>> former vice president dick cheney talks about his experiences in 9/11 and the lessons he's learned since then. he is interviewed by stephen hayes, senior writer at the weekly standard and author of "cheney." [applause] [applause] >> good morning, everybody. welcome to the american enterprise institute. pantani danielle pletka, former

defense policy is at aei. let me first remind everybody to turn up telephones are put in on vibrate and ask everybody when the session ends, to please remain seated in order to allow our speakers to leave the room. a final housekeeping note, booksellers are available with the book and a reception after the end of the event. what aei president, arthur brooks, who unfortunately couldn't be here, invited vice president cheney to join us today, it was a debut to remember in the attacks of 9/11 10 years later and considering some of the lessons learned and those that were not. since that day. but the first thing to recall about 9/11 and about the long war that we are still fighting is in many who gave their lives, their families, the sacrificed loved one in the awful loss.

first and foremost, now is time to remember that as many brave americans who died at home, our fighting men and women who risk everything so that we can live in freedom and are invaluable allies from too many countries to name who share our cause. as some of you know, vice president cheney recently published a memoir, "in my life," written with his daughter, liz cheney. we understand it will debut at number one on "the new york times" bestseller list on sunday. [applause] today, he joins us with weekly standard senior writer and a silly author, stephen hayes for conversations about that attack on our nation, about decisions made since then and some reflections on an amazing life in politics and pretty much

whatever else he is do you choose to talk about today in the hour that we have. in the 10 remaining after the conversation, we will have it q&a session moderated by steve. lynne cheney has been a scholar at aei for many years. dick cheney as a member of our board of trustees. we are so quiet to have them as part of our aei family and we thank them and you all for joining us here today. [applause] >> well, thank you. i walked under a. >> remember, you are re-reporter, steve. >> i just wanted to say a word in an alternate over to mr. hayes. the book i wrote is a memoir. covers all 50 years of my life. the early years are short.

there wasn't a lot of good stuff to write about that period of time. but the last half of the book focuses on the cheney administration break here as vice president. the book opens in the prologue with recounting the events as i saw them a 9/11, much of the last half of the book deals with what we had to do during the course of our subsequent 7.5 years in order to keep the country safe, some of the things were involved in such as a large part of the book is relevant, with respect to 9/11 and the aftermath, although i don't want to mislead anybody, there's an awful lot in the period going

back to the fact there've been administration. i worked in four of them, worked closely with the ferrets, reagan administration as part of the house republican leadership in so i tried to cover all of that. time and obviously there's a lot we had to leave out. there is a lot. there's a lot of articles. i'm going to train over to him. >> just to give you an idea of what i would try to do this morning, going to start with questions about 9/11 specifically in push you, in particular, that your personal views on these things to say now you kind of like to put yourself on the couch like that public self reflection. i am going to go talk about a number of different ways in which the policies that emanated from 9/11 that in large part how

to drive. try to sell in some. i spent a lot of time looking at you if you see done since the book came out about it now twice. some questions i have remained for you. so i think that's a lead like to proceed. as danny mentioned, will open up to some questions will probably be much better than mine. i thought the first place we would start us on the of 9/11. i would be interested to know when you first knew we were under attack. not when you first heard about it, but when did you know we were under attack? what we are very first thoughts at that moment? is >> well, i was in my office in the west wing, working with a speechwriter when my secretary called to report that a plane had struck the world trade center in new york or return on the television. this is after the first plane had gone and, that before

anything else happened. my immediate reaction was, how is this possible? it wasn't perfectly clear whether there is no way to account for it. as he watched, we saw the second plane hit the and that immediately in my mind but the notion this had to be a terrorist attack to have two airliners flying into the world trade center within minutes of each other and not have it be anything but a terrorist attack. shortly after that, i talked to the president down in florida and we talked about a statement. he was getting ready to issue a statement and not was whether it was proper to talk about terrorism would think that statement and we both agreed it definitely was. i think the word he used was probably a terrorist attack on the united states. within a relatively short pater

time, people began to gather at my office. secretary rice, national security adviser was there, chief of staff. we probably had 70 or 80 people in the room. all of a sudden the door is open in a lead service agent came and came over to the desk where i was standing. and he said, sir, we have to leave immediately. i'd like to take you out. please come with me. he said we have to leave immediately. put one hand on the back of my ballot in one hand on my soldier and literally propelled me out of my office. i didn't have the option of not going. then the cost for that, the reason he had done that as he explained to me he was taking me down to the presidential emergency operations center that he received a report over the

