President Obama declared today that opening Guantánamo Bay was a mistake that encouraged terrorism and compromised America’s moral standing in the world as he reaffirmed his commitment to close it down despite setbacks in Congress.

The President said that keeping the military camp open was more dangerous than shutting it down and transferring the prisoners. “Let me be blunt there are no easy or neat answers here,” he said. “As President I refuse to allow this problem to fester, I refuse to pass it on to someone else.”

Yesterday, the Senate refused to finance the Obama Administration’s plan to close the military camp and transfer the suspects to American prisons.

Mr Obama admitted that many of the terror suspects would be brought into America to face trial and prison but he said that no one would be released who could endanger the United States.

He conceded that there were some people who would not be able to be tried under American law but nonetheless posed a threat to American life. Those people, he said, like any prisoners of war must not be released to attack again.

The President said that his Administration was working to create a legal compromise — monitored and overseen by a panel of experts — whereby those detainees who cannot be tried in court are retained in a secure facility.

He said: “We are cleaning up something that is quite simply, a mess, a misguided experiment that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges."

A bipartisan movement in the Senate and House of Representatives has sought to block Mr Obama’s move to transfer terror suspects to America, but the President insisted that there would be no threat to the US as no one had escaped from one of the nation’s “supermax” top-security prisons.

The President called for an end to political point-scoring over sensitive security issues, but he blamed his predecessor for creating the situation that America now faced.

“The existence of Guantánamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained. . . Rather than keep us safer, the prison at Guantánamo has weakened American national security. It is a rallying cry for our enemies,” he said. “It sets back the willingness of our allies to work with us in fighting an enemy that operates in scores of countries.

“By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it.”

Mr Obama used a historic backdrop featuring the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence to defend his decision to shut down the Cuban facility by January 2010.

“If we cannot defend our core values then we are not keeping faith with the documents that are enshrined in this hall,” he said. “We must never, ever turn our back on it’s principles for expediency’s sake.”

The President criticised the “ad hoc legal approach” that was neither effective nor morally acceptable under the previous regime.

He said that the Government had trimmed facts and evidence to fit their ideologies and “during this season of fear all of us … fell silent.”

He said that as well as being morally dubious, Guantánamo had failed to meet its purpose. He said that two-thirds of the detainees had been released before he was elected President and that many of those were able to return to the battlefield.

“We succeeded in convicting a grand total of three terrorists — let me repeat that: three convictions in seven years,” he said.

As soon as Mr Obama ended his address, Dick Cheney began an instant riposte on the other side of Washington, damning the “phony moralising” of those who have criticised the Bush Administration. “Our government prevented attacks and saved lives,” he told the American Enterprise Institute.

“It’s easy to receive applause in Europe for closing Guantánamo,” he said. “To bring the worst of the worst terrorists inside the United States will be a mistake regretted for years to come.

“The enhanced interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other techniques had failed. The interrogation officers who used the techniques can be proud,” he said, insisting that thousands of lives had been saved.

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