--- title: Inside the Bush White House on 9/11 | TIME description: Former Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz offer a glimpse inside the White House and Pentagon on the morning of 9/11 (Photographs and Video by Marco Grob) canonical: https://time.com/video/r4gb21qY/ og:title: Inside the Bush White House on 9/11 og:description: Former Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz offer a glimpse inside the White House and Pentagon on the morning of 9/11 (Photographs and Video by Marco Grob) og:url: https://time.com/video/r4gb21qY/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/r4gb21qY/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Inside the Bush White House on 9/11 twitter:description: Former Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz offer a glimpse inside the White House and Pentagon on the morning of 9/11 (Photographs and Video by Marco Grob) twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/r4gb21qY/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Inside the Bush White House on 9/11 > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Inside the Bush White House on 9/11 [Watch (HLS stream): Inside the Bush White House on 9/11](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/r4gb21qY.m3u8) (7:21)  _Published 2011-09-06. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz offer a glimpse inside the White House and Pentagon on the morning of 9/11 (Photographs and Video by Marco Grob)_ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:17 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Dick Cheney Defends CIA's Post 9/11 Interrogation Tactics](/video/ZaGJCkLl/) ### Dick Cheney Defends CIA's Post 9/11 Interrogation Tactics [Beyond 9/11: Inside the Bush Administration](/video/a8V4FSvG/) ### Beyond 9/11: Inside the Bush Administration [Beyond 9/11: Marco Grob on Making Portraits of Resilience](/video/Ms5xkCai/) ### Beyond 9/11: Marco Grob on Making Portraits of Resilience --- ## Transcript On a, September 11, 2001, I began the day in my west wing office in the White House. Went to the Pentagon early in the morning and Admiral Giambastiani, the senior military assistant came into the office and said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center tower. We started seeing the news about the World Trade Center in New York and at first it looked like an accident. It was obviously an accident. And then as we watched, we saw the second plane strike. And then we knew it was, was a terrorist attack. It was a few minutes later that the Pentagon was hit. The whole building shook and I rather stupidly thought that it felt like an earthquake. The building shook. You could feel that something, a bomb or something had hit the building. I had no idea what. My Secret Service Agent, Lead Agent came bursting through the door in my office and said, Sir, we have to leave now. I walked around the side of the building and could see pieces of metal laying all over the grass out there and people that were wounded, people that were being brought out of the building, who were dead, and, and injured. This is the first time it really hit me that the United States was vulnerable to mass casualty attacks of terrorism. The audacity of it, was such that it, it suggested that there would be additional attacks. We began a very intense round of discussions, debate. What do we do next? What is the problem? How do you define the problem? How do you do define a strategy to deal with the problem? We've always treated, terrorist attacks before primarily as a law enforcement problem. Every occasion when the United States had suffered a terrorist attack previously the reaction had been basically to treat it as a law enforcement problem, like a bank robbery or a murder or a car theft. Going out and finding the guilty party, bring them to trial, put them in the slammer. And then go on with your business. Occasionally, lob a couple of cruise missiles. And the magnitude of the 9 / 11 attack was sufficiently different, greater and more lethal than previously. And it, it suggested the prospect of even greater lethality in the period ahead. It was such a massive attack, killed so many of our people. It clearly was an act of war. We had been attacked in an act of war there's no mistaking that. When you're the leader of an organization you've gotta be resolute, compassionate, and you, and, you gotta know what you want, need to do. And I knew what we needed to do. I knew we needed to use all resources of our government to defend the American people. The past practice, in dealing with terrorist acts, simply wasn't good enough. This isn't just about retaliating for this specific attack. It's really about what do you do to prevent similar attacks or even larger attacks in the future. And so the Bush administration approach was notably different than in the past. As it, in my view, it had to be. We significantly enhanced our ability to intercept communications coming from, suspected site or individual overseas. Put pressure on the terrorists all over the world, wherever they are. Make everything they do harder. Make it more difficult to talk on the phone, to move around, to recruit, to raise money, to transfer money. Once we captured somebody like Kaleed Sheik Mohammed, it was very important that we find out what they knew. The indefinite detention, Guantanamo Bay, the Patriot Act, military commissions. Not everybody agreed that that was the right way to go. President and I felt very strongly it was, and took the necessary steps to make it happen. The goal is, and it's an ambitious goal, but the goal is to, eliminate global terrorism as a threat. It was already the policy of the United States' government. Congress had passed legislation, establishing as US policy changing the regime in Iraq. Certainly there was no indication that Iraq had been involved in in the al Qaeda in the 9 / 11 attack. Iraq was one of the few countries that was negative about the United States after the attack. I think there were only one or two countries in the world that said things that were anything other than, condolences to the United States, and IrAq was one of those two. The Iraqi regime engaged with terrorists. making, payments to the families of suicide bombers. Providing safe harbor and sanctuary to some of the folks in al Qaeda. Iraq was paying $ 25, 000 to the families of terrorist, suicide attackers. We were focused especially on this problem of weapons of mass destruction. It was the only country in the world that was firing at U. S. military aircraft on a regular basis. So the decision was made to go in and take down the regime. We did. I think there was a expectation that once we got to Baghdad, once Saddam was gone that things would sort of fall into place in some ways, in the way they had in Eastern Europe. Obviously, there's always things when you look back, at things that might have been done differently and better. And, and things that one wished they might have anticipated better. And the growing insurgency that occurred after the military success in Iraq was one of those things that had not been anticipated to the extent it might have been. I think the biggest problem we encountered in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, the Taliban didn't stop fighting. The Saddam regime didn't stop fighting. It's been expensive in terms of lives. It's been expensive in terms of finances. War is a costly and terrible thing, but I think we did, basically, the right thing. As I review it now and think back on it I think, it was exactly the right thing to do. The massive fact that can't be ignored is that on September 12th, 2001. I don't think anyone would have taken a bet that the United States would not be attacked again in ten years. We were convinced, I think most people were, in the immediate aftermath of 9 / 11 that there was likely to be another attack. We did everything we could to prevent it. We were successful for seven and 1 / 2 years. There has not been another successful attack on the American people in our country. I'm often asked, the biggest accomplishment of my presence and I think the biggest accomplishment was there was no further attack. Compared to where we are on September 12, I'd say we're much safer against the threat of terrorism. But it hasn't gone away, and the worst thing we can have now is complacency, because that's the way things come back. I'm still very concerned about the possibility that there will be more attacks, and that the next attacks will use deadlier substances than anything we've seen today. Interestingly, even though the later administration campaigned against the structures that were put in place to put pressure on and protect the American people, they, they've kept those structures in place because, I think, on reflection, they've concluded that, that they are necessary to protect the American people during this period. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Inside the Bush White House on 9/11","description":"Former Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz offer a glimpse inside the White House and Pentagon on the morning of 9/11 (Photographs and Video by Marco Grob)","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/r4gb21qY/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2011-09-06T22:54:40.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/r4gb21qY.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/r4gb21qY/","duration":"PT7M21S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/r4gb21qY/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```