WASHINGTON, Jan 9: President-elect Barack Obama said on Friday his administration would not compromise its ideals to fight terrorism, and he has told his new intelligence chiefs that he expects the Geneva Conventions to be honoured.

Obama was speaking at a news conference on Friday to announce his choice for CIA director, former Clinton White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, and director of national intelligence, retired Adm. Dennis Blair. His team’s long delay in selecting CIA and national intelligence directors is a reflection of the complicated demands of the jobs and Obama’s own policies and priorities.

Obama has criticised interrogation practices he says amount to torture and also has promised to close the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The president-elect, who takes office Jan 20, said he has given the men the clear charge to restore the United States’ record on human rights.

“I was clear throughout this campaign and was clear throughout this transition that under my administration the United States does not torture,” Obama said, when asked at the news conference whether he would continue the Bush administration’s policy of harsh interrogation. “We will abide by the Geneva Conventions. We will uphold our highest ideals.”

Also at Friday’s news conference, Obama addressed the latest data on US job losses, calling it “a stark reminder of how urgently action is needed.”

Congressional leaders have said they will finish work on Obama’s economic recovery plan by mid-February, though outlines of the proposal are already drawing some criticism, even among the president-elect’s fellow Democrats.

But much of Obama’s focus on Friday was on national security, with Blair and Panetta rounding out his team.

Panetta, a former congressman, White House chief of staff and budget director with no direct intelligence experience, will have the president’s “complete trust and substantial clout,” Obama said.

Panetta said as head of the Central Intelligence Agency he would work to assuage a Congress bruised from eight years of abrasive relations with the Bush administration and promised “to form the kind of partnership we need if we’re to win the war on terror.”

Blair won high marks for countering terrorism in southeast Asia after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks. He worked closely with foreign partners in crafting offensives that crippled the Jemaah Islamiyah terror faction in Indonesia and the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines.

Blair, a former head of the US Pacific Command, pledged as director of national intelligence to uphold the standards that Obama articulated “and that the American people have a right to expect.”

Both men are both garnering substantial support in Congress, although concerns exist about each.

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden said on Thursday that he plans to question Blair about the role he played 10 years ago in US efforts to rein in the Indonesian military as it brutally cracked down on civilians in East Timor. Staff aides to other members said they would be listening closely to the answers.

Paramilitary groups sponsored by the Indonesian military with US financial and political patronage slaughtered more than 200,000 East Timorese over two decades. In 1999, as civilians were being massacred, Congress and the Clinton administration cut off all military ties.

Also on Friday, Obama tapped John Brennan to coordinate counterterrorism policy for the White House National Security Council.

Brennan, Obama’s top intelligence adviser through the campaign, took himself out of consideration for CIA head in November, saying he did not want to be a distraction.

His potential appointment had raised a firestorm in liberal blogs that associate him with the Bush administration’s interrogation, detention and rendition policies.—AP