It’s very important to go back and keep in mind the distinction between handling these events as criminal acts, which was the way we did before 9/11, and then looking at 9/11 and saying, ’This is not a criminal act ’ not when you destroy 16 acres of Manhattan, kill 3 000 Americans, blow a big hole in the Pentagon. That’s an act of war.

This remark reflects Vice President Dick Cheney’s post‑9/11 argument that the attacks of September 11, 2001 required a shift in U.S. policy from a primarily law‑enforcement framework (treating terrorism as “criminal acts”) to a national‑security and military framework (treating 9/11 as “an act of war”). Cheney repeatedly advanced this distinction in interviews and speeches during the early “War on Terror,” as the Bush administration sought public and congressional support for military action abroad and for expanded counterterrorism authorities at home. The language about “16 acres of Manhattan,” “3,000 Americans,” and “a big hole in the Pentagon” is characteristic of his rhetorical emphasis on the scale of the attacks to justify that reframing.

Cheney’s core claim is definitional and strategic: how an event is categorized determines the tools deemed legitimate to respond. Calling 9/11 a crime implies investigation, prosecution, and punishment within established legal norms; calling it an act of war implies preemption, military force, and extraordinary security measures. The vivid inventory of destruction functions as an argument from magnitude—because the harm resembles wartime devastation, the response should resemble wartime mobilization. The quote thus encapsulates a central post‑9/11 debate about the boundary between policing and warfare, and about the legal and moral consequences of treating non‑state terrorism as war rather than crime.