PRESIDENT BARACK Obama has told graduates from the US Naval Academy that he will maintain his country’s military superiority, but promised not to send them to war unless it was necessary.
Mr Obama was delivering the commencement address at the Annapolis academy a day after he clashed with former vice-president Dick Cheney over the closure of the prison camp at Guantánamo.
“When America strays from our values, it not only undermines the rule of law – it alienates us from our allies, it energises our adversaries, and it endangers our national security and the lives of our troops. So as Americans, we reject the false choice between our security and our ideals. We can and we must and we will protect both,” he told graduates.
“Today, this is the promise I make to you. It’s a promise that as long as I am your commander-in-chief, I will only send you into harm’s way when it is absolutely necessary, and with the strategy and the well-defined goals, the equipment and the support that you need to get the job done.”
In a speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute on Thursday, Mr Cheney defended the Bush administration’s authorisation of torture, and accused Mr Obama of “recklessness” in his approach to national security.
Civil liberties groups have welcomed the president’s promise to close Guantánamo, but criticised his proposal to detain some inmates indefinitely without charge. “Preventive detention goes against every principle our nation was founded on,” said Shayana Kadidal, an attorney at the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents Guantánamo detainees.
“We have courts and laws in place that we respect and rely on because we have been a nation of laws for hundreds of years; we should not simply discard them when they are inconvenient. The new president is looking a lot like the old.”
Mr Obama said on Thursday that a few dozen of the 240 Guantánamo detainees could be resettled in third countries, while others could face trial in US federal courts and some could be tried by military tribunals. He suggested, however, that a fourth group who could not be prosecuted for past crimes but were deemed too dangerous to be freed could be detained without being charged.
“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. We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified,” he said.
“I want to be very clear that our goal is to construct a legitimate legal framework for the remaining Guantánamo detainees that cannot be transferred. Our goal is not to avoid a legitimate legal framework. In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight.”
Leading Republicans in Congress have warned against resettling or imprisoning Guantánamo detainees within the US, but prominent figures in the party have avoided wading in behind Mr Cheney in the debate over torture and detention. Instead, the former vice-president’s daughter Liz Cheney appeared on TV news networks to defend her father and amplify his criticism of the president.
Defence secretary Robert Gates, who served in the Bush administration, yesterday defended the decision to close Guantánamo, declaring that the prison camp had become a stain on the country’s reputation.
"The truth is, it's probably one of the finest prisons in the world today. But it has a taint," Mr Gates told NBC's Todayshow. "The name itself is a condemnation. What the president was saying is, this will be an advertisement for al-Qaeda as long as it's open."
The defence secretary said that Americans should not fear the transfer of some of the detainees to high-security prisons in the US, where convicted terrorists have been held for years.
“We have many terrorists in US prisons today. This started 20 years ago when I was at CIA and we captured a Hizbullah terrorist who had been involved in killing an American sailor on an aircraft that had been taken hostage in Beirut,” he said.
“The truth is there’s a lot of fear-mongering about this. We’ve never had an escape from a super-max prison. And that’s where these guys will go, and if not one of the existing ones, we’ll create a new one.”