By RON FOURNIER
.c The Associated Press

NEW YORK (Sept. 11) - With words of comfort and resolve, President Bush joined the nation Wednesday in remembering ''a year of sorrow, of empty places'' since the terrorist attacks that drew America into war. He vowed victory over ''history's gang of fanatics.''

In a nationally televised address, Bush said, ''We will not relent until justice is done and our nation is secured.''

The Statue of Liberty and a forever-altered skyline were at his back as the president spoke from Ellis Island, the first stop for millions of immigrants and a symbol of American tolerance and independence. ''Now and in the future, Americans will live as free people, not in fear, and never at the mercy of any foreign plot or power,'' Bush said.

''This nation has defeated tyrants, liberated death camps and raised this lamp of liberty to every captive land,'' Bush said. ''We have no intention of ignoring or appeasing history's latest gang of fanatics trying to murder their way to power. They are discovering, as others before them, the resolve of a great democracy.''

The emotional return to New York was his final stop in a daylong tour of the three sites scarred by terrorism - a rebuilt and now unblemished Pentagon, a field of golden grass in Pennsylvania and the dusty, seven-story-deep hole where the trade center towers once soared.

''In the ruins of two towers, under a flag unfurled at the Pentagon, at the funerals of the lost, we have made a sacred promise, to ourselves and to the world: We will not relent until justice is done and our nation is secure. What our enemies have begun, we will finish,'' Bush said.