Cheney Tours New York Site

Vice President Dick Cheney visited the ruins of the World Trade Center on Thursday and thanked firefighters and construction workers at the site.

The vice president, who was wearing a hard hat emblazoned with the American flag, spent about half an hour touring the cavernous Manhattan landscape where the twin towers once stood as he chatted with rescue officials and construction workers.

It was his first trip to New York and one of his few public appearances since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“This is the first time I’ve had the chance to be back in New York since then and I’m trying to think if there’s anything I’ve ever seen that rivals this,” Cheney said.

“Television is great, but it doesn’t convey the sense of destruction that clearly happened here. None of us ever thought that we would ever see something like this,” he said.

“They’ve done a tremendous job,” he said of the workers.

In a speech later, the vice president warned that life in the United States would never be the same and more terrorist attacks should be expected.

Speaking at the annual Alfred E. Smith memorial dinner, a high-profile Catholic charity event, Cheney said: “The enemy has shown a capacity to inflict great damage on the United States, and we have to assume there will be more attacks. That is the only safe way to proceed.

“For the first time in our history,” he said, “we will probably suffer more casualties here at home in America than among our troops overseas.

“We are dealing here with evil people who dwell in the shadows, planning to commit international violence and destruction. We have no alternative but to meet the enemy where he dwells,” Cheney said.

“And I know there is not a man or a woman in this room who does not wait on the day that justice is delivered,” he said to sustained applause from an audience at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel that included New York Sens. Charles E. Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki.

Cheney’s trip comes at a time when tensions are running high across the nation and President Bush is visiting China for a summit meeting.