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Know the Enemy
Extracted from an
address delivered to the graduating class of
the U.S. Navel Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, on May 26, 2006
By Vice President Richard Cheney
To prevail in [the global war on terror], we must understand
the nature of the enemy that threatens America and the civilized world. It
is as brutal and heartless as any we have ever faced. This enemy wears no
uniform, has no regard for the rules of warfare, and is unconstrained by any
standard of decency or morality. They plot and plan in secret, target the
defenseless, and rejoice at the death of innocent, unsuspecting human
beings.
White House Photo by David Bohrer.
This enemy has a set of beliefs -- and we
saw the expression of those beliefs in the rule of the Taliban. They seek to
impose a dictatorship of fear, under which every man, woman, and child lives
in total obedience to a narrow and hateful ideology. This ideology rejects
tolerance, denies freedom of conscience, and demands that women be pushed to
the margins of society. Such beliefs can be imposed only through force and
intimidation, so those who refuse to bow to the tyrants will be brutalized
or killed -- and no person or group is exempt.
This enemy also has a clear set of
objectives. The terrorists want to end all American and Western influence in
the Middle East. Their goal in that region is to seize control of a country,
so they have a base from which to launch attacks and wage war against
governments that do not meet their demands. The terrorists believe that by
controlling one country, they will be able to target and overthrow other
governments in the region, ultimately to establish a totalitarian empire
that encompasses a region from Spain, across North Africa, through the
Middle East and South Asia, all the way to Indonesia. They have made clear,
as well, their ultimate ambitions: to arm themselves with chemical,
biological or even nuclear weapons; to destroy Israel; to intimidate all
Western countries; and to cause mass death here in the United States. Some
might look at these ambitions and wave them off as extreme and mad. Well,
these ambitions are extreme and mad. They are also real, and we must not
wave them off. We must take them seriously. We must oppose them. And we must
defeat them. (Applause.)
Over the last several decades, Americans
have seen how the terrorists pursue their objectives. To put it in very
basic terms, they would hit us, and we would not hit back hard enough. For
many years prior to 9/11, we treated terror attacks against Americans as
isolated incidents, and answered -- if at all -- on an ad hoc basis, and
never in a systematic way. Even after a strike inside our own country -- the
1993 attack on the World Trade Center in New York -- there was a tendency to
treat terrorist attacks as individual criminal acts, to be handled primarily
as a matter for law enforcement. The man who perpetrated that first attack
in New York was tracked down, arrested, convicted, and sent off to spend the
rest of his life in prison. Yet behind that one man was a growing network
with operatives inside and outside the United States, waging war against our
country. For us, that war started on 9/11. For them, it started years
before. After the World Trade Center attack in 1993 came the murders at the
Saudi Arabian National Guard facility in 1995; the attack on Khobar Towers
in 1996; the simultaneous bombings of our embassies Tanzania and Kenya in
1998; and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. With each attack, the
terrorists grew more confident in believing they could strike America
without paying a price and believing that if they killed enough Americans,
they could change our policy. So they continued to wage those attacks --
making the world less safe and eventually striking us here in the homeland
on September 11th and killing 3,000 of our fellow citizens.
Against this kind of determined, organized,
ruthless enemy, America required a new strategy -- not merely to prosecute a
series of crimes, but to fight and win a global campaign against the terror
network.
First, we are absolutely determined to
prevent attacks before they occur, and so we are on the offensive against
the terror networks. At home and with coalition partners abroad, we have
broken up terror cells, tracked down terrorist operatives, and put pressure
on their ability to organize and plan attacks. The work is difficult and
often perilous, and there is much yet to do. But we have made tremendous
progress against this enemy that dwells in the shadows.
Second, we are determined to deny safe haven
to the terrorists. Since the day our country was attacked, we have applied
the Bush Doctrine: Any person or government that supports, protects, or
harbors terrorists is complicit in the murder of the innocent and will be
held to account.
Third, we are working to halt the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and to keep those weapons out
of the hands of killers. In the post-9/11 world, we have had to confront
such dangers before they materialize. The President put it very well:
"Terrorists and terror states do not reveal these threats with fair notice,
in formal declarations -- and responding to such enemies only after they
have struck first is not self--defense, it's suicide."
Fourth, we are determined to deny the
terrorists control of any nation, which they would use as a home base and a
staging ground for terrorist attacks on others. That is why we continue to
fight Taliban remnants and al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. That is why we
are working with President Musharraf to oppose and isolate the terrorist
element in Pakistan. And that is why we are fighting the remnants of Saddam
Hussein's regime and the terrorists in Iraq.
