Rumsfeld gets first look at Ground Zero

Rumsfeld and Giuliani at Ground Zero on Wednesday.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited the still-smoldering remains of the World Trade Center towers in New York for the first time on Wednesday as recovery workers trudged into a third month of back-breaking -- and heartbreaking -- work.

"The site there says it all," Rumsfeld said, turning to see the recovery operations going on behind him. "The Pentagon is no longer smoking, and yet here we are so many weeks later and the World Trade Center is still burning, still smoking."

Rumsfeld, wearing a New York Fire Department jacket, accompanied New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on a helicopter tour of the site where terrorists slammed a pair of hijacked commercial airliners into the renowned Twin Towers before touring the grounds.

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Both towers collapsed, showering lower Manhattan in a thick cloud of dust and swallowing thousands of emergency personnel and office workers trapped in the falling skyscrapers.

"I guess the one word that comes to mind is really 'duty.' You've done yours," Rumsfeld told Giuliani. "The people of New York have done theirs, and the men and women in uniform are still doing theirs."

The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon sparked America's campaign against terrorism and the daily bombings in Afghanistan, where U.S. officials say the Taliban were harboring the terrorists responsible for the attacks.

The Taliban abandoned the capital city of Kabul early Tuesday, retreating to the south into the Afghan mountains, as opposition Northern Alliance troops, backed by the allied bombing, took over.

Rumsfeld told reporters that it was "gratifying" to see the Taliban fleeing some of Afghanistan's major cities, but he cautioned that the campaign was far from over.

"Our task is to find the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership, and we haven't finished that task yet," the secretary said. "But the president is determined to root out the terrorists wherever they are, to find them, to bring them to justice or bring justice to them."