WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama said Thursday that he was prepared to hold some terrorism detainees now at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, indefinitely without trials, even as he stood by his plans to close the facility by next January and transfer other detainees to U.S. civilian courts for trial.

In a speech defending his evolving national security policies, Obama charged that Republicans had sought political gain by trying to scare Americans that terrorists would be released into their neighborhoods.

He said that while most detainees could be dealt with in civilian courts, military commissions or transfers to other countries, some couldn't be tried and nevertheless posed such an ongoing threat to the nation that they couldn't be released either. He said he would develop a system that permitted consultation with Congress and the courts.

''We are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security, nor will we release detainees within the United States who endanger the American people,'' he said.

He sought to reframe the notion that the Bush administration was more committed to protecting Americans from terrorists than he is. Under President George W. Bush, he said, more than 525 detainees were released from Guantánamo and only three were convicted.

Today, 240 detainees remain -- 21 of whom have been ordered set free by civilian judges.

He said the facility had ``set back the moral authority that is America's strongest currency in the world.''

''The existence of Guantánamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained,'' Obama said.

''There are no neat or easy answers here,'' he said, but he added that ``the wrong answer is to pretend like this problem will go away if we maintain an unsustainable status quo.''

Obama also said that he thought the civilian courts and federal prison system could handle many detainees, and that some would need to be tried through a revised military commissions system.

He said his review team had approved the release of 50 detainees to other countries.

Separately, former Vice President Dick Cheney accused Obama of deciding to close Guantánamo on his second day in office ``with little deliberation and no plan.''

''The administration has found that it's easy to receive applause in Europe for closing Guantánamo,'' he said in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research center in Washington.

Cheney, who has emerged as the most vocal Republican critic of Obama's national security policies, accused the president of putting U.S. security at risk by releasing the secret Bush administration memos on its abusive interrogation techniques, which he said ``prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.''

Cheney accused Obama of deliberately withholding documents that Cheney claimed sustained his assertion that the use of abusive interrogation techniques provided information that averted terrorist attacks after Sept. 11.

''The public was given less than half the truth,'' Cheney said. ``The released memos were carefully redacted to leave out references to what our government learned through the methods at hand.

``Other memos, laying out specific terrorist plots that were averted, apparently were not even considered for release. For reasons the administration has yet to explain, they believe the public has a right to know the method of the questions, but not the content of the answers.''

However, the CIA said it couldn't release two documents that Cheney said should be made public, because an executive order that Bush signed in 2003 prohibited their release, as they are the subject of two lawsuits.

Obama's speech came as the Justice Department announced plans to send the first Guantánamo detainee to trial in a civilian court.

Zanzabar-born Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, accused of being an al Qaeda member involved in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, was indicted by a federal grand jury more than a decade ago. At Guantánamo since September 2006, he also faces charges of commiting war crimes before a military commission set up by the Bush administration.

The Ghailani decision, announced hours before Obama's speech, drew criticism from some, including Kirk S. Lippold, who commanded the USS Cole when al Qaeda attacked it in 2000. Lippold is now a senior military fellow with the advocacy group Military Families United.

''While this action may appear to put substance behind the desire to show the world that the U.S. is a nation that embraces due process, the decision is being done in a vacuum,'' Lippold said. He warned that it could force the release of classified information and jeopardize a conviction.

Miami Herald staff writer Carol Rosenberg contributed to this story

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