President Obama on Thursday delivered a blistering critique of both his predecessor’s counterterrorism policies and Republican attacks on his own national security decisions, in a wide-ranging speech at the National Archives in Washington.

Obama, speaking with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as a backdrop, defended his order to close the detainee prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and outlined several tenets of his own counterterrorism strategy. The president tried to reframe the complex problem of how to treat the Guantánamo detainees as one that requires pragmatism above politics and bipartisan deliberation over partisan attacks.

“As president, I refuse to allow this problem to fester. I refuse to pass it on to somebody else,” Obama said, in one of several thinly veiled digs at the George W. Bush administration. “It is my responsibility to solve the problem. Our security interests will not permit us to delay. Our courts won’t allow it. And neither should our conscience.”

Obama has suffered some setbacks on Capito Hill to his nascent Guantánamo policy. Lawmakers in both chambers have stripped out $80 million he had requested in the fiscal 2009 supplemental (HR 2346) because the administration has not presented a detailed plan for the detainees.

But if the president produces a detailed strategy that can garner public support, he may not have as much trouble getting funding when he actually would need it, in the fiscal 2010 appropriations bills.

The president said the administration would put the 240 detainees at Guantánamo into one of five categories: Some will be tried in federal courts; others will be tried before revamped military commissions. Some detainees will be transferred to other countries; some will be released pursuant to court orders, almost all of which were issued before Obama took office.

Obama said the remaining detainees will be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

“We must have clear, defensible and lawful standards for those who fall into this category. We must have fair procedures so that we don’t make mistakes,” Obama said. “We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified.” He added that such detainees would be held “within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime.”

The Justice Department announced Thursday that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian held at Guantánamo Bay since 2006, would be tried in a New York federal court. Ghailani faces charges related to the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and other alleged crimes.

Civil libertarians and liberal activists argue that detainees should be tried in federal courts — or perhaps courts-martial -— or simply released. They are opposed to military commissions and to prolonged detention without trial.

The president criticized the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies as motivated by fear and ideology. He said that “the decisions that were made over the last eight years established an ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable — a framework that failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions and that failed to use our values as a compass.”

Cheney Rebuttal

After Obama spoke, former Vice President Dick Cheney delivered a rebuttal speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He invoked the horror of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, defended the Bush administration’s policies and dismissed Obama’s criticisms.