"I mean, it's not just one day you get up, bang, and you got Osama bin Laden."

Said Dick Cheney:

It's the kind of thing where an awful lot of people over a long period of time, thousands have worked this case and worked these issues and followed up on the leads and captured bad guys and interrogated them and so forth.

(Earlier the interview had prompted Cheney about the "interrogation program that's now defunct," and Cheney had said "it's an enhanced interrogation program that we put in place back in our first term.")

So I think it could be looked upon as a collective effort by our military and intelligence personnel-- and by a lot of our civilian leaders. And in the final analysis we demonstrated conclusively that the American government takes very seriously our responsible to bring justice, if you will, or to bring to justice somebody like Bin Laden who's committed this terrible outrage, killing-- 3,000 Americans on 9/11.

And I think the way for us to think about it is-- is to think about it as part of a collective effort. It started in the Clinton administration, was carried forward very aggressively in the Bush administration and now the Obama administration with the-- the results that we're all very pleased to see today....

And now? Can we feel good at last?

[W]e need to preserve our sense of vigilance... There's every reason to believe there'll be further attacks attempted against the United States. And for us to spend so much time patting ourselves on the back because we got Bin Laden that we miss the next attack would be a terrible tragedy. We need to stay just as vigilant as we have been. We need to continue to emplace those policies that produced the intelligence that we needed in order to be able to successfully complete this mission.