Time & Perspective Quote by Dick Cheney

Cheney’s voice here is the bureaucrat’s antidote to the Hollywood version of justice: no lone hero, no sudden epiphany, no clean moral arc. The casual “I mean” and the onomatopoeic “bang” do double duty. They mock the public’s appetite for instant closure while also reclaiming authorship for the national security machine. This isn’t just an explanation of how intelligence work happens; it’s a justification for how it has to happen.

The specific intent is to recast the bin Laden pursuit as an institutional triumph built on attrition: “thousands” over “a long period of time.” That scale is rhetorical insulation. If victory is the product of a vast system, scrutiny of any single tactic becomes easier to wave away as missing the point. Notice the pile-up of verbs - “worked… followed… captured… interrogated” - a chain that normalizes the machinery of counterterrorism as process, not controversy. “Bad guys” is another telling choice: it flattens moral complexity into a children’s-book taxonomy, making the hardest parts (detention, coercion, secrecy) feel like common sense.

The subtext is Cheney’s long-running argument in miniature: the post-9/11 world demanded endurance, coordination, and methods that polite society prefers not to watch. He’s not merely praising analysts and operators; he’s defending a doctrine. By framing success as cumulative and collective, he implies that loosening the system’s tools would break the chain. Even “and so-forth” signals a studied casualness - the messy details are treated as mundane, not debatable.

Context matters: Cheney is speaking from inside the political fight over credit and culpability in the War on Terror. The line tries to lock bin Laden’s capture into a narrative where the security state’s continuity, not any administration’s change of course, is the decisive weapon.