Rights campaigners reacted angrily, warning the move would prolong the "injustice" of the war on terror camp, days after Obama dismayed some backers by deciding to oppose the release of photos of Iraq and Afghan prison abuses.

"This is the best way to protect our country, while upholding our deeply-held values," Obama said in a written statement Friday, outlining his reasoning and a set of reforms to the military commissions.

"These reforms will begin to restore the commissions as a legitimate forum for prosecution, while bringing them in line with the rule of law," Obama said.

Obama halted the Guantanamo tribunals pending a review after taking office in January, saying the system did not work, but did not rule out the use of a modified system in future.

Last year however, then-candidate Obama had called the military commissions "an enormous failure."

The president said the Department of Defense would ask for extension of the suspension of military commissions to permit time for reforms.

Commissions were "appropriate for trying enemies who violate the laws of war, provided that they are properly structured and administered," Obama said.

David Rivkin, a Washington lawyer who served in the Reagan administration, told The New York Times the decision suggested that the Obama White House was coming to accept the Bush administration's thesis that terror suspects should be viewed as enemy fighters.

"I give them great credit for coming to their senses after looking at the dossiers," Rivkin told the paper.

However, several key amendments will be made to the commissions system.

Statements using CIA interrogation methods that are "cruel, inhumane and degrading" -- since outlawed by Obama -- will no longer be admitted as evidence.

The party that offers hearsay evidence must now prove its reliability. In Bush-era trials the burden rested on the party that objected to it.

Furthermore, the accused will get greater latitude to choose his defense counsel and more protection if he refuses testify.

Military commission judges will now also be allowed to establish the jurisdiction of their own courts.

But the changes did not appease rights groups.

"The military commissions system is flawed beyond repair," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

"By resurrecting this failed Bush administration idea, President Obama is backtracking dangerously on his reform agenda."

The American Civil Liberties Union bemoaned a "striking blow to due process and the rule of law."

"President Obama would do well to remember his own infamous words during his presidential campaign: 'you can't put lipstick on a pig,'" said Anthony Romero, ACLU Executive Director.

Despite the improvements, the commissions "do not address fundamental concerns about the flawed nature of such tribunals," Human Rights Watch said.

"The very purpose of the commissions was to permit trials that lacked the full due process protections available to defendants in federal courts," it said.

But Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs denied the president was retooling a discredited Bush-era system.

"It's like saying 'I am buying the car, but changing the engine and painting it a different color' -- the notion that this is the same vehicle is simply not true."

The move would affect, among others, five detainees charged with having played key roles in the September 11, 2001 attacks, including the plot's self-proclaimed mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Republicans assailed Obama's order to close the Guantanamo prison within a year. Democrats have rejected a White House funding request to shutter the prison until the president comes up with a concrete plan.

The top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell said Guantanamo Bay was the best venue to try terror suspects -- as opposition mounts in Congress to taking suspects to the United States.

"Given the disruption and potential dangers caused by bringing terror suspects into American communities, the secure, modern courtroom at Guantanamo Bay is the appropriate place for commission proceedings," McConnell said.

The camp, synonymous around the world with Bush's "war on terror" excesses, still holds 241 inmates from 30 different countries, according to the Pentagon.

Algerian detainee Lakhdar Boumediene, held for seven years at Guantanamo, left the US jail Friday for France.

Boumediene, 42, was cleared of wrongdoing in November.

earlier related report
Bush anti-terrorism ghosts haunt Obama
Former president George W. Bush warned his successor: the realities of governing would put to the test Barack Obama's commitment to break with his predecessor's counter-terrorism practices.

Obama's aides insist that he has not reneged on that promise.

But recent decisions like the one this week to fight the release of photographs documenting mistreatment of detainees by US soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere shows how hard it has been for Obama to escape the Bush legacy.

A few days before leaving office, Bush explained that he had taken certain decisions without allowing himself to be swayed by "the loud voices" of public opinion.

"President-elect Obama will find this, too," he predicted. "He'll get in the Oval Office and there will be a lot of people that are real critical and harsh, and he'll be disappointed at times by the tone of the rhetoric.

"And he's going to have to do what he thinks is right," Bush said.

Two days after his swearing-in, Obama did what he thought was right, ordering the closure of the "war on terror" prison at Guantanamo and forbidding the use of Bush-era interrogation methods that critics charged were nothing less than torture.

But since then, the Obama presidency has been been haunted by the ghosts of the Bush presidency.

With his decision to challenge a court ruling ordering the Pentagon to release hundreds of photographs gathered in prisoner abuse investigations, Obama's new era of transparency and the rule of law has been put into question.

The political left, which rallied behind Obama as their champion against Bush's "global war on terrorism," is beginning to have doubts.

Republicans, meanwhile, have found their voice and are using the same arguments that Democrats had used against them to great effect.

An ally of the left, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, found herself trying explain what she knew about the CIA interrogations and when she knew it.

The American Civil Liberties Union openly accused the Obama administration this week of adopting "the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration" in refusing to release the photographs.

The disappointment on the left was all the greater because the Obama administration had said it would make the photos public. But that changed after US military commanders raised their concerns at the highest levels of the government.

"The role of the president in this situation is as commander-in-chief," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said. It is a title that Bush often invoked to justify his most controversial decisions.

Obama's "positions on transparency and public disclosure are strong and well known," David Axelrod, one of the president's closest advisers, said in an interview with PBS television. "But ... they're not without limit."

The administration's release in April of secret Bush-era memos that provided the legal rationale for the CIA's controversial interrogation methods had already caused an uproar.

The left reproached Obama for opposing criminal investigations of lawyers and senior Bush administration officials who authorized the interrogation techniques.

The right accused Obama of giving terrorists an advantage. Former Vice President Dick Cheney resurfaced to demand the release of other memos that he said would show the interrogations produced valuable intelligence.

Ironically, Obama's decision to stop the release of the abuse photos drew praise from his political opponents.

Meanwhile, another controversy brewed over the special military commissions set up during the Bush administration to try some terrorist suspects.

"If you have any doubt about where we stand on the issues of detainee abuse, enhanced interrogation techniques and torture, I'd be happy to provide you the copy of the executive order that once and for all ends their use as part of this administration," Gibbs told reporters Thursday.

An unnamed Obama administration official said late Thursday that the government is set to announce that it will retain Bush-era military commissions to try top terror suspects, but with improved legal safeguards for detainees.

Obama halted the Guantanamo Bay military tribunals pending a review soon after taking office in January, saying that the system as it stood did not work, but did not rule out the use of a modified tribunal system in future.

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