Ok, I watched this when it happened on 9/11 and have been searching my ass off to try and find it in light of things Biden has recently said.
Go to 17:05 in the video, it's only around a minute long.
http://www.archive.org/details/abc200109111323-1404I always considered this one of the last intelligent things to leave Biden's lips but I could never find the video again until now.
Transcript of interview:
Linda Douglass: ...we have to be on a war footing, uh we, and the Senator Hagel said that we have to start securing our borders, locking down our airports, revisiting the way we protect our public institutions--what about that?
Senator Biden: I hope that's not true. Uh, I would say it another way. I would say we've come face to face with the new reality. A reality that we knew existed, we knew was possible, a reality that has happened in varying degrees in other countries.
But if in fact in order to respond to that reality, we have to alter our civil liberties, change the way we function, then we have truly lost the war. The war is one that allows us..
the way to conduct the war, is to demonstrate our institutions are functioning, that your civil liberties, your civil rights, your ability to be free and walk and move around infact are not fundamentally altered. Anybody who is willing to strap dynamite to their body or have a kamikaze suicide mission, you'll never fundamentally be able to stop. It doesn't matter what you do, there are a lot of things we can do though to diminish significantly the possibility of this happening again without, uhm, changing our character as a nation.
