Tough detainee decisions remain

WASHINGTON — President Obama reversed the most disputed counterterrorism policies of the Bush administration Thursday, saying "our ideals give us the strength and moral high ground" in the fight against al-Qaida. But he postponed for months decisions on complex questions the United States has been dealing with since the terrorist attacks of 2001.

He signed executive orders closing the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, detention camp within a year, ending the CIA's secret prisons and requiring all interrogations to follow the noncoercive methods of the Army Field Manual. "We intend to win this fight," he said. "We are going to win it on our own terms."

His actions on the second full day of his presidency won praise from human-rights groups and Democrats in Congress, who said the new policies would help restore the United States' moral authority.

Obama's orders represented an important first step toward rewriting U.S. rules for dealing with terrorism suspects. But only his decision to halt, for now, the military trials at Guantánamo seemed likely to have immediate practical significance, with other critical policy choices to be resolved by task forces set up within the administration.

Among the questions the White House did not resolve Thursday: What should be done with terrorists who cannot be tried in U.S. courts, either because evidence against them was obtained by torture or because intelligence is too sensitive to use in court? Should some interrogation methods remain secret to keep al-Qaida from training to resist them? How can the United States make sure prisoners transferred to other countries will not be tortured?

Members of Obama's national-security team have expressed a wide range of views on the details of interrogation and detention policy, and there is likely to be robust internal debate before the questions are resolved.

John Hutson, a retired admiral and law-school dean who attended the signing ceremony, said he has confidence the administration will come up with practical answers to such questions.

Closing Guantánamo and banning coercive interrogation, Hutson said, "is the right thing to do morally, diplomatically, militarily and constitutionally. But it also makes us safer." But Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said the decision to close Guantánamo by a year from now "places hope ahead of reality; it sets an objective without a plan to get there."

In offering a warning sounded by other Republicans, Hoekstra noted that in briefings for Congress, administration officials "could not answer questions as to what they will do with any new jihadists or enemy combatants that we capture."

Obama's order closing Guantánamo assigns the attorney general to lead a review of what should happen to the remaining 245 detainees and does not rule out the possibility of trying some of them using military commissions, as the Bush administration had begun to do, though possibly with different procedures.

In a separate directive, Obama asked for a high-level review of the case of Ali al-Marri, — Obama called him "clearly a dangerous individual" — who is being held without charges as an "enemy combatant" in a military jail in South Carolina.

The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court for a 30-day stay in al-Marri's civil case challenging his detention until the new administration decides on its position.