U.S. & World

WASHINGTON (CBS) ― President Barack Obama defended his decision to close the Guantanamo prison camp on Thursday and promised to work with Congress to develop a system for imprisoning detainees who can't be tried and can't be turned loose.

Obama conceded that some would end up in U.S. prisons and insisted those facilities were tough enough to house even the most dangerous inmates.

"There are no neat or easy answers here," Obama said in a speech in which he pledged anew to "clean up the mess at Guantanamo." Speaking at the National Archives, Obama said he wouldn't do anything to endanger the American people.

He noted that roughly 500 detainees already have been released by the Bush administration. There are 240 at Guantanamo now.

Obama said opening and continuing the military prison in Cuba "set back the moral authority that is America's strongest currency in the world."

Obama spoke in front of a copy of the Constitution, to members of the Judge Advocate General's Corps, diplomatic, policy and development officials and representatives of civil liberties groups.

"I can tell you that the wrong answer is to pretend like this problem will go away if we maintain an unsustainable status quo," Obama said. "As president, I refuse to allow this problem to fester. Our security interests won't permit it. Our courts won't allow it. And neither should our conscience."

Obama said his administration was in the process of studying each of the remaining Guantanamo detainees "to determine the appropriate policies for dealing with them."

"Nobody has ever escaped from one of our `supermax' prisons which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists," Obama said.

The president finds himself in a political bind - at home and abroad - over closing the Guantanamo Bay prison and was trying to work out of the tight spot with the major address on national security.

Mr. Obama takes on the explosive topic a day after the U.S. Senate - at the behest of his own majority Democrats - pulled Mr. Obama's funding request to close the prison in a rare, bipartisan defeat for the popular president.

The vote came as Mr. Obama tries to persuade allies to accept Guantanamo detainees, and makes the task of convincing skeptical countries even more difficult than it already is. While France has accepted one prisoner, fulfilling a promise made when Mr. Obama attended a NATO summit in April, other European allies have refused outright or given non-specific commitments.

At the same time, it marked a victory for Senate Republicans, who have turned their attention to Mr. Obama's policies on foreign policy and terrorism after failing to make headway in criticizing his economic program.

They have dubbed the decision to close Guantanamo a security misstep, an argument that appears to have swayed Democrats.

The White House, though, sought to remind the public that Guantanamo is an inherited issue.

"We do not have the luxury of starting from scratch," an administration official told CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller. "We are cleaning up something that is - quite frankly - a mess that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges that we are forced to deal with on a constant basis and that consume the time of government officials whose time would be better spent protecting the country."

The Senate's rebuff of Mr. Obama is likely to provide an opening to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was deeply involved the Bush administration's development of Guantanamo policy, and who is giving his own speech Thursday at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Cheney has been an unprecedentedly outspoken critic of Mr. Obama and his plans for closing the prison, saying the new president's policies are making Americans less safe.

In spite of lawmakers' concerns, the Obama administration plans to send a top al Qaeda suspect held at Guantanamo Bay to New York to stand trial for the deadly 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, Attorney General Eric Holder announced early Thursday. The suspect, Ahmed Ghailani, would be the first Guantanamo detainee brought to the U.S. and the first to face trial in a civilian criminal court.

Mr. Obama announced on his second day in office that within one year he would close the prison constructed by the Bush administration at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. Vastly unpopular abroad, the prison holds terrorism suspects, most of them captured in Afghanistan.

The Obama administration argued the lockup had become a "recruiting poster" for al Qaeda because prisoners were being held indefinitely without charges and some were subjected to "enhanced interrogation," including waterboarding - a technique Mr. Obama has called torture.

But when prisons close, inmates must either be released or sent to other jails, and Mr. Obama still "has not decided where some of the detainees will be transferred," spokesman Robert Gibbs said Wednesday.

That's the nub of Mr. Obama's problem with both U.S. politicians and America's allies abroad. With Wednesday's action in the Senate, both houses of the U.S. Congress have refused Mr. Obama's request for $80 million to fund the prison's closing, citing a lack of specific plans about where to house inmates who are considered too dangerous to be released or transferred to other countries.

Following the lead of the House of Representatives, Democrats in the Senate pulled the funding request, taking cover behind the lack of specific plans from the White House and, like Republicans, retreating from an uproar in their home districts over the possibility that terror suspects would be housed in local prisons.

That's a fairly empty sales pitch for administration officials who are trying to persuade European and Muslim allies to take in some of the detainees.

Ken Gude, an associate director of the Center for American Progress, a think tank close to the administration, said that the White House had been caught off guard by the resistance to its Guantanamo plans in Congress. But it is still early in the administration's 12-month timeline for closing the facility.

"If Congress were ultimately to bar detainees from coming to the United States, that would be a challenge," he said. "But we are a long way from that point."

Still, the White House got no help Wednesday, when FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress that bringing Guantanamo detainees to the United States could pose a number of risks, even if they were kept in maximum-security prisons.

Gibbs and Attorney General Eric Holder quickly responded that Mr. Obama would never do anything to endanger Americans.

In addition to Guantanamo plans, Mr. Obama's speech at the National Archives were expected to touch on his recent decisions to withhold Bush-era memos on and pictures of enhanced interrogations, the decision to continue using military commissions to try some terror suspects and other legal issues surrounding handling of the prisoners.

Mr. Obama came to office pledging a dramatic change in former President George W. Bush's terrorism policy. In the months since, he was weaved an uncertain course, occasionally angering liberals.

Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union have become noisy critics of the administration as the president has backed away from expunging military tribunals from the tool kit for handling prisoners.

Concerns on that front were sufficient Wednesday that Mr. Obama met in the White House with ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero and representatives of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch and other such organizations.

"I left the meeting feeling discouraged that President Obama plans to continue with many of the same policies of the Bush administration," Romero told The Associated Press.

Romero described the meeting as unprecedented and voiced chagrin that word of it had been leaked to reporters.

(© 2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)