secret service revealed that, that there was a hijacked aircraft out at dulles headed towards crowd at 500 miles an hour. crowd with the code word for the white house. that turned out to be american 77, which of course came in and made a circle and then went into the pentagon. at that point i was in partly to the pr. part way to the kiosk and i immediately used a telephone that was there to place another call to the president. that was their second or third called up warning to let him know that washington is under attack as well as new york and the secret service had strongly recommended that he not come at. i also recommend that he not come back believing it was important for us to stay apart so that we didn't become a riper

target and we didn't know at that stage but was happening. >> you didn't like to hear that. >> he didn't like it at all for understandable reasons. >> did you ask what our reaction was that morning, steve, i went from that area after a talk to the president and from there it was presented as more metadata, secretary of transportation, responsible for the faa. norm had a list of six aircraft that they believed had been hijacked at that point. actually had flight numbers on them. and of course it was only four. for a while we thought it was fixed. and there were two major drivers in terms of what i thought about that morning and as they were through the crisis that day, number one wesley had to get off the plane down out of the sky so we could isolate whatever had

been hijacked and account for all the aircraft including the ones we got it been hijacked at that point would account for three of them. two in new york and one at the pentagon. so that was a major part of the effort. the other thing that was very important, that i focused on was the continuity of government. some of you are probably familiar with with over the years, especially during the cold war, we have developed programs and procedures for preserving the continuity of government in the event of an all-out global conflict with the soviet union. that was so it's a scenario in actually exercise that on many occasions. a focus on underhanded ways than taking steps to ensure that some mullane of success unshared successions survived whatever kind of attack we were on air,

so when the dust settled we have a president in a government able to function. this will refer to as continuity of government. that day i took the form basically and one was to recommend the president and i not on chat. it was very important for us to stay separated. secondly, it was to get a hold of denny hastert, of course speaker has to reside at andrews air force ace for his security detail had relocated them and we arranged for him to be moved from their two resecure disclosed location because he was next in line at the president the end of something happened to the president and me, didn't denny was in a pistons should to take over function as president. those were the two major concerns that occupied most of our time. one was getting all the airplanes down out of the sky and the other the otherwise guaranteed that there be somebody in the line of

succession in a position to build a takeover. >> speaking of secure, undisclosed location, most of the time of the media was reporting you're in a secure, undisclosed location, your actually camp david. and that's where you went to evening of september 11th. i remember having a conversation with you much later in which you describe what that was like being at camp david late that evening. the way you describe it to me was the family gathered around the television. he saw basically in science, watching reruns of the planes hitting the towers and of the horror that day. while the satellite? how long did you do that and what were you thinking at that point? >> well, after the president had returned, with national security council address the nation. and when you finish that, then lynn and i got on a white top helicopter on the south lawn and

were flown to camp david. it's the only time i've ever taken off in a helicopter off the south lawn without being president. i've done a lot over the years, but she don't fly off the south on accepting those extraordinary circumstances. and when we got to camp david, they took us to aspen lodge, which is the presidential lodge up there. again for security reasons, the secret service was obviously totally focused and concerned about possibilities for follow-up attacks and so forth in aspen was the most secure facility at camp david. so we spent a couple of days they are aspen lodge. we sat in the living room, watched the television. i was accompanied by my wife when an dot release. my daughter mary was out of the

country. but i can remember sitting there, focused obviously like people were all over the country, watching the towers come down, and began to think about what we need is to do by way of policy, what steps we might take in order to deal with this new situation. and the thoughts that came to mind were the first and foremost that this wasn't just a terrorist attack. ..

from the intelligence community, it wasn't a big mystery about who was behind pretty much focused in on a osama bin laden but there was a lot we didn't know about al qaeda. now we've heard so much about it for ten years as a bit of a temptation we think we know everything there is to know about al qaeda, but the day of the attack this was a group of terrorists that there were a lot questions we couldn't answer. we didn't know how big they were or where they were operating and

there was a lot we needed to learn and that part we drove our search for intelligence that generated some of the policies that we put in place, i sat and made a series of notes on legal tablet that night and as i thought about what we were faced with and how we might begin to deal with it, and shoot over in my own mind what we ought to be doing. ultimately we met at camp david and followed the national security council that weekend, the attack i guess was on tuesday and that by friday night we pretty well gathered at the camp david saturday and sunday at their with the president and pulled together would ultimately emerged as the strategy for the global war on terror. >> in the days after the tax we