Because our coalition has stood by our
commitment to the Afghan and Iraqi peoples, some 50 million men, women, and
children who lived under dictators now live in freedom. Afghanistan is a
rising democracy, with the first fully elected government in its 5,000-year
history. Iraq has the most progressive constitution and the strongest
democratic mandate in the Arab world. And despite threats from assassins and
car-bombers, Iraqis came forward by the millions to cast their votes and to
proclaim their rights as citizens of a free country. Now they live under an
elected government committed to serving all Iraqis, determined to speed up
the day when Iraqi forces can assume full responsibility for their nation's
security. We will help them on this journey because we are a nation that
keeps its word. And we know that when men and women are given the power to
determine their own destiny, the ideologies of violence and resentment will
lose their appeal, and nations will turn their energies to the pursuit of
peace.
By standing with our friends, and making a
better day possible in the broader Middle East; by supporting democracy, we
serve both ideals and the security of our nation. And the brave Americans on
duty in this war can be proud of their service for the rest of their lives.
In an enterprise as vast as the war on
terror, victory requires that we use every element of our national power.
The terrorists view the entire world as a battlefield. And those of us in
positions of responsibility must do everything we can to figure out the
intentions of an enemy that likely has combatants inside the United States
today. We live in a free and open society, and the terrorists want to use
those very advantages against us. And so we have an urgent duty to learn who
they are, what they are doing, and to stop them before they act.
For this reason, in the aftermath of 9/11
President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to intercept a
certain category of terrorist-linked international communications. The
purpose is very simple to state: If people inside the United States are
communicating with al Qaeda, they are talking to the enemy -- and we need to
know about it.
The Terrorist Surveillance Program is highly
classified and carefully limited. The program was improperly revealed to the
news media, some of which now describe it as domestic surveillance. That is
not the case. We are talking about international communications, one end of
which we have reason to believe is related to al Qaeda or to terrorist
networks. It's hard to think of any category of information that could be
more important to the safety of the United States.
The Terrorist Surveillance Program is fully
consistent with the constitutional responsibilities and the legal
authorities of the President. And the program is conducted in a manner that
fully protects the civil liberties of the American people. the President has made clear from the outset,
both publicly and privately, that our duty to uphold the law of the land
admits no exceptions in wartime. As he has said, "We are in a fight for our
principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them."
In addition, the entire program is
reconsidered and reauthorized by the President himself every 45 days. He has
reauthorized it more than 30 times since September 11th because our nation
faces a continuing threat from al Qaeda and related organizations. Key
members of Congress, from both political parties, have received more than a
dozen briefings on the Terrorist Surveillance Program. The reason I know
this is that I'm the one who presided over most of those briefings.
Above all, I can tell you that the Terrorist
Surveillance Program is absolutely essential to the security of the United
States. If you'll recall, the 9/11 Commission focused criticism on the
nation's inability to uncover links between terrorists at home and
terrorists overseas. The term that's used is "connecting the dots" -- and
the fact is that one small piece of data might very well make it possible to
save thousands of lives. And the very important question today is whether or
not we've learned all the lessons of September 11th.
In the decade prior to 9/11, this country
spent more than $2 trillion dollars on national security. Yet we lost nearly
3,000 Americans at the hands of 19 men with box cutters and plane tickets.
In the case of al Qaeda we are not dealing with large armies we can track,
or uniforms we can see, or men with territory of their own to defend. Their
preferred tactic, which they boldly proclaim, is to slip into this country,
blend in among the innocent, kill without mercy and without restraint. They
have intelligence and counterintelligence operations of their own. They take
their orders from overseas. They are using the most sophisticated
communications technology they can get their hands on. Since 9/11 they have
successfully carried out attacks in Casablanca, Jakarta, Mombassa, Bali,
Riyadh, Baghdad, Istanbul, Madrid, London, Sharm al-Sheikh and elsewhere.
Here in the U.S., we have not had another 9/11. But while the enemies that
struck us may be weakened and fractured, they are still lethal and still
desperately trying to hit us again. They hate us, they hate our country, and
they hate the liberties for which we stand. They have contempt for our
values. They doubt our strength. And they believe that America will lose our
nerve and let down our guard.
We're all grateful that this nation has not
had another day like September 11th. Obviously, no one can guarantee that we
won't be hit again. But the relative safety of these years did not come
about by accident. We've been protected by sensible policy decisions, by
decisive action at home and abroad, and by round-the-clock efforts on the
part of people in the armed services, law enforcement, intelligence, and
homeland security.
Every day the President of the United States
makes decisions based on the intelligence briefing he received that morning.
The information in that briefing is critical to assessing risks, and to
allocating security assets inside the homeland and far beyond. Throughout
our military, intelligence has a daily, indeed hourly, influence on the
movement of ships and subs, fighter and bomber missions, and orders given to
those commands at the tip of the spear. Gathering the best information, and
getting it into the hands of the war fighter, means that your work is more
effective, your maneuvers are more safe, and the nation you serve is more
secure....
I want each one of you to know that the President will not
relent in the effort to track the enemies of the United States with every
legitimate tool in his command. This is not a war we can win on
the defensive. Our only option against these enemies is to monitor them, to
find them, to fight them, and to destroy them.
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