From our perspective, trying to deal with this continuing campaign of terror, if you will, the war on terror that we’re engaged in, this is a continuing enterprise. The people that were involved in some of those activities before 9/11 are still out there.

Cheney frames counterterrorism as an open-ended, long-duration struggle rather than a finite campaign with a clear endpoint. By calling it a “continuing enterprise,” he emphasizes persistence, vigilance, and institutional continuity in U.S. security policy after 9/11. The reference to actors “involved in some of those activities before 9/11” underscores a narrative that the attacks were not an isolated rupture but part of an ongoing threat ecosystem—networks and individuals already active beforehand. The phrasing also works rhetorically to justify sustained measures (intelligence, military, and legal) by suggesting the adversary remains present and adaptive, making “war on terror” a generational task rather than a temporary response.