saw various public officials from the jury public displays of emotion. we saw president bush almost come to tears in the oval office and heard of condoleezza rice going back to the watergate breaking down at one point because of the emotional toll this was taking on a personal note and i remember coming back and driving across the roosevelt bridge during martin sexton's version of america the beautiful and vibrant down crying. did you ever have a moment like that? >> not really. [laughter] you understand people will find that to kill -- to kill your. >> my wife and daughter with me that evening into that day and she had been downtown that morning when the attack started

and the secret service had brought her over to the west wing and then she sat beside me throughout the day and would probably be the best person to comment on my mental attitude. 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 the policy and the military forces and with the targets were out there we might go after, how we might go after them and so forth, what kind of intelligence we were going to need in order to cope with this. but that is what i recall. it wasn't that it wasn't a deeply moving the event, it clearly was, but the other thing that influenced me in the personal standpoint was that i had spent a good deal of time over the years on the continuity of the government program, and i had been to exercises where the nature of the attack on the u.s.

in excess of what we actually faced on 9/11, hundreds of thousands maybe even millions of people killed, so i had the benefit of having gone through those exercises over the years and the training just sort of kick in in terms of thinking about what we have to do that next 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 counter surveillance program on the other and enhanced interrogations' on the other. can you describe -- i think there is a general sense among the public that you sort of brainstorm these ideas. you came up with them. they were your ideas. they were the most fierce public advocate of them. can you describe how the terrorist surveillance program came to be? >> it's important to keep in

mind they were initiated at different times. the terror surveillance program is something we moved to in the days of our time after 9/11 the enhanced interrogation techniques came a year or two later when we were in the business by then of capturing people like khalid sheikh mohammed and we caught him in the spring of 03, and it was the capture of certain kinds of individuals that led us to the point that we needed enhanced interrogation. but coming back to the basic question of the surveillance program, the origin of the program and reliefer, mike haydon as people of the national security agency and george kennan was involved as well there had been a conversation between the two of them this is within a couple of days of 9/11

and as i recall the two of them had talked, and george mentioned it to me the basic question the their additional things we can do with our capabilities and the capacity to read the mail that would help us deal with the situation that we then faced. that led to the meeting in my office as i recall where mike tannin, then general haydon, then the head of the nsa and the cia, and george and the three of us talked, and there were things that the nsa thought they could do if they had additional authority. and i took that package of that proposal basically and went to see the president and sat down and went through it with him and

he signed up to it and dealt with the caveat that if carefully managed he wanted to make certain that he personally approved at each step of the way and that they had to come in on approval on a regular basis. what emerged out of that is significantly enhanced capacity to be able to intercept communications originating outside of the united states possibly from what we referred to as a dirty number. to capture al qaeda he's got a computer, a rolodex, whatever it is, a group of phone number sand you want to know who he is talking to in the united states for example, and the safeguards that we build into it at the direction of the president involved the fact that every 30

or 45 days it varied from time to time. i think the secretary of defense and the director of the cia and the nsa had to sign off on continuing the program didn't get renewed automatically. they had to say in writing to the president they felt we should continue the program from the standpoint of the nation's security, etc.. the attorney general had to sign off on it. all of that and went to the president, david addington who worked for me and was responsible for carrying them around and he would get all the signatures and the president once he had received this input from this senior advisor than she would sign up for an extended program for another 40 or 45 days and that's the way be operated for years and the key members of congress have the

chairman and ranking member of the house and senate intelligence committee, down every couple of months to my office and mike haydon would come in and george tenet, and we briefed the members of congress who have the jurisdiction in this area over what we were doing and what kind of results it was producing so they were wired in from the beginning. later on with some the controversy and the justice department we expanded that group of four into nine. we have the speaker majority and minority leaders of the house and senate and have all of them in as well and then we went around at that point and asked them at that point nancy pelosi was in the room, jerry rockefeller, the democratic side asked them if they thought we should continue the program and they said absolutely.

