President Bush is seeking to prosecute 14 alleged Al Qaeda operatives as war criminals and has ordered them transferred to the American military’s detention center at Guantanamo Bay from secret CIA-controlled facilities.

In a major speech from the White House, Mr. Bush officially confirmed for the first time the CIA program under which the prisoners were held at so-called black sites around the world. He also touted the results of the spy agency’s harsh interrogation techniques, which some critics have branded as torture.

“Questioning the detainees in this program has given us information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks,” Mr. Bush said. “By providing everything from initial leads, to photo identifications, to precise locations of where terrorists were hiding, this program has helped us to take potential mass murderers off the streets before they were able to kill.”

Among the prisoners moved to Guantanamo for possible trial were:

• Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, a Pakistani-born senior Al Qaeda official widely described as the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks on America.

• Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni native who allegedly assisted September 11 hijackers and may have tried to enter America to take part in the Al Qaeda operation.

• Zayn al’Abidin Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian Arab alleged to have acted as travel and financial facilitator for Al Qaeda.

• Riduan bin Isomuddin, also known as Hambali, the Indonesian leader of Jemaah Islamiya, Al Qaeda-affiliated group allegedly responsible for the bombing of a Bali nightclub in 2002, killing more than 200.

Mr. Bush’s announcement came on the same day he submitted legislation to establish military commissions to try the 14 prisoners and others already detained at Guantanamo. In June, the Supreme Court rejected the president’s attempt to establish such commissions unilaterally, but said he could do so with congressional approval.

“As soon as Congress acts to authorize the military commissions I have proposed, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the death of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, can face justice,” Mr. Bush said. He said some of the prisoners could face charges related to the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000 and the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Mr. Bush’s 37-minute address to an audience that included family members of those killed on September 11was unusual for the detail it offered on the information obtained from the prisoners in the CIA program. He described how the use of “tough” questioning techniques on Mr. Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in March 2002, helped track down Messrs. Muhammad and bin Al Shibh. Questioning of Mr. Muhammad led to information about Al Qaeda’s efforts to use anthrax as a weapon, the president said.

According to press reports, the CIA’s special interrogation methods have included slapping prisoners, stripping them naked and subjecting them to cold temperatures, and, in a few instances, “waterboarding,” in which water is poured onto a restrained detainee in an attempt to convince him that he is drowning.

Mr. Bush did not describe the techniques in detail yesterday. However, he said, “I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, lawful, and necessary.”

The announcement of the prisoner transfer was part of what was intended to be a coordinated administration-wide effort to resolve issues related to the status and treatment of detainees. However, one aspect of that effort, the announcement of a new military field manual for interrogations, seemed to undermine Mr. Bush’s message.

At a Pentagon briefing yesterday, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, Lieutenant General John Kimmons, and the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, Charles Stimson, said the new manual included 19 authorized techniques.

Among the approved measures are a good-cop, bad-cop routine and a so-called false flag interrogation where the prisoner is led to believe he is in the custody of a country other than America. Prohibited practices include nudity and the use of dogs, as well as some of the techniques reportedly used by the CIA, including waterboarding and chilling prisoners to induce hypothermia.

Asked by reporters whether the Pentagon was ruling out techniques that could be effective, the officials forcefully said no.

“No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that,” General Kimmons said. “Moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress through the use of abusive techniques would be of questionable credibility. And additionally, it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can’t afford to go there. … Nothing good can come from them.”

“It’s not like Sipowicz from the TV show, where they take them to the back room,” Mr. Stimson said. “You’re not going to get trustworthy information.”

Some observers said the dissonance between the Pentagon and the White House reflected an ongoing dispute about the usefulness of aggressive measures like waterboarding.

“There has been some success and some failure,” a former CIA counterterrorism coordinator, Vincent Cannistraro, said.

An author who has written about the intense interrogations, Ronald Suskind, said Mr. Bush’s statements were misleading. “The president, I’m sure, understands that the harsh techniques, the waterboarding, the death threats, ultimately did not work for the most part,” Mr. Suskind said.

Others said the usefulness of the techniques is fundamentally unknowable. “We can’t know whether the information they obtained through torture could not have been obtained through lawful means of interrogation,” a Georgetown law professor who has represented detainees, David Cole, said.