Former Vice President Dick Cheney told
Newsmax TV on Friday that, 14 years after 9/11, "we're in a positon now where 9/11's far enough behind us that a lot of people have a tendency to forget what that time was like.
"The thing I'm concerned about more than anything else is another mass-casualty attack but with armed terrorists — terrorists armed with something tougher, more dangerous than box-cutters and airline tickets," Cheney told "The Steve Malzberg Show" in an exclusive interview.
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Cheney is the co-author of a new book,
"Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America," with his daughter, Liz Cheney.
In viewing recently released pictures from that day, Cheney recalled that he was in the Presidential Emergency Ops Center below the White House — and that one photograph was snapped "as I watched the towers come down here in New York City."
"I was thinking that we were under attack, that this was an act of war — this wasn't just a terrorist attack that you could treat as a law-enforcement problem," he said. "We lost 3,000 people that day.
"At that moment, we didn't know exactly how extensive the attack was, but it was a very, very serious proposition for us. I was starting to anticipate what we needed to do in order to protect ourselves from further attack and to get the guys who had struck on 9/11."
Cheney said the anniversary of the attack should be "a reminder, I hope, for everybody out around the country of what happened that day and the measures that are necessary to prevent it from happening again.
"Unfortunately, we've seen sort of a reduction, a tendency to say: 'That was a one-off event. We don't really need to do those things we did to keep us safe' — and that's a huge mistake."
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