then i said you think we ought to go back to the congress and get additional legislative authority to operate the way we are operating and they said absolutely not and they were unanimous on the plains and they were concerned if we went out and asked the congress for the vote on the subject and the fact we would be telling the enemy how we were reading their mail. so it was well known provided to the congress there was some controversy leader on but internally that the president dealt with but it was time convinced the key part about were success in terms of preventing further attacks against the united states i think we saved some thousands of lives, by what we were doing it gives one of the great success stories especially with respect to the nsa and held it with the program together and develop the capability over the american

intelligence maybe someday it will all be told. >> he made the same argument about the enhanced interrogations and give a strong believer the policies quote on quote worked. let's go beyond that part of the debate and talk about the effects of the interrogation and the perceptions around the world, but it is torture. the things we did amount to torture and in the sense that maybe to the position of the united states was eroding because of the things that we did. is that a question or -- invitation to argue? >> i always offer you an invitation to argue. those are crazy critiques and thoughtful critics and that is a more forceful critique. do you, i do not.

i 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 lot about the rank and file enemy troop or soldier. this does not involve the military, this does not involve the department of defense. this is a program that is authorized by the president, signed up to by the national security council, carried out with all kinds of safeguards by the central intelligence agency. we had a case where we had a handful of individuals who clearly had a knowledge of what was in the works of the standpoint of al qaeda and what they hope to be a will to do, how they functioned, who the

members were and what the plans were. people like khalid sheikh mohammed, abu zubaydah,, the notion that somehow the united states was torturing anybody isn't true and anybody that takes the time to look at the program i think will come to the same conclusion obviously that people out there differed with respect to that perspective but when we get into the whole area of the controversy techniques of the waterboarding i think as the protesters out this morning when i drove and commenting on waterboarding. three people were waterboarded. notte dozens or hundreds but three of them and the one who was subjected most often to that was khalid sheikh mohammed and it produced phenomenal results for us. there are reports that the

intelligence community did at the results of the program, which are declassified at my request that are now available on the internet to talk up the quality of information that we got as a result of our enhanced interrogation techniques applied to the 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 moly the man who had reason to believe correctly had be headed daniel pearl, the reporter for "the wall street journal," but also had claimed credit for the 9/11 killed thousands of americans that morning. another key point that needs to be made is the techniques the we used rob roll previously used on

american military personnel, not all of them, but all of them had been 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 of whether or not we were, quote, torturing the people we captured. the way the program worked was the agency came come primarily georgetown and then still the director of the cia talked to me and a couple of other people who basically to know how far they could go in terms of the interrogation of the individuals that we captured, and they needed to kinds of sign-offs'.

one was a sign off on the president and the second was from the justice department where that line was you could cross, and we sought and obtained most of those and the members of the national security council. some of my colleagues may have forgotten that, but in fact every bloody who was a member of the national security council was informed about the essence of the program and signed up to it. so you get the proper governmental authorities agreeing that this was necessary and worth while and we had the key people in the justice department, people like john yoo who has been severely harassed because that the legal opinion he or others issue but they have a legitimate legal opinion from the justice department that this

is okay inappropriate and this gave us very clear guidance that we could follow, and the folks out at the agency insisted on that kind of guidance before they were willing to go forward. now one of the things i found most objectionable was with respect to the obama administration when the cannon was the initial decision by the president and the attorney general holder that they were going to investigate and prosecute people in the intelligence community who had carried out the integration program by our direction. the president of the united states signed up to it. he's a legitimate authority in this case. the justice department signed up to it, these guys have gone out in the direction and use this authority to collect

intelligence that we badly need it to have and the next thing you know you get a change in the administration and the new crowd coming in the we are going to prosecute those guys responsible for carrying out the policy. and here at the a e.r.a. about two years ago we spoke on the subject and no administration appears to have. all of those activities were investigated by lawyers in the justice department to the bush administration. it had been left out before, and the obama administration did finally and i think and i hope it matters now has all back off and those people but frankly i think didn't deserve to be prosecuted or decorated for the work they did that saved many

lives. >> let's jump forward to that speech which sec was may of 2009 here and was in part a critique of the administration's decision on those things that you mentioned, but it was also, at least the way that i heard, it was a warning. by stepping back from the kinds of things that they're administration had done you were in effect saying we are choosing to put ourselves at a greater risk and yet here we are two and a half years later with the attack at fort hood, but in spite of all the things we haven't been attacked again. osama bin laden has been killed and has been taken out. you have had a series of success on al qaeda central in afghanistan and pakistan and it has by most accounts been decimated or pretty thoroughly

