Time & Perspective Quote by Dick Cheney

The sentence structure is doing crisis-management in real time: short clauses, plain verbs, a heavy reliance on "we", and the procedural specificity of "get all of the planes down" before the moral horror of what follows. Cheney frames the moment first as an operational problem to be solved, then as an unimaginable spectacle to be absorbed. That ordering matters. It signals the worldview of a national security state under stress: action, containment, coordination - then grief.

The subtext sits in the phrase "something no one expected and anticipated". The doublet is redundant, but politically useful. It washes the event in collective surprise, implicitly insulating decision-makers from blame for lack of foresight. In the post-9/11 environment, "no one could have imagined" became a kind of rhetorical solvent: it dissolves earlier warnings, bureaucratic failures, and messy pre-attack intelligence into a shared shock.

Cheney also uses the passive voice to widen the distance between observer and catastrophe: "we watched", "collapsed", "being killed as a result". The agency belongs to "the terrorist attacks", not to any subsequent choices the administration might make. In that split second, the quote is already building the narrative scaffolding for what comes next: if the world is newly unthinkable, then extraordinary measures become thinkable. The line "at that moment" collapses time into urgency - a moral claim that immediate, forceful response is not just strategic but obligatory.