President Obama will seek today to wrest back control of the debate on the future of Guantánamo Bay after the Senate stripped $80 million (£50 million) earmarked for closing the detention centre from a war funding Bill.

Yesterday’s 90-6 vote, after a similar decision by the House of Representatives last week, shows how far the Administration’s national security agenda risks being blown off course by powerful political crosswinds even within a Democratic-dominated Congress.

Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, said that the Administration had to work with Congress on a number of tough choices resulting from a “hasty decision” to close the base: “The President has not decided where some of the detainees will be transferred.”

Mr Obama will deliver what aides describe as a big-picture speech clarifying the philosophy that led him to order the closure of the detention camp in southeastern Cuba and publish secret memos on interrogation techniques — while resorting to many of the same security tools or legal arguments for which the Bush Administration was widely denounced.

Unease about the lack of a clear policy on the treatment, status and eventual destination of terror suspects has left Democrats in retreat. They have also been embarrassed by allegations that Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, had been told about harsh interrogations, although she later claimed that the CIA lied to Congress over waterboarding.

Republicans, for the first time since the election, are gaining the upper hand against the White House, with demands that none of the remaining 240 detainees at the prison should end up on American soil. “The American people don’t want these men walking the streets of America’s neighbourhoods,” Senator John Thune said. “The American people don’t want these detainees held at a military base or federal prison in their backyard, either.”

There were reports that Mr Obama’s Guantánamo task force had said that two Uighurs, Muslims from the far western Chinese province of Xinjiang who are deemed to be no security threat, should be allowed into the US.

Dick Cheney, the former Vice-President, who has accused the new Administration of weakening US security, will fire off another broadside on the subject today with a speech less than two miles from where Mr Obama is delivering his own address at the National Archives building in Washington.

Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, rattled by Republican aggression, said that he wanted a “comprehensive, responsible plan” from the White House for closing Guantánamo. “We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States,” he added.

Robert Mueller, the FBI Director, in testimony to Congress, said that he too had concerns about allowing Guantánamo detainees into the US, even if they were held in maximum-security prisons.

Times Recommends

• UN may halt 400-year-old 'freedom of the seas'
• Where the Rosetta belongs can’t be set in stone
• Gas deal on hold, but Ukraine may pay in the end