taken apart. weren't you wrong when you made those mornings in may of 20009? >> i don't think so, steve. i would argue that the policies we put in place back in those days they were available to us and they were utilized over time, and i have seen some comment to this effect from current officials in the government helped produce the intelligence that allowed us to get osama bin laden and that was out of the enhanced interrogation techniques and that ultimately produced the result when president obama got osama bin laden. so if you will let this between the administration's focused especially on the part of the career folks in the intelligence

community and in the special lops community in the military that has worked overtime that wasn't just the new administration came in and all of a sudden we got bin laden. the had the benefit of all the work that had been done. >> but at the same time it is operating as it was originally concealed. >> we are broadcasting to al qaeda and others exactly how we will interrogate them and we had murray in the warnings to the umar farouk abdulmutallab. all these things that you and others had warned against and yet here we are and we hadn't been attacking and we had these major successes. when the bush a administration came to an end i remember you making the argument that we should be judged by the fact that it is in large part because we haven't been attacked and that was a sign of success. why can't we use the same standard for the noval administration and say the things they are doing have been successful? >> i guess i would make the case that they have been successful in part because the capabilities

we left them with an intelligence and what we learn from the men like khalid sheikh mohammed back when he was subjected. i think it is a mistake for example not to have an enhanced interrogation program available now. the president when he canceled the enhanced integration program said they are not going to set up their own for the detainee's 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 khalid sheikh mohammed. reva miranda rights, i don't know. that's not in my mind -- it's a mistake 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 her that there's a threat that's sufficient credibility at least with this stage that the

authorities say this is not confirmed but we are taking this very seriously. so i think that -- i do think it was a mistake for them not to stay as actively and aggressively involved. charles brough mur has written a brilliant piece on the notion that we overreacted. i don't think we did. i think we did exactly what we had to do, and the results speak for themselves. >> one or two and then we will open up to questions from others. you often made the case iraq was a central war front. looking back on iraq one of the things that has -- that people have focused on in reading your book and the reviews of your book is the fact that you don't think that a lot of mistakes were made that there's not much you would change about the way that the iraq war that was conducted, and i noticed in my

reading of the book that in the criticism of what the state department did you often focus on secretary powell and later secretary rice but in the criticism of with the pentagon did, you focused on general casey and didn't focus on your friend and donald rumsfeld. why is that? >> guest >> well, i thought 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 had been a lot of books written, some of them pretty good i think about the policy in terms of setting up the new government in iraq. jerry has written one.

several other books have been written. rumsfeld has written pretty extensively about, and basically took the approach that i can focus on a few things and what i really wanted to focus on was the surge in the counterinsurgency doctrine that accompanied the surge that was put in place of the beginning of 07. so there is a lot written about that in my book, but i didn't spend a lot of time going back over what the state department did with respect to managing the situation of with the pentagon did outside of the normal military activities. but i talked to people on your stuff and elsewhere who said that you are asking questions about the u.s. military strategy and iraq during those years that things obviously were not going well, do we know how to win, why

are we doing the same thing, is the training effect of? and i guess i interest on a personal level when did you start asking those questions? >> on a personal level at some point we will sit down and talk about it. [laughter] >> i thought now was as good a time as any. >> no, i -- i could have -- you have to make traces in the book. we wrote about a little less than 600 pages, and as i point out in my earlier remarks, yet material for four or five books, but what i chose was to focus on the highlights and what i saw 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 in the whole range of different areas. >> would there be a second volume? >> it depends on how this one does. [laughter] yeah, there are things i did not talk about, not just on iraq, but throughout my 40 year career. when you are the chief of staff to the president of the united states, there are things that you are involved in where he expects discretion it deserves at, and i didn't write about those things. that's generally true in connection with my time that president bush. i think it's fair to say in both cases there are confidences they had in me and certain issues and i'm honored those.

>> on the second term foreign policy you wrote in the book in a chapter not so subtle legal setback about iran, north korea, syria and nonproliferation issues, and you suggested various points in the chapter that the bush administration lost its way and had the essentially veer away from the bush doctrine that was so well established in the first term, and i wonder if you think president bush himself is lost? >> i didn't say that in my book, did i? >> that's what you're saying now. >> i did write a chapter called set back, and i thought it was important because it was the source of frustration for me. it also demonstrated pretty clearly that i didn't win all the arguments, i thought that was important to convey that and

this was an area that had to do with north korea that to with the aspirations and activities and a nuclear reactor for the syrians in this area that would allow them to produce nuclear weapons and so forth. it was one where there were significant differences inside of the administration. i think many of those were known but part of my interest was putting down the history of that period and policy debates and thought there were lessons to be learned. we were not the first administration that had trouble figuring out how to get the north koreans to go nuclear and the clinton administration faced problems i think the obama administration will have similar problems as well, to match, but i thought it was important to put down the record if you will of how we dealt with that.

