Mr. President, no words can ever convey our regrets, our sadness, our shock, our loss from the great tragedy of September 11, 2001. The newness of the century, of a millennium, has been tarnished forever by the blood of innocents shed by anonymous assassins, terrorists whose only motivation is an evil hatred.

All our prayers are with the victims and their families and friends. When the final list of casualties is known, I am certain that every state, and perhaps every nation in the world, will have been touched by this calamity. Our prayers will be with them forever. We will remember each and everyone as long as we live and then our descendants will remember them too. It will be their memories that guide us in the difficult days ahead.

Their deaths have reminded us of our common humanity, that what we share is greater than what separates us, and that the fabric of beliefs which makes us Americans is strong enough to resist any cowardly act by terrorists. Where one American falls, another will stand. Each of us shine as a beacon of our shared beliefs in freedom, liberty and justice. In the dawn after this dark day we will all shine. Those who expect us to be weakened will be sadly mistaken.

Those who think Americans are soft and fearful will be astonished by our strength and determination. I was a young man when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Then we knew our enemy and he thought our will could be shattered by one frightful day of disaster. Instead our enemies learned that where we had been broken, we healed and became stronger.

Today we begin to become stronger. We begin by mourning our dead brothers and sisters. We begin by comforting the survivors. And as we pick up the bricks and the steel and sweep away the glass and dust, we begin to identify our enemies and design the strategy for defeating them.

There will be no place that our enemies can hide, no sanctuary for them to cower in. We will seek them out and justice will be done. It will be a long process but it will be thorough. We have come brutally to understand that terrorism is an evil beyond our borders that still threatens our homeland. We have come to understand that our enemies want to extinguish the light of freedom which shines from America. We have come to understand that the only way to resist the darkness of hatred is to spread that beacon of light even farther from our shores. From this battle we hope will come not just a stronger, safer America, but a better, more secure, freer world.

May God bless America.