Vigilance, says Rumsfeld, has kept us safe.

“The decision to go after them, to make everything they do more difficult, has worked. It has made it harder for them to communicate with each other, harder to travel, harder to raise money, harder to recruit,” Rumsfeld asserts. “That has been beneficial. I think the structures that the Bush administration put in place — Guantanamo Bay, the indefinite detentions, the Patriot Act, the military commissions — those things have contributed to that.”
Rumsfeld is struck by how President Obama, who famously railed against the Bush administration’s intelligence tactics, continues to implement Bush-era anti-terror policies, perhaps cognizant of how important those post–September 11 programs are to national security. “To the credit of the Obama administration,” Rumsfeld says, “while they campaigned against all of those things, once in office, they decided to keep those structures in place to protect the American people.”
“That has been a good thing,” Rumsfeld says, and he points out that leaders of both parties are adapting to this century’s national-security challenges. Whereas in the Clinton years the military budget was reduced and combatting terrorism was not a prominent part of the U.S. military’s mission, Rumsfeld argues that the Bush administration and the Obama administration, though less assuredly, have clearly understood the necessity of addressing terrorism.
The change in approach has been a “distinctive one,” Rumsfeld says, a strong example of putting aside partisan differences in a shared commitment to defending against a looming threat. “Prior to the 9/11 attacks, the common way of treating terrorists was as criminals, as if they were bank robbers. We would indict them in absentia, and let it go at that,” Rumsfeld says. “That contributed, I would say, to the attacks on 9/11.”

Read the rest of Rumsfeld’s NRO interview here. And for more about his experience that day, check out “The Agony of Surprise,” the 9/11 chapter from Rumsfeld’s memoir, Known and Unknown, available for free on his website.