in the final analysis the president made his decision he had to make choices. that's why he got the big bucks and was at the big house and it's the responsibility of the president of the united states. obviously he didn't always agree with my advice and in this particular case he opted pretty much for the state department view of how we should proceed rather than what i was recommending. it's not the first time that i lost. >> you think we lost because of those decisions? >> well, i think that the way to put it would be that i believed i gave an interview before 9/11, it was in april or may of 2001 with only been in office a couple of months, and basically i was in atlantic, new york, where i cited as the biggest

threat the nation faced the possibility of the terrorist organization requiring weapons of mass destruction and al qaeda's nukes that i believe deeply especially in the aftermath of 9/11, and i think it's important on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 to remind ourselves that threat is out there and is still very real. one of the things i thought we did well up to the plight was when we went in and we took down saddam hussein and we eliminated one of the guys that had been a prime source of weapons of mass destruction previously and produced the equipment on the stockpiles of the time that went and he clearly was a proofreader, potential proliferators in that kind of capability but we got rid of saddam hussein as a threat and five days after we went in and

captured sunnistan the press announcement he was surrendering his material for enriching uranium and the stocks and the weapons design he surrender all of those and now they are in our possession so we took him out of the nuclear business. pretty good given what has happened since in libya would not have been good as difficult as it had been over there if marked off the had the nuclear weapons. we also took on the a.q. khan network. he was the mastermind of the pakistani nuclear program then he went into business for himself and the black market operation following the nuclear materials and his biggest customer was libya but he also was dealing with north korea and to some extent with iraq, so

saddam hussein, ghaddafi come a.q. khan all put out a business from the standpoint of having to worry about them producing and or proliferating those materials. the one where we didn't get a handle on this north korea and the chapter that you refer to that is basically the story of how we did not deal effectively with north koreans. so i think it keeping score three out of four isn't bad. but the problem is that threat is very real and north koreans are especially dangerous because if not tested to weapons. we caught them right handed with respect to their providing a plutonium reactor to one of the worst terror sponsored regimes on the face of the year, syria, and fortunately the israelis

took that out so we didn't have to worry about that anymore but the north koreans clearly established that they would proliferate nuclear materials to the terse concert regimes, and the problem we are faced with is a skill very much there and we do not yet have a number on north korea. the other problem obviously still is iraq. we haven't even talked about that but it has to be front and center as well in terms of our concerns about that threat. but i do believe still today that is the most dangerous threat to the united states faces that technology will fall into the hands of an al qaeda organization and the the nuclear weapons will no longer be a deterrent to be an incentive. >> maybe we can take a few questions and get a question 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. thank you. yes, ma'am. >> were too surprised when you found out that osama bin laden was in pakistan and in terms of your talking with president musharraf about the cooperation you had with both countries did you at any point feel they have been hiding from things in the bush administration? >> i never had reason to believe president musharraf was involved in anything like that. it was a general view that bin laden was in some remote section of pakistan, not just from this, but. i think what was startling was

that he was living where he was. he wasn't hiding in a cave someplace. the was a lot of the imagery that somehow he has gone underground figuratively. but even in my dealings with president musharraf, an adult and quite a bit, the question as commitment to the work he was doing with us to help us deal with the threat that had emerged in pakistan. i think that he can to believe that al qaeda threatened him personally as well as his regime as much as it did the united states and i think that is true of on his life in a matter of weeks by al qaeda and the the al qaeda affiliated organization while he was still president. another question?

yes, sir. right down here in the front for >> mr. vice president and a graduate student of middle east studies at george washington university. i think that it is fair to say that no matter who is in the white house, the arab spring represented a great challenge, but the challenge to protect our interests and to uphold our values. how well as the obama administration responded and how has the bush administration responded differently if he had still been in power? thank you. >> well, it's difficult to judge the quality of the effort without speculating what is going to come out of the far end of the process, and frankly

answers to a couple key questions. i don't know who is going to be in charge when the dust settles and the new government 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 regime's have been replaced and president mubarak in egypt for civil had been good friends and allies of the united states over the years worked closely together in the first four for example, so i -- if you are evaluating the outcome in terms of u.s. interest i think that 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 we've continue to express our support and certain values that we

