Politics & Power Quote by Dick Cheney

Cheney’s line isn’t just a definitional argument; it’s a jurisdictional land grab. By insisting on a bright line between “criminal acts” and an “act of war,” he’s not clarifying language so much as reassigning power: away from courts, warrants, and public trials and toward the executive branch’s emergency toolkit. The quote works because it sounds like common sense while quietly pre-loading the policy conclusion.

Notice the structure. He starts with a seemingly procedural concern - “go back” and “keep in mind the distinction” - the tone of a sober manager restoring order. Then he drops the sensory inventory: “16 acres of Manhattan,” “3,000 Americans,” “a big hole in the Pentagon.” The details are blunt, physical, and cinematic; they don’t invite deliberation so much as they demand a category change. The emotional force becomes the evidence.

The subtext is that scale determines legal meaning. If an atrocity is large enough, Cheney argues, it stops being crime and becomes war - which implies different rules, looser constraints, and an indefinite time horizon. That shift mattered in the post-9/11 context: it helped justify detention without ordinary due process, expanded surveillance, and military framing for a conflict against non-state actors. “Before 9/11” functions as a mild rebuke, suggesting prior restraint was naive for a new era.

It’s also political inoculation. If you accept “war,” then objections about civil liberties can be framed as peacetime fussiness. The sentence doesn’t merely interpret 9/11; it drafts the public into accepting a permanent state of exception.