, but i don't know how i could've done my job if i hadn't. i had part of my job was as the

president was to make certain that we never again got hit the way we did on 9/11. >> well, with that, that you think mr. vice president and the american enterprise in detail for hosting. and thank you all for coming. [applause] >> thank you. thanks so much, stephen, vice president cheney. aei is extraordinarily grateful to have a friend like you. a scholar statesman and men of action, which represents 88th edition so well. we are so thankful for your time this morning. mr. cheney, there's cheney, thanks for being here. we'll let you get out of here. i think you've got some media interviews right after this and then we will excuse the crowd. thanks again.

>> had like to weigh in on this a little bit. you're talking about fundamental confusion. if you think about what a warrior race, a warrior is a person who first of all chooses a side. the warrior clearly knows that these are my people and those are my enemy. and he will risk his life and limb to use violence to try and stop people who are trying to do violence against his people. that is a warrior. a policeman will also risk life and limb, but they cannot choose sides. they have to be on the side of the law if a police man chooses sides, it's called corruption. we have fundamentally confused the role of warriors with the role of policing with the put warriors who are trained to

oppose another side into a situation to act as policemen, where there is no agreed-upon law. they have to be on the side of the law. if you go to the state pen and any state in this union, the people who are inside will tell you if you say, is it bad to kill or is it against the law? yeah, they all agree. we've put people who are trained as warriors into a situation where there's no agreement is perfectly justified out to cut a woman's ears after she's humiliated her husband away. which are we dealing with? and the second thing is you have policemen who are trained, they are generally more mature. infantrymen are young. would you take a 19-year-old and sent him to a troubled neighborhood in bedford stuyvesant with an automatic weapon? is not likely he's going to do a very good job.

he's planning to go up against the enemy and he clearly knows who they are. he'll do a magnificent job. that's what 19-year-olds do. so if we don't get over this fundamental confusion, we're going to be finding ourselves in situations time and time again where we are putting people who are trained one-way and two-way role that has none of the requirements to make that rule successful. >> clarity of purpose and battle is a real force multiplier. in the middle of matterhorn, you have this devastating moment when a u.s. officer said nebulizers in getting worried over the fact that the north vietnamese army that he is multiplying are infused with a sense of purpose and mission. and you are for this devastating observation, that kind of clarity was something of the past. the marines seemed to be killing people is no objective be on the killing itself that left a hollow feeling that maldini tr