believe people want to have the opportunity to live by and we believe in freedom and democracy, and i think that needs to come through. but again we have to come back and be cautious i think in terms of our we promoting that process with respect to islamic fundamentalists to groups of organizations that may have won that election and shut down the electoral process and have hamas and gaza we don't know yet and it's difficult to make a final judgment until we see how those developed. >> should the united states to give more upfront role in promoting the arab spring? >> i'm cautious, steve, partly because the things we don't know. but also i think it's important

for us to be a little cautious about lumping them all together and my experience over the years with that part of the world is it's very important to remember these are different countries and in some cases there are linguistic differences and in some cases there are religious differences between the shia and sunni and in some cases you get the governments that are probably viewed as legitimate and in the eyes of the governed and others who are clearly syria comes to mind and there's a brutal dictator who is in charge and using violence to try to preserve his hold on power and most of us could agree so we need to make those kind of judgments. 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 you will in the region but i do think it's important to keep in mind as we evaluate these developments that have each and every one of these countries as different, and needs to be dealt with accordingly. >> next question? >> i'm an average citizen. i have a question. on the global war on terror. >> when do we know we won the global war montara? well, it's not similar to what we think of as a conventional war where we get the battleship and to tokyo and that's not

going to happen, and i think that there is evidence that we are making significant progress. i think that getting osama bin laden is very important, and very useful demonstrated part of the process, but i think also it may be the kind of thing that gradually fades over time. i don't think that there is likely to be the moment where you can say it's done. >> we will take a couple more? >> sure. >> if i could go back to the earlier comments about the middle east and bring it back in history, the great controversy of the close of pushed 41 was the general assertion that had

we continued the march was the phrase he used there might have been a different outcome would do you think that outcome would have been had his advice been pursued in that regard? or would it have changed the course of events? >> he's talking about when he and i were in the charge of the pentagon but he was the comptroller. as i think that on national, careful not to challenge my colleagues from that era because they did good work but my recollection of the close of the gulf war was that there was unanimity on the part of the president and the senior civilian and military advisers that we gathered around the desk

of the oval office, we had the secure line open where the senior military commander general schwarzkopf was, and you could look back on their leader and say we shouldn't have let them have helicopters or there were things we didn't know what time, but there was the general sense that we had done what was sent out to do. that's what congress had offered us to the u.n. security council signed up that's what we told the coalition, that's what we told the troops we were going to do and i promised my had gone over there to get permission as the u.s. forces i also promised as soon as we completed the mission we would go home. we were not looking for the permanent bases in saudi arabia, and so there was a general sense of that. now should we have gone all the way to baghdad then?

circumstances were pretty dramatically different ten years later after we have had the event of 9/11, after we had seen saddam hussein violate 16 out of 17 u.n. council resolutions and produce the weapons of mass destruction against his own people. the world had shifted ten years later, and if there was a way we won thing i could think of and i would like to change it would have been to have saddam hussein the table signing the doctrine. one of the things that emerged out of the way that it was dealt with was was he was very creative and didn't have any qualms about what misrepresenting the situation but for years afterwards he was

as somebody who had defined the successfully defied the great states of the united states of america because after all we had done to him he was so spent but he used the demonstrator to violate the notion that he would want or what have but is able to tell about that part of the world so if i can think of one thing that i might have liked to see differently it wouldn't happen to go to bed at this point he would sat his danny down in the chair and signed the doctrine. >> you are from where? >> the local daily newspaper. but i also served in iraq for five years after the united

nations spokesman and i can tell you that iraq with little chance to recover for decades to come speak to in retrospect was it a mistake that iraq? >> i think would be domestic to cut and run. i don't think that we should turn our back on iraq at this stage in the efforts over the years i think it's important to complete the mission, and i think my own personal view is there is a danger here to rush for the exit's under the trend administration, and that would be really unfortunate. >> with the washington examiner, president bush and his memoir which doesn't report to cover

doesn't really mention iraq from the spring of 03 and the spring of 06. what do you say to the criticism that the president was insufficiently monitoring the generals and not a listening early enough or as early as desirable something on the order of a strategy which was ultimately developed at the end of 06 and 07, early 07. could that have been done earlier? well, first of all what i remember is the president was heavily engaged in that per go times, he wasn't by any means ignoring what was going on in the operations in iraq. we had a fairly regular sessions where he would get on the secure

took up to baghdad not only with our own senior people but also with of a senior iraqi is somehow he wasn't focused on or wasn't engaged i would challenge that. i don't think that is true. >> let me take the prerogative of asking one last question and bringing this back to 9/11. he made the case that 9/11 changed the government and that is obvious to everyone in many respects it changed the country and clearly it changed the

world. did it change you? >> 9/11 changed me. >> well, i don't think it changed me in the sense that some have suggested. i've got friends out there that used to be friends -- [laughter] the other day i didn't jay leno i don't know whether anybody here saw that they have with a call the cold open and the program begins with him greeting his guests that evening he is wearing blue jeans and so forth and he asks me if i'm willing to where the suit on the hanger on the show that night and at that point i open the door to come out of the dressing room and i

am dressed as darth vader. he is part of the joke. it didn't have my image. [laughter] >> suppose i can't say it didn't change me. it's part of my life, and it's then portent 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 the would guarantee the safety and security of the american people. i sort of see this the problem here is how we're going to deal with it.

the notion of change mainly came to the focus in my own mind i felt before about this problem of the 9/11-style terrorist attack with deadly weapons something other than box cutters and airline tickets but the defense of 9/11 really brought home, and i think a heightened my concern would be a fair way to put it about the potentially devastating consequences, and we had anthrax attacks at the same time and it turned out those were domestically initiated. we had a dinner of but new york, and after 9/11, and as we landed that they to the speaker of the

evening who we received word that there had been able to the summit at the white house, one of the detectors have gone off suggesting the president and i and others had been exposed and its deadly and we didn't know for several hours with a that was true or not. it turned up to be a false reading fortunately, but there was a level of heightened concern in the of the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that we have to deal with. it was like on the 9/11 you get a report that there are six planes hijacked. it turns out there were only four. that was enough. reports that there was a car bomb in the state department. it turns out that there was no car bomb at the state department. it turned out that there was a reporter for a plane that had gone down on the ohio west virginia border and those americas 77 that simply drop off their radar and the pentagon and

there was the report of a plane down in pennsylvania shanks phill, turned up the was trick was united 93. so as we went through that process in the immediate aftermath as we are putting together policies and so forth, there is no question about whether there was a significantly elevated levels of concerned i don't know how i could have done on my job if i hadn't come and i felt part of my job was to make sure we never again got hit the way we did on 9/11. >> thank mr. vice president and the american enterprise for hosting and all of you for coming. [applause] >> thanks so much, vice

president cheney. aei is extraordinarily grateful to have a friend like you, scholar statement on a man of action which represents aei's envisions a well. we are so thankful for your time this morning. mr. cheney, thanks for being here. thanks for all the questions this morning. we will let you get out of here. we have media interviews right after this and then we will excuse the crowd. thanks again. [applause] on booktv we are joined by david. -- dava. >> he was brave enough to say that the earth was actually moving, turning around and moving around the sun at the time everybody thought the earth was the center of the university did not move.

>> what did that revelation brigade? >> harvick. that's what sent galileo to trial by the inquisition. but copernicus was trying to find a way to predict the future of the planet that would make sense, and he realized if the earth was a notion he didn't have to move the sun or the stars and everything that had been confusing came in. >> tell us about copernicus. >> he was an amateur to get his day job was an administrator for the catholic church, so people often think he wasn't opposed to that idea. not until later he had studied law and he was also a medical director so it was the personal position and he was never the less afraid to publish his book because he thought everybody would laugh at him and he was worried about reticule in

survival be laughed off the stage so he decided not to publish this book that he had spent his whole life writing and then a young and brilliant mathematician worried about his work came to visit him and talked him into publishing. >> who was that? >> he was from martin luther's and university of wittenberg and copernicus lift into catholic poland where the lutherans had been banished and the peak of the protestant reformation. but even with all of that going on, copernicus' managed to keep him there for two years, breaking the law, and together they got the book into shape and the young man left with a copy of the manuscript and got it printed in nuremberg and it changed the world. estimate light today are you writing about copernicus?

>> i had something new to bring to him which was the idea of writing a play about this unusual meeting between the old recluse and the young itinerant mathematician, different religions, different backgrounds, different sexuality, but they overcame all of those things for the purpose of an idea, and telling the world about that idea. >> a more perfect have been comes out and october, 2011. >> thank you. coming up next, book tv presents "after words," an hourlong program where we invite a guest host interview authors. this week, dana priest and her latest book, quote coach top-secret america the rise of the new american security state."