President Barack Obama defended his decision to close the Guantanamo prison camp Thursday and pledged to work with Congress to develop a system for imprisoning detainees who may need to come to the U.S. if they can't be tried or released.

During a speech at the National Archives billed as a major address on national security, President Obama conceded that some would end up in U.S. prisons and insisted those facilities were tough enough to house even the most dangerous inmates.

Also Thursday, former Vice President Dick Cheney delivered a speech to the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute in Washington,offering his views on how the Obama administration has handled anti-terror policy thus far.

Watch: President Obama's and former VP Cheney's Speeches on National Security [C-SPAN]

NPR Resource: Detainees at Guantanamo Bay

CIA interrogators who used waterboarding on terrorism suspects will not face prosecution, President Barack Obama said in his announcement of the release of long-secret Bush administration-era memos, which authorized the use of exceptional interrogation techniques.

In his second full day in office, President Barack Obama signed a series of executive orders Thursday morning to close the Guantanamo detention center within a year, ban the harshest interrogation methods and review military war crimes trials.

A bill overhauling the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was recently approved after nearly a year of passionate debate in Congress as to the scope of the legal protections afforded telecom companies.