“Up until 9/11, it was treated as a law enforcement problem,” he said. “You go find the bad guy, put him on trial, put him in jail.

“Once you go into a wartime situation and it’s a strategic threat, then you use all of your assets to go after the enemy. You go after the state sponsors of terror, places where they’ve got sanctuary. You use your intelligence resources, your military resources, your financial resources  everything you can  in order to shut down that terrorist threat against you.

“When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they’re doing, closing Guantánamo and so forth, that they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that’s required, and that concept of military threat that is essential if you’re going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks.”

In what CNN promoted as his first televised interview since leaving office in January, Mr. Cheney touched on a number of other subjects, including the economy, his failure to persuade Mr. Bush to pardon his former aide I. Lewis Libby Jr. and the war in Iraq.

“We’ve accomplished nearly everything we set out to do,” he said about Iraq. “Now, I don’t hear much talk about that, but the fact is, the violence level is down 90 percent. The number of casualties and Iraqis and Americans is significantly diminished. There’s been elections, a constitution. They’re about to have another presidential election here in the near future.”

“We have succeeded in creating in the heart of the Middle East a democratically governed Iraq, and that is a big deal,” Mr. Cheney said. “And it is, in fact, what we